Paul McCartney once mistook music legend for ‘homeless guy’ at airport

Music legend Paul McCartney says he once mistook a fellow veteran songwriter for a homeless man at an airport.

McCartney explained how he kept running into the acclaimed hitmaker by accident in various parts of the world, numerous times. One such occasion had Bob Dylan approach McCartney, with The Beatles member at first not realising who he was speaking with. Asked whether he had ever bumped into Dylan while the pair were touring around the world, McCartney confirmed that he had interacted with the long-serving stage performer on several occasions, and that it was often in airports.

McCartney said: “I did, yeah. I was going through an airport, and this kind of homeless guy comes shuffling up to me in a grey hoodie. And I’m going, ‘Yeah? Can I help you?’ [Dylan voice], ‘Hey, Paul. It’s Bob.’ I must say, you know, he was very incognito. I would not have recognised him at all.”

McCartney has also credited Dylan with showing him the meaning of life, though says he does not remember the details of such an awakening.

The songwriter was so moved by his experience, 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.”