The 80 Greatest Dylan Covers of All Time

Captain’s log, Stardate 1968: William Shatner creates the music equivalent of the Doomsday Machine. At the height of Star Trek, Captain Kirk recorded this bizarre spoken-word recital of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” definitely taking a trip upon his own magic swirling ship. He declaims the lyrics in his tormented style, as if feeling all the pain of the Horta, over psychedelic lounge-pop. By the end, he’s screaming, “Mr. Tambourine Maaaaaaan!” It’s safe to say he succeeds in his mission to boldly go where no Zimmerman has gone before. R.S.

The British punks may have been keen on skewering sacred cows, but even the most nihilist of the CBGB crowd kept on eye on the past of rock and roll. On his second and final album, the punk poet the Times once called “a kind of contemporary equivalent of the mid-60’s Bob Dylan” finds an unexpected outlet for his sorrow in a track from Planet Waves, which guitarists Ivan Julian and Robert Quine lacerate with a ferocity that makes Robbie Robertson sound tame. K.H.

The cryptic Street-Legal track about a horse named Lucifer gets the sludgy blues treatment from Jack White’s heavy rock supergroup. According to singer Alison Mosshart, this track, like much of the band’s debut LP Horehound, wasn’t even initially intended for release. “We were just seeing how we could attack it and what we could get from it.” she told Billboard at the time. They got maybe even more than they bargained for. K.H.

Lewis is such a great songwriter nobody would wish she’d stick to other people’s material, but on those rare occasions she covers another artist she reveal what a terrific interpreter she can be. In 2019 she released an expressively sung home recording of this Time Out of Mind standout, subtly overdubbed, on her iPhone Demos EP. Lewis’ version is on a more down-to-earth human scale than Dylan’s doomy meditation of mortality, revealing just how adaptable the original composition was. K.H.

The psychedelic punks in the Dream Syndicate always had a tight connection with the Dylan songbook, even in their early 1980s days, when they were bashing out deep cuts like “Outlaw Blues” and “Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar” for Hollywood club kids. They were the first to release “Blind Willie McTell,” for a 1988 fanzine single, years before Dylan’s version came out. Steve Wynn’s acerbic sneer carries the song’s bitter indictment of American history. How could Dylan write a song this great for Infidels and leave it off the album? All we know for sure: nobody could play the blues like Blind Willie McTell. R.S.

It’s fair to go out on a limb and call this the least seductive “Lay Lady Lay” ever recorded. That’s an achievement that Ministry’s Al Jourgensen must be proud of. The industrial metal kingpin just had a huge breakthrough hit with his 1992 Psalm 69, and to celebrate, he set out to make the noisiest, sludgiest, most antisocial follow-up album he could, calling it Filth Pig. “Lady Lady Lady” was the hilarious climax, with Jourgensen screaming the title in a druggy haze. “His clothes are dirty but his hands are clean”? Yeah right — this version makes you look for the nearest decontamination shower. R.S.

Kesha doesn’t so much perform this breakup song as she does endure it. Recorded for Amnesty International’s 76-song Dylan tribute, this spookily skeletal version establishes a raw mood even before she audibly breaks down in tears. “The emotion caught up with me and I just started weeping,” she told Rolling Stone at the time.“It seemed like a suicide note to the love of my life and to my former life. Because everything in my life has changed so much.” K.H.

When the Roots were booked to play a Bob Dylan tribute show at New York’s Lincoln Center in 2006, they took a page from the Leon Russell playbook and set it to the tune of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” By this point in history, it was clear to most Americans that the war in Iraq had been a horrible mistake, and it was met with roars of approval and a standing ovation. It was enough to make them add it to their setlist and at Coachella in 2007, they stretched it out to eight incredible minutes. A.G.

Dylan should have written more Seventies baseball songs, right? “Catfish” is an acoustic blues he cut in 1975, but left unreleased until his 1991 The Bootleg Series, a tribute to the great pitcher Catfish Hunter. Dylan turned the Carolina boy with the fastball into a folk hero a la Pretty Boy Floyd or Stagger Lee, smoking cigars and wearing alligator boots. As a Northern English bloke, Joe Cocker might not have been much of a baseball fan, but he wails it as a slow, bluesy boast. Some of us still hope we eventually get Dylan songs about Dock Ellis, Mark Fidrych, Vida Blue, and Bye Bye Balboni. R.S.

