The 80 Greatest Dylan Covers of All Time

Beloved indie-rock trio Yo La Tengo have always had impeccable taste in covers, and they’ve done many Dylan songs throughout their illustrious run, often pulling tunes from the sad, gentle side of the canon. They’re version of “I Threw It All Away,” off Nashville Skyline, appeared as the final track on their third album, President Yo La Tengo, full of sleepy Hoboken guitar prettiness and sung by Ira Kaplan with careworn late-night intimacy. For more Yo La/Dylan content, check out their arresting, slow-dissolve take on “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry,” or this great run through “Wallflower,” with Lucinda Williams and Janet Weiss, among many other fine offerings. J.D.

Blood on the Tracks is a perfect record and it’s hard to quibble with any decision that Dylan made on it. That said, it might have been even more perfect had Dylan included “Up to Me” on it instead of “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts.” The world didn’t hear Dylan’s “Up to Me” until the release of Biograph in 1985, but his Rolling Thunder tour mate Roger McGuinn (who knew a thing or two about covering Dylan songs) tackled it on his 1976 LP Cardiff Road. It’s hard to make much sense of the lyrics, but when McGuinn sings “I’ve only got me one good shirt left and it smells of stale perfume/In fourteen months I’ve only smiled once and I didn’t do it consciously” it somehow comes together. A.G.

Many have recorded this song, from Judy Collins to Fairport Convention, but only Nico could put such a tragically tender spin on a simple song about friendship. She exudes the same melancholy as she does on her cover of Jackson Browne’s “These Days,” but instead of being lonely, she’s offering a helping hand. It’s certainly as far away from the imperious image she cast that same year as a singer for the Velvet Underground on songs like “Femme Fatale” and “All Tomorrow’s Parties.” A.M. 

In 1971, four years before the song would be released on The Basement Tapes, eclectic English rockers Manfred Mann recorded a great version of “Please, Mrs. Henry,” recasting a hobbled lope about being too drunk to function as hard-driving hippie-R&B boogie. It’s the takeoff point for Cheap Trick’s demolition job live rendition, which definitely inhabits the original song’s sloshed spirit, suggesting the Replacements doing a Rolling Stones cover. Cheap Trick’s take would in turn serve as the inspiration for the equally hot riff on the song that Silkworm and Stephen Malkmus did as the Crust Brothers. J.D. 

One of the most purely playful things the Byrds ever did, and a highlight from their classic debut album. “Spanish Harlem Incident” is a youthful fling, from Another Side of Bob Dylan — the tale of a fresh-faced country kid in the big city, under the spell of a mystic woman. The Byrds jangle it up, making it sound like Dylan’s version of a Brian Wilson song. Roger McGuinn sounds like he’s trying hard not to crack up in the last verse, but the humor jumps out when the boys sing, “I got to laugh halfways off my heels!” R.S.

The Dead always sounded great playing Dylan — that is, unless Dylan was singing with them. (When he toured with the Dead in the Eighties, not a peak live era for him, they did the maudlin gangster epic “Joey,” which was about as much fun as getting shot at Umberto’s Clam House.) “Tom Thumb’s Blues” became a fan fave for tape traders in the Eighties, with Phil Lesh on lead vocals. He plays around with the lyrics, from “I started out on Heineken but soon hit the harder stuff” to “My best friend, my drummer, won’t even tell me what it was that I dropped!” R.S.

Out of all the surreal, WTF moments in Todd Haynes’ 2007 Dylan film I’m Not There, Jim James singing this Basement Tapes track in Rolling Thunder-era white face is perhaps the wildest. The performance is included in one of Richard Gere’s scenes as Billy the Kid, as an open casket of a woman is propped up and the townspeople gather around to hear James and Calexico. It’s not only James’ best Dylan covers, but arguably one of his greatest vocal performances ever, as booming horns accompany his lines about visiting Rose Marie, who likes to go to big places. A.M.

Television, the original CBGBs garage punks, came up with the idea of turning “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” into a long, brooding guitar warhorse — an idea that a few other bands have tried since then. (Cough, Guns N Roses cough.) Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd crank gunshots out of their Fender Jazzmasters, catching all the morbid outlaw angst of the story, but with an extra dose of NYC urban sleaze. They make it worthy to stand next to their original guitar jams like “Marquee Moon” and “Little Johnny Jewel.” This 1978 live version was a bootleg fave until it surfaced on Television’s posthumous live album The Blow Up. R.S.

Pearl Jam were just starting to break big when Eddie Vedder and Mike McCready were invited to perform at Bob Dylan’s 30th anniversary concert at Madison Square Garden. They were sharing the bill with heavyweights like George Harrison, Johnny Cash, Stevie Wonder, Eric Clapton, and Tom Petty, but their haunting rendition of “Masters of War” early in the night was a clear highlight, especially since the Gulf War was a very recent memory at the time. Pearl Jam brought the song into their live show after the outbreak of the Iraq War over a decade later, but they never quite bested this first rendition. A.G.

