Elton John ‘once threw oranges at Bob Dylan’ during party game dinner fallout

A party hosted by rock and roll legend Elton John saw Bob Dylan covertly attend, and the pair later shared a disastrous dinner together.

The Rocketman hitmaker confirmed the first encounter had been at a party he held in the late 1980s, and that the star-studded guestlist had included Dylan’s name. The veteran performer showed up, and Elton did not recognise the Mr. Tambourine Man hitmaker. Dylan’s appearance at the house proved to be quite the surprise for Elton, who at first mistook Dylan for a gardener. The Tiny Dancer hitmaker confirmed the embarrassing encounter in his tell-all memoir. He shared: “Towards the end of the Eighties, I held an insane party in LA, and invited everyone I knew.

“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.’”

The moment may have been embarrassing, but as Elton recounts, it got much worse from there. He continued: “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!’

“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.” Later on, the pair attended a dinner together with Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. According to the Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting hitmaker, Dylan could not get the hang of a party game the four were playing.

“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.”