“I’m Not There” is such a mysterious Bob Dylan song that nobody even knows the complete lyrics. It was recorded during the Basement Tapes sessions, but confined to bootleg recordings until he finally allowed it to see the light of day on the soundtrack to the surreal 2007 movie of the same title. The sole available Basement Tapes version begins with Dylan mid-word and he’s so slurry in some parts that fans have spent decades arguing over what exactly he’s saying. What everyone agrees is that “I’m Not There” is a haunting work worthy of endless examination. Covering it is a very difficult task, but Sonic Youth nailed it on the I’m Not There soundtrack. Their rendition keeps all the mystery of the original intact. A.G.

Johnny Thunders was the ultimate NYC born-to-lose street punk, ever since he redefined feedback as the glam-trash guitar hero of the New York Dolls and the Heartbreakers. Born John Anthony Genzale in Queens, he related to Dylan’s tale of another Italian prince gone bad, Brooklyn mafioso Joey Gallo. “Joey” might be the most widely hated Dylan song of the Seventies, but Thunders claims it as a tribute from one great paisan hipster rock & roll star to another. He turns it into a Dion-worthy Fifties-style guitar/sax toast: “Joey Joey Joey, king of da street!” This is where “Like a Rolling Stone” meets L.A.M.F. — one of those rare Dylan covers that improves on the original. R.S.

Griffith performed this study abroad blues with Carolyn Hester at Dylan’s star-studded 30th Anniversary Concert. He liked it enough to add his own harmonica to Griffith’s studio version, released the next year, in 1993, on her signature covers record Other Voices, Other Rooms. That album included covers by everyone from Kate Wolf to John Prine to Jerry Jeff Walker. She plays “Boots of Spanish Leather” completely straight, laying bare the song’s heartbreak and agony by letting the song speak for itself. J.B.

Few artists have brightened up a Dylan recording as nicely as the Heptones did on their 1969 reggae iteration of the singer’s redemptive ballad “I Shall Be Released,” released just a year after the Band did it on Music From Big Pink. For whatever reason, the song was never included in any of the multiple album-length compilations of reggae Dylan covers, but the Jamaican trio recorded the song several times (including a 1977 version with dub master Lee “Scratch” Perry). In later years they would change the chorus to: “I see Jah light/Come shining.” J.B.

After ranting about homicide for nearly an hour on his 1996 album, Murder Ballads, Nick Cave must have needed a hug, so he turned to Dylan’s uplifting Down in the Groove deep cut and made it a warm-and-fuzzy campfire singalong with some of his best friends and baddest seeds. Maintaining the easy, country-tinged vibe of the original, Cave trades verses on the recording with a cross section of his mid-Nineties dark-rock cabal and some pop-rock curveballs: PJ Harvey, the Pogues’ Shane MacGowan, Einstürzende Neubauten and the Bad Seeds’ Blixa Bargeld, Kylie Minogue, former Bad Seed Anita Lane, and the Bad Seeds’ Thomas Wylder. Other than Bargeld’s sinisterly whispered verse, it’s a sweet and sentimental palette cleanser, a refreshing after-dinner mint to follow the bloody massacre that was the rest of the album. K.G.

On Highway 61 Revisited, Dylan approached this assemblage of railroad and blues-song images as a lanky shuffle. This souped-up overhaul, from the Super Session album that also featured guitarist Mike Bloomfield on other tracks, replaces the clank of a railway car with the souped-up feel of a jet airliner. Kooper’s delivery is even more laconic than Dylan’s, and Stills contributes a fluid solo with a hint of twang (egged on by Kooper’s “aww, pick it, Wilson!” exclamation). Kooper later wrote that he was inspired by Dylan’s earlier, “fast-tune” arrangement of the song. D.B.

Among the many playful songs Dylan wrote during his “Basement Tapes” era was his freewheeling, surrealistic tale of a party inhabited by all sorts of freaks and geeks. Fairport Convention’s cover delightfully heightens the bawdy-reverie aspect of the tune. With band members trading verses — listen close for Sandy Denny and Richard Thompson, both in Fairport at that point — “Million Dollar Bash” becomes a woozy, giddy, seemingly liquored-up sing-along. Even more so than Dylan and the Band did in their Big Pink version, Fairport make you want to join in on the party as soon as possible. D.B.

