50 More of the Best Bob Dylan Covers Ever Recorded: Bonus Tracks Edition

For Bob Dylan’s 80th birthday this past week, Variety selected 80 of the best or most undervalued interpretations of Dylan’s work ever recorded. Was that sufficient covers coverage? The answer is clear, if you at all appreciate the catalog of the man often revered as rock ‘n’ roll’s greatest songwriter: 80 is not enough, any more than eight would be.

That’s why, to cap off Dylan’s birthday week, we’ve come up with 50 more must-hear tracks from among the untold thousands that exist to be mined. This bonus-tracks addendum includes still more classics from the Byrds, Joan Baez, Nina Simone, Jimi Hendrix and Johnny Cash, all of whom were represented on our previous list of 80… along with covers that may surprise you from Beck, Cat Power, Alicia Keys, XTC, the Rolling Stones, the Specials, Townes Van Zandt, the Ramones and even David Lynch.

Join us for a journey through his back pages with contributions from Variety staffers Steven Gaydos, William Earl and Chris Willman and contributors Chris Morris and Jessica Hundley. As the birthday boy himself might say, if you gotta go, go now… or else you gotta stay all 50!

• The Byrds, "My Back Pages"

  

  The Byrds’ electrified refresh of this acoustic song from 1964’s “Another Side of Bob Dylan,” it’s nearly impossible to listen to the original and not wonder where the Rickenbacker is, or where Roger McGuinn and David Crosby are to make what previously felt like a barely-there hook into one of the great eight-second eagworms of the 1960s (or ever). What did “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now”? Amid all the otherwise cryptic lyrics, was it a just a mind— on the level of “There’s no success like failure, and failure’s no success at all”? Or was Dylan saying that his earlier, more political material was too self-serious and he was ready to embrace the perceived juvenilia of rock ‘n’ roll? Whichever way you took it, McGuinn, Crosby ensured that “My Back Pages” would forever be on the front pages of songs that endure from the ’60s. —Chris Willman

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h80l4XIPJC4?feature=oembed&w=500&h=375%5D

• Johnny Winter, "Highway 61 Revisited" 

  

  Since Bob Dylan has spent the past few decades on the road as the featured performer in a world-class Texas roadhouse boogie band, there’s no big shock that a badass guitarslinger from Beaumont, Texas would know just how to make one of Bob’s classic rockers howl like a coyote caught between a cyclone and the headlights of a Peterbilt. There’s something truly Old Testament about Winter himself, a rail-thin albino outsider who shut up all naysayers the minute he plugged in his Firebird. By the time the ravages of drugs and time had turned him into an even more ghostly figure garbed appropriately like The Man in the Long Black Coat, he could spit out “God said to Abraham ‘Kill me a son'” and your first thought wasn’t “Nice cover version of ‘Highway 61’,” but “Someone make sure no kids are missing.” —Steven Gaydos

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUXhoIf1eQU?feature=oembed&w=500&h=375%5D

• Elvis Presley, “Tomorrow Is a Long Time”

  

  Dylan songs have been covered many thousands of times since November 1969, but back then the songwriter told Rolling Stone’s editor Jann Wenner that Elvis’ version of this obscurity was “the one recording I cherish the most.” Unless you were a die-hard Presley fanatic, you may not have been aware of its existence, as this outtake from a gospel music session was dumped onto the 1966 soundtrack album for “Spinout,” a lesser entry in his film canon. Dylan remembered the movie’s title as “Kismet,” which may have been a joke about destiny, or something. —Chris Morris

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VLpgttfEM0?feature=oembed&w=500&h=375%5D

• Jimi Hendrix, “Like a Rolling Stone”

  

  The original 1965 studio version, a No. 2 pop hit, and subsequent readings of the number with the Hawks on Dylan’s 1965-66 world tour were enough to keep most interpreters away. But Hendrix seldom encountered a challenge he chose to decline, so he took on the tune and turned in a straightforward, rousing version of it during his historic set at the Monterey Pop Festival on June 18, 1967. Listening today, one can hear a road map to “Axis: Bold As Love.” —Morris

  https://youtu.be/9_ISCzW_JqU

• Joan Baez, “Love Is a Four-Letter Word” 

  

