Elton John Once Let Stevie Wonder Drive His Snowmobile

Plus: the singer recalls a contentious game of charades with Bob Dylan on "Kimmel"

Elton John performs during The Henley Festival on July 6, 2016 in Henley-on-Thames, England.  (Photo by Emulsion London Limited/Getty Images)
Elton John performs during The Henley Festival on July 6, 2016 in Henley-on-Thames, England. (Photo by Emulsion London Limited/Getty Images)
Getty Images

Elton John paid a visit to Kimmel last night to promote his new memoir, Me, and during the chat the legendary singer revealed that he once let Stevie Wonder drive his snowmobile alone.

Wonder is famously blind, but that didn’t stop John from handing over the keys. “I was at the Caribou Ranch in Nederland and I was recording,” he told Jimmy Kimmel. “It was thick snow, and Stevie wanted to go out in the snowmobile.”

“We thought, okay, that’s another rival gone,” he quipped. “That’s him out of the way. We just needed to get Phil Collins and Rod Stewart up there.”

The “Rocketman” singer also recalled the time he played charades with Bob Dylan and lost his temper.

“When I first came to America, I went to Neil Diamond’s house because Neil was so kind to introduce me at the Troubadour club in 1970, and he and his wife Marcia at the time invited us to dinner, and Bob Dylan was there,” he said. “Can you imagine how I felt? And so afterwards, they said ‘let’s play charades.’ The greatest poet in the world, could he do ‘sounds like, two syllables’? No. And he was on my team. And I am a competitive motherfucker. I threw oranges at him, and the next day my friend who was there, Tony, said ‘Uh, just to remind you, last night you did throw oranges at Bob Dylan,’ and I went, ‘did I?’ And bless his heart, I love him to death. They were small. They were satsumas.”

John told Kimmel he wanted to make sure the memoir contained gems like the Dylan-orange-pelting story because he wanted to maintain his sense of humor.

“I wanted it to be amusing because I’ve had an incredibly amusing life and funny things happen to me,” he told the host. “There’s a lot of dark stuff in there, there’s a lot of true stuff about my family. It’s just my life as it happened.”

John also discussed his decision to stop touring and why he doesn’t own a cell phone. You can check out the full interview below.

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