Recommendations of the Editorial team
Bob Dylan loves it when other people sing his songs. It’s amazing how many songs here were often recorded by other artists before he released his own versions. Often they lived completely different lives, evolving and changing over the years, with his idea of the song serving only as a blueprint. And because there are so many different types of Dylan songs, there are also a variety of different Dylan covers.
R&B singers love to relax into the contours of “Lay Lady Lay.” Country singers like his rootsy pieces. Indie rockers focus on his sad side. Heroic rock singers love to scale the peaks of open-ended classics – like “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” or “Like a Rolling Stone” – and find their own way to create new meanings amid the overlapping and often contradictory emotions and ideas that can be stirred up in a Dylan song. Even strange, casual, or downright bad Dylan songs can make great covers.
When reading this article, true fans will immediately think of their own favorite covers that didn’t make the list. Und that’s part of the fun. This story goes in a million directions. The path always ends where you are.
80. William Shatner, “Mr. Tambourine Man” (1968)
Captain’s log, stardate 1968. William Shatner creates the musical equivalent of the Doomsday Machine. At the peak of Star Trek Captain Kirk recorded this bizarre chant version of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” definitely embarking on a journey on his own magical, whirling ship.
He declaims the lyrics in his tortured style, as if he feels all the pain of the Horta, over psychedelic lounge pop. At the end he shouts: “Mr. Tambourine Maaaaaaaan!“It’s safe to say he succeeded in his mission to boldly go where no Zimmerman has gone before. RS
79. Richard Hell and the Voidoids, “Going Going Gone” (1982)
The British punks may have been out to slaughter sacred cows. But even the most nihilistic members of the CBGB scene kept rock ‘n’ roll’s past in mind.
On his second and final album, the punk poet, whom The Times once described as “a sort of contemporary equivalent of Bob Dylan in the mid-’60s,” finds an unexpected outlet for his sadness in a track from “Planet Waves,” which guitarists Ivan Julian and Robert Quine mangle with a ferocity that makes Robbie Robertson seem tame. KH
78. The Dead Weather, “New Pony” (2009)
The cryptic track “Street-Legal,” about a horse named Lucifer, gets a muddy blues treatment from Jack White’s heavy rock supergroup. According to singer Alison Mosshart, this track, like much of the band’s debut album Horehound, was not originally intended for release.
“We were just seeing how we could approach it and what we could get out of it,” she told Billboard at the time. They may have even gotten more than they bargained for. KH
77. Jenny Lewis, “Standing in the Doorway” (2019)
Lewis is such a great songwriter that no one would want her to stick to other people’s material. But on the rare occasions that she covers another artist, she shows what an excellent performer she can be.
In 2019, she released an expressively sung home recording of this standout song from “Time Out of Mind,” subtly layered, on her EP “iPhone Demos.” Lewis’ version is much more down-to-earth than Dylan’s somber meditation on mortality and shows how adaptable the original composition was. KH
76. The Dream Syndicate, “Blind Willie McTell” (1988)
The psychedelic punks of The Dream Syndicate have always had a close connection to Dylan’s songbook. Even in their early days in the early 1980s, when they played songs like “Outlaw Blues” and “Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar” for Hollywood club kids.
They were the first to release “Blind Willie McTell” on a fanzine single in 1988, Years before Dylan’s version came out. Steve Wynn’s caustic mockery underscores the song’s bitter indictment of American history. How could Dylan write such a great song for Infidels and then not include it on the album? We know one thing for sure. No one could play the blues like Blind Willie McTell. RS