Dylan recorded “Groom’s Still Waiting At the Alter” in 1981, a rollicking apocalyptic blues-rocker that would’ve been good enough to make it on Highway 61 Revisited but was deemed unsuitable for the last of Dylan’s Christian albums, 1981’s Shot of Love. Dylan rectified this odd decision by including the song on subsequent editions of Shot of Love, but since people weren’t exactly running out and gobbling up subsequent editions of Shot of Love, it remained an obscurity. Yet, even if it wasn’t the most likely song for Rod Stewart to record in the early Nineties, he absolutely bodyslams it, with the raw joyful spirit of his finest Seventies moments. J.D. 

In December of 1997, Stephen Malkmus of Pavement and members of the indie-rock band Silkworm got together to play a show in Seattle to benefit the Washington Wilderness Coalition. The crowd was clamoring for Pavement songs. Instead, they got a killer covers set, including “Bitch,” “Tuesday’s Gone” and seven songs from The Basement Tapes. They opened with “Going to Acapulco,” turning a slow, mournful ode to beleaguered escape into a choogled-out guitar banger. When a recording of the show materialized under the title Marquee Mark, it immediately became a bootleg grail, just like The Basement Tapes had been decades earlier. J.D. 

Chrissie Hynde has said that when Bob Dylan surprised the world with the release of “Murder Most Foul” a few weeks into pandemic lockdowns in 2020, “It knocked me sideways.” It helped her realize just how much Dylan’s music has meant to her, so she and Pretenders guitarist James Walbourne set about recording eight Dylan covers to get through the year. One of the best was “Sweetheart Like You,” the easygoing Infidels single, which doubles as a pickup line and a Dylan-esque statement of sympathy for the suffering of women everywhere. Hynde sings it in her typically breathy way, enunciating the words in her distinctive way and making lines like “You could be known as the most beautiful woman/Who ever crawled across cut glass to make a deal” cut with more pathos than that of the original. K.G.

Leave it to Lou Reed to perform a super obscure 1983 studio outtake at a Bob Dylan tribute concert in front of 20,000 people at Madison Square Garden and countless more watching on television. A tiny fraction of the audience probably recognized “Foot of Pride” (which was released on the first edition of the Bootleg Series in 1991), but it’s hard to imagine that Reed cared. The lyrics (“Like the lion tears the flesh off of a man/So can a woman who passes herself off as a male”) seemed custom-made for Reed, and he made it seem like a lost classic from the Velvet Underground catalog. Dylan has never attempted the song live, so this remains the definitive concert version. A.G.

Dylan’s good friend Johnny Cash famously duetted with him on this folk ballad for Nashville Skyline in 1969. Cash also included the Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan number on a list of “essential” country songs that he passed along to his daughter Rosanne, and it was one that she chose for her album drawn from those selections, The List. With a lovely fingerpicked guitar and Cash’s pristine voice, the song becomes a tribute to two great artists from a third. K.H.

Dylan’s catalog is rife with spooky, ominous parables, and this tale of a woman who leaves her husband to run off with a shadowy stranger — and is never heard from again — is one of his eeriest. “In some kind of weird way, I thought of it as my ‘I Walk the Line,’” he wrote in Chronicles Volume One, “a song I’d always considered to be up there at the top, one of the most mysterious and revolutionary of all time.” Dylan’s version on Oh Mercy sounded, in his word, “deserted,” but Osborne’s cover slows the tempo just a bit, making the song even more haunting. Almost as if she’s singing in the voice of the vanished woman herself, Osborne sounds increasingly desperate as the song continues, while the music stays muted, never giving in to her pleas. “She’s gone, she’s gone,” Osborne ad-libs at the end, and you know she is. D.B.

Soul singer Betty LaVette is a peerless song reimaginer, and she puts on yet another master class in interpretation here. In Lavette’s hands, “It Ain’t Me Babe” becomes more vulnerable, bruised, dejected. The original was a highlight on Things Have Changed, her 2018 collection of Dylan covers. “When people ask me, ‘How do you make these songs your own?’ she told Rolling Stone that year. “I tell them it’s so much easier for me to sound like Bettye Lavette than it is for me to sound like Bob Dylan.” J.B.

Allman made his final album, 2017’s Southern Blood, as he was dying of liver cancer, creating a work similar to the swan-song LPs of David Bowie and Leonard Cohen. It’s highlighted by this powerful reading of “Going Going Gone,” a raggedly beautiful intimation of suicide from 1974’s Planet Waves. Allman turns it into an honest, graceful reckoning with his own mortality, gilded with steel guitar and a Southern-soul horn section. When he sings “I’m closing the book on pages and texts/And I don’t really care what happens next,” it’s almost too real to take. J.D.

When Jimi Hendrix stepped onstage at the Monterey Pop Festival, in the summer of 1967, he was a complete unknown in his native land. But an hour later, he was the guitar hero of all guitar heroes. Hendrix capped his triumphant Monterey homecoming gig by telling the crowd, “I’d like to bore you for about six or seven minutes…I wanna do a little thing by Bob Dylan — that’s his grandma over there,” pointing to frizzy-haired bassist Noel Redding. “A little thing called ‘Like a Rolling Stone.’” Then he turned it into a screaming electric storm, blowing the minds of an audience who’d never heard him before. R.S.

