Paul McCartney says he discovered the “meaning of life” after a wild night with Bob Dylan.
The Mr. Tambourine Man songwriter has been credited by McCartney as the source of knowledge on what it means to live, with the Wings frontman confirming it was a “crazy night” together that brought him clarity. The songwriter was so moved by his experience that he insisted on finding someone to write down the meaning of life for him. McCartney was left asking for road manager Mal Evans when Dylan shared some knowledge and insights on the world around him. It had a profound impact on McCartney, who was left reeling from the “crazy party”.
McCartney said: “It was a crazy honour to meet him, we had a crazy party the first night we met. I thought I’d found the meaning of life that night. I went around trying round to our roadie going ‘Mal, Mal, Mal’ get us some paper and a pencil, I’ve got it!’
“Mal was a bit out of it and couldn’t find a piece of paper and a pencil anywhere but eventually at the end of the evening he found it and I wrote down my message for the universe y’know and I said ‘keep that, keep that in your pocket’ and Mal did.”
Unfortunately, the meaning of life McCartney wrote down and shared with Evans was not quite as clear when he had sobered up. According to McCartney, his road manager shared the note with him after the party, but noted it was a tad tricky to understand.
McCartney recalled: “The next morning he said, ‘Here Paul, do you wanna see that?’ and I was like ‘what‘, he said that bit of paper and I said ‘oh yeah’ and it had written ‘there are seven levels’.”
Fellow musicians from the 1960s were filled with praise for Dylan. While McCartney was briefly gifted the meaning of life, The Rolling Stones frontman, Mick Jagger, had nothing but praise for the “lyrical guru”.
He said: “The lyricist who was really good at the time was Bob Dylan. Everyone looked up to him as being a kind of guru of lyrics. It’s hard to think of the absolute garbage that pop music really was at the time.
“And even if you lifted your game by a marginal amount, it really was a lot different from most everything else that had gone before in the 10 years previously.”
Though Jagger was full of praise for Dylan as an artist whose impact on The Rolling Stones is clear, he was less complimentary about the songs on reflection. He named hit track Like a Rolling Stone “nonsense” and suggested some songs from Dylan’s discography were simply “not as good as we thought”.