  After Bob Dylan struck gold at CBS Studios in Nashville with “Blonde on Blonde” and “John Wesley Harding,” Joan Baez made the trek to Music Row in September 1968 to record “Any Day Now,” a double album made up entirely of Dylan songs, including a half-dozen never released by Dylan himself. One of those songs, “Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word” had been kicking around for years. You can hear Baez fiddling around with it in 1965 in “Don’t Look Back,” but backed by Nashville’s finest studio cats, Baez pulls together a lively up-tempo gem that helped turned “Day” into her own gold record.  —Gaydos

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SX4QLrrqhNI?feature=oembed&w=500&h=375%5D

• Johnny Cash, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”

  

  Cash was one of the first major supporters and interpreters of his friend and label mate’s music – to the extent that he lifted the melody of this song wholesale for his own composition “Understand Your Man,” released in 1964. But the Man in Black finally got around to cutting his own solid, boom-chicka-booming version of the original tune, issued as a single later that year and included as one of the three Dylan compositions heard on the 1965 album “Orange Blossom Special.” —Morris

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuSFBNkwkQ0?feature=oembed&w=500&h=375%5D

• The Specials, "Maggie's Farm"

  

  “Maggie’s Farm” has proved a rich source of reinterpretations over the years, including an aggro 21st-century one by Rage Against the Machine. But back in 1990, the Specials were ahead of the curve in throwing a stylistic curveball with the song. Its torrent of rapid-fire percussion sounds like it could be fit for a dance party, but when the lyrics of the “Well, I wake up in the morning, fold my hands and pray for rain / I got a head full of ideas that are drivin’ me insane” go into spoken-word double-time, it actually feels a little creepy, reminding us that Dylan’s song is, on some level, about a workplace dystopia. Four decades later, anyway, you’d be hard-pressed to find any other record that sounds so wonderfully peculiar in the same way this one does. —Willman

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQaPvHsbVzs?feature=oembed&w=500&h=281%5D

• Lucinda Williams, "Positively 4th Street"

  

  Lucinda Williams loves Dylan enough to have done an entire livestream set of his songs during the 2020 quarantine. But she made her mark with his material when she took on this singular song for a 1994 compilation album. When Williams sings “You’ve got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend,” it’s not with Dylan’s sneer, but with a sense of genuine vulnerability. It’s remarkable how, for five minutes, she can sing the exact same lyrics and bring out all the hurt you never noticed before in Dylan’s previously cocky tale of betrayal. —Willman

  https://youtu.be/ea6R-sALVlA

• Bryan Ferry, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”

  

  In which Roxy Music’s lead singer, leading off his 1973 solo debut “These Foolish Things,” arrives at the apocalypse via a limo, in a tux, with a female chorus, horns, and strings in tow, thereby blowing away the notion that a “protest song” should be sung by dirty-faced, angry children in funky hippie clothes. Never lacking in audacity, Ferry continued to show abiding love for Dylan’s work in his equally idiosyncratic 2007 studio recital, “Dylanesque.” —Morris

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zwBHd4kll0?feature=oembed&w=500&h=375%5D

• XTC, "All Along the Watchtower"

  

  Landing in the middle of their debut album — 1978’s “White Music” — XTC rips Bob Dylan’s composition to shreds and rebuilds it over a dancefloor-ready bass and drum groove. Andy Partridge’s wild scatting and vocal breakdowns battle moody synth freak-outs and harmonica interludes in a more-is-more soundscape that works if you just surrender. —William Earl

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qXxOSYZi7U?feature=oembed&w=500&h=375%5D

• Cat Power, “I Believe in You"

  

  The oft-tormented singer-songwriter a/k/a Chan Marshall has essayed several Dylan tunes over the course of her cover-laden career, but none has been quite so striking, or unnerving, as this rendition – heard on 2008’s “Jukebox” — of a devotional number from his first set of Christian music, 1979’s “Slow Train Coming.” Hearing her wrestle quite audibly with a song that is a simple declaration of faith in its original version, she puts a distinctive and hackle-raising stamp of her own on it. It feels almost like apostasy. —Morris

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPrmv2leH3w?feature=oembed&w=500&h=281%5D

• Alicia Keys, "Pressing On"

  

