Elton John has revealed that he once attempted to give “scruffy” Bob Dylan a makeover after he mistook him for his gardener.

Writing in his upcoming tell-all memoir, Me, the ‘Rocket Man’ icon recalled Dylan turning up to one of his huge parties back in the wilder early days of his career.

“Towards the end of the Eighties, I held an insane party in LA, and invited everyone I knew,” John remembered. “By mid-evening, I was flying, absolutely out of my mind, when a scruffy-looking guy I didn’t recognise wandered into the lit-up garden.


“Who the hell was he? Must be one of the staff, a gardener. I loudly demanded to know what the gardener was doing helping himself to a drink.

“There was a moment’s shocked silence, broken by my PA saying, ‘Elton, that’s not the gardener. It’s Bob Dylan.'”

John added: “Coked out of my brain and keen to make amends, I rushed over, grabbed him and started steering him towards the house. ‘Bob! Bob! We can’t have you in those terrible clothes, darling. Come upstairs and I’ll fit you out with some of mine at once. Come on, dear!'”

The star went on to explain that Dylan was “horrified” by his comments. “His expression suggested he was trying hard to think of something he wanted to do less than get dressed up like Elton John, and drawing a blank,” he explained.

Despite the mix-up, it turns out Dylan and John spent time in each other’s company following the party. “Another time, I invited Dylan to dinner with Simon and Garfunkel, and afterwards we played charades,” John wrote, revealing that the ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ singer’s party game skills weren’t up to scratch.


“He couldn’t get the hang of the ‘How many syllables?’ thing at all. He couldn’t do ‘sounds like’ either, come to think of it,” John recalled. “One of the best lyricists in the world, the greatest man of letters in the history of rock music, and he couldn’t seem to tell you whether a word had one syllable or two syllables or what it rhymed with!

“He was so hopeless, I started throwing oranges at him. Or so I was informed the next morning by a friend.”

Elsewhere in Elton John’s new autobiography, the star revealed how he “hijacked” a Rolling Stones gig in the 1980s while high on cocaine. Shining light on his more-recent year’s he spoke of undergoing treatment for prostate cancer in 2017.

Elton John’s Me is set for release on October 15.