When Dylan arrived in NYC in the early 1960s, Dave Van Ronk was the king of the Greenwich Village folkies, the Mayor of MacDougal Street. Dylan idolized him from afar and studied him up close — as he recalled in Chronicles, “He was passionate and stinging, sang like a soldier of fortune and sounded like he paid the price.” Van Ronk did one of the kid’s songs on his 1963 album In The Tradition — a ribald ragtime ditty Dylan played just a couple of times onstage. The immortal hook: “If I had to do it all over again, babe, I’d do it all over you!” R.S.

Dylan’s look back at a collapsed relationship has been tackled by a wide range of acts over the decades — from Richie Havens and Nina Simone to, later, Stevie Nicks and Old Crow Medicine Show. Buckley’s 1993 cover, which predates his Grace album, strips down the song musically and emotionally. In his Blonde on Blonde take, Dylan, encased in subdued folk-rock, sounded worn down and slightly dismissive of the woman with “her fog, her amphetamines and her pearls.” Here, accompanied only by his electric guitar, Buckley sings in a far more supple and consoling tone, as if he’s in as much anguish as his partner. By the end of the song, he seems on the verge of tears. The result is a rarity: a Dylan cover that sounds like an entirely different song, D.B. 

Dylan bent the blues to his own artistic purposes, so it was always rewarding to hear bluesmen readjust his songs back into a more traditional shape. This riff-driven Blood on the Tracks number almost calls out for a straight blues cover, and the Texan-born Chicago guitar great leapt at the invitation, performing it on the last album he released in his lifetime, Larger Than Life. Where Dylan plays it cool, King rushes into it with soulful abandon, reeling off a stylishly fierce solo, with horns busting in at just the right moments. K.H.

Dylan famously loved this version of his Another Side ballad by his mentor (and Woody Guthrie pal) Elliott. “I bequeath it to you!” he announced as he watched Elliott perform the song one night. And it’s easy to hear why, especially in this original remake from 1965. If anyone could relate to the I’m-outta-here narrator, who decides to hit the road and not be pinned down, it would surely be Elliott. (“Where I’m bound, I can’t tell” in some ways sums up Elliott’s own zigzagging travels and personal life.) Elliott sings it with equal parts tenderness and crankiness, and the craggy harmonica adds a perfect Dust Bowl touch. D.B.

Doug Sahm was a legend of Tex-Mex rock & roll, from the Sir Douglas Quintet in the 1960s to the Texas Tornados in the 1990s. His first solo album, Doug Sahm and Band in 1972, had a freewheeling cast of friends including Dylan, who contributed “Wallflower,” a delightfully ragged waltz about yearning to dance with the shy gal across the room. Dylan plays guitar and sings harmony; Dr. John joins in on organ. Many years later, when Dylan’s son Jakob formed his own successful band, he called it the Wallflowers. R.S.

“Sweetheart Like You” is one of the man’s sharpest Eighties love songs, from the 1983 gem Infidels. (It’s become an underrated deep cut now, though it was a MTV hit at the time.) The Hold Steady’s frontman Craig Finn gets the elusive tone exactly right: It’s the ballad of two lost souls in a bar at closing time, sizing each other up. When Finn sings the title question — “What’s a sweetheart like you doing in a dump like this?” — he sounds like a philosopher on a barstool, finding a little poetry in the eyes of a stranger. The most famous line unfortunately sounds as true as ever: “Steal a little and they throw you in jail / Steal a lot and they make you king.” R.S.

Veloso’s been called Brazil’s answer to Bob Dylan, which, as such comparisons will, undersells the uniqueness of both artists. But his stature is comparable, so this take on the opaque Infidels opener, from Veloso’s live album Circulado Vivo. has the feel of one culture’s titan addressing another’s. The Brazilian legend and his band bring an elasticity to the number, which he sings in nimble English as thunderous hand percussion pounds upon a rubbery bassline, the instrumental break. K.H.

Dylan took his most famous song title from the Muddy Waters blues classic “Rollin’ Stone” — the same place the Stones got their name. (As did a certain magazine.) Given their tangled histories, it made sense for the Stones to pay tribute to Dylan by covering this song. (It basically had to happen, right?) They did “Like a Rolling Stone” on their 1995 live album Stripped, with Mick Jagger wailing away on harmonica. At the end, Keith Richards says, “Thanks, Bob” — a touching salute from one timeless rock & roll pirate to another. R.S.

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.