  Of all the songs from Dylan’s two all-gospel albums in 1979-80, “Pressing On” (from “Saved”) was a peak moment — a ballad of devotion that sounded like it had been part of the Black church for years before he ever entered a recording studio. It’s a pity he didn’t write it 10 years earlier: Aretha Franklin could have had a field day with it on her “Amazing Grace” if it’d entered the lexicon by then. It never did quite become a spiritual standard, but Keys rightfully treated it like one when she was filmed recording it as the closing number of the “Muscle Shoals” documentary in the mid-2000s. (Unfortunately, it was never released as an individual track, but it’s easy enough to find pulled out from the movie on YouTube.) Presumably, she had some holy reasons for laying down this track — if only to salute the holiness of the Muscle Shoals musicians she cut it with — and wasn’t just paying Bob back for his shout-out to her on his “Thunder On The Mountain” song (“I’m wondering where in the world Alicia Keys could be / I been looking for her even clear through Tennessee”). —Willman

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oa3wUtCTw_s?feature=oembed&w=500&h=281%5D

• Susan Tedeschi, "Lord Protect My Child"

  

  Dylan recorded this track in the early ’80s but didn’t put it out until the “Bootleg Series” began almost a decade later. If it had started life on a proper Dylan album, it surely would have become a more ubiquitous widely covered anthem than it did. It’s the arguably better flip side of “Forever Young” — a worried prayer sung from a place of never-ended parental anxiety. Tedeschi’s lovely version defined it as an underrated standard, to the point that she got a rare invite to sing it on stage with Dylan. —Willman

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HK97_EKBqA8?feature=oembed&w=500&h=281%5D

• Bonnie Raitt, “Let’s Keep It Between Us”

  

  As if to perhaps keep to the vow set in the title, Dylan kept this song to himself — or himself and whichever love he wrote it for  — after he wrote it as he was coming out of his gospel period at the beginning of the early 80s. Early drafts of the lyrics intriguingly suggest that it was about an interracial love, which was indeed something Dylan was experiencing around that time. By the time he gave it to Raitt to record a couple of years later, the themes in the lyrics had been made more universal: a celebration of the right to privacy for all lovers. But it’s not as defensive as that sounds, at least in Raitt’s slinky hands. It’s loose and sexy, and the series of unusually tumultuous chord changes in the tune really makes it sound like a romance where anything could happen. It also makes for a great companion piece to her future hit “Something to Talk About”: Let’s give ’em something to not talk about. —Willman

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wtju6noyvE?feature=oembed&w=500&h=375%5D

• Arsonists Get All the Girls, "Masters of War"

  

  Perhaps one of the most obviously titled Dylan tracks to receive a metal cover, Santa Cruz thrashers Arsonists Get All the Girls funnel the lyrics’ anti-Vietnam messaging into a ferocious stomp, bookended by two quiet interludes which make it easier to reflect on the poetry. It’s the most mosh pit-worthy Dylan cover ever. —Earl

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmKzF-JGGfI?feature=oembed&w=500&h=375%5D

• Diana Krall, "This Dream of You"

  

  One of Dylan’s great latter-day songs, from 2009’s “Together Through Life” album, “This Dream of You” has gone largely undiscovered by modern interpreters… or maybe it’s just a little too dark to become the next “Make You Feel My Love.” The narrator in the song is feeling his years: “There’s a moment when / All old things become new again / But that moment might have come and gone / All I have and all I know / Is this dream of you which keeps me living on.” Krall, of course, knows a classic when she hears one, and this became the heartbreaking — yet not hopeless — title track of her latest album, where it sat comfortably aside its elders in her great American songbook. —Willman

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRDucdnrR9Y?feature=oembed&w=500&h=281%5D

• Everly Brothers, “Lay Lady Lay" 

  

  Thirty-seven years ago, one of rock music’s titanic acts ventured to London to make their first album of new material in over a decade. “EB 84,” produced by Brit rocker Dave Edmunds, turned out to be one of the legendary duo’s greatest albums, and one of the record’s many delights is the way they turn “Lay Lady Lay” so effortlessly and elegantly into the perfect Everly Brothers song. Intimate, romantic, Southern sounding as shrimp and grits, Don and Phil infuse one of Bob’s greatest songs with their trademark simple passions and heavenly harmonies that helped turn a Zimmerman boy into