Leon Rusell’s 1970 cover of “Masters of War” is a mere one minute and 24 seconds long, and he stops it after the first verse, leaving the vast majority of it un-sung. But he made the genius decision to sing it to the tune of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” This was the height of the Vietnam War and many Americans were incredibly disillusioned by the real-life Masters of War calling the shots in that never-ending nightmare. By taking Dylan’s 1963 words and delivering them in this context, he spoke for much of his audience. And even though Dylan never spoke out against the war himself, he gave followers songs like “Masters of War” to use at their discretion. It was never used more effectively than it was here. A.G.

The soundtrack to the trippy 2007 Dylan biopic I’m Not There is packed with amazing covers of famous songs like “All Along The Watchtower,” “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” and “Maggie’s Farm,” but Willie Nelson and Calexico dug deep into his catalog for the Street Legal tune “Señor (Takes of Yankee Power).” Like many songs from that time, the lyrics make little sense, but Nelson infuses them with incredible gravitas. He has sang many duets with Dylan over the years and they even wrote the song “Heartland” together, but his voice and Dylan’s lyrics have never sounded as majestic together as they do here. A.G.

The mass public didn’t come around to Bob Dylan’s New Morning deep cut “The Man In Me” until the Coen Brothers used it in their 1998 movie The Big Lebowski, but the Clash beat them to it by a good 19 years when they covered it during the London Calling sessions. As heard on the “Vanilla Tapes” taken from the London Calling Legacy Edition, they transform it into a slow reggae tune, and somehow it fits seamlessly onto the same LP as “Death or Glory” and “Lost In The Supermarket.” They never played the song live (or any Bob Dylan song for the matter) and their one-off take was never meant to be heard by the public, but it’s brilliant nonetheless. The Dude must definitely would abide. A.G.

Was any Dylan song better intended for a make-over by the make-out king of R&B? In the Seventies, Hayes reveled in recasting other people’s songs into extended, sensual, orchestral vamps. For a 1999 album of Dylan covers, Hayes returned to that turf and proved he hadn’t lost any of his moves. “It’s too early to go home … Why don’t you just chill, relax,” he improvs in the intro before amplifying the sexuality of Dylan’s Nashville Skyline song. In Hayes’ rendition, “You can have your cake and eat it too” takes on an all-new meaning. D.B.

In 1984, years before he started Mazzy Star, the late great guitarist David Roback did an album called Rainy Day, covering 1960s faves with friends from L.A.’s neo-psychedelic “Paisley Underground” scene. It was hugely influential, turning postpunk kids on to the Byrds and the Buffalo Springfield. Susanna Hoffs of the Bangles sang two of the highlights: Dylan’s “I’ll Keep It With Mine” and the Velvets’ “I’ll Be Your Mirror.” (Dylan didn’t release his own version of “I’ll Keep It With Mine” until his 1985 Biograph box.) Most singers who attempt this tune stumble over the quizzical lyrics, but Hoffs just savors the melody with a smile in her voice — the most purely beguiling version ever heard. R.S.

The Dead started playing their favorite Dylan tune in their early days, and never stopped. Of all their many Dylan covers, “Baby Blue” was the one they played most often, right up to the year Jerry Garcia died. There’s a fine 1981 performance on Postcards of the Hanging, but their toughest “Baby Blue” comes from their legendary Jersey City run, the night of September 26th, 1972. (The following night was released as Dick’s Picks Volume 11.) Garcia puts on the chill with his voice and guitar, as if he sees all the song’s dire prophecies coming true. R.S.

If anyone could translate Dylan into goth, it had to be Siouxsie. The Eighties icon rode this Basement Tapes classic from Big Pink to the Batcave. Siouxsie and the Banshees took pride in reworking Sixties classics for the black-lipstick crowd; they had a U.K. Top Ten hit with the Beatles’ “Dear Prudence,” one of the few goth hits about enjoying sunshine. On their 1987 album Through The Looking Glass, they covered Iggy (“The Passenger”), the Doors (“You’re Lost Little Girl”), and Dylan. Siouxsie did a trippy performance of “This Wheel’s on Fire” on Top of the Pops, vamping in her purple catsuit, doing an awesome version of the goth cobweb-gathering dance. R.S.

A TV star and teen heartthrob in the 1950s, Ricky Nelson had been trying to move away from his bubblegum image throughout the Sixties, signaling his new phase by dropping the “y” from his first name. By the end of the decade, he hadn’t a hit for a while, but his version of Dylan’s caustically elegiac ballad eased him back into the Top 40 with a strikingly lovely country-rock treatment in step with the Byrds and Flying Burrito Brothers, featuring a steel guitar player borrowed from Buck Owens’ backing band and including future Eagle Randy Meisner on bass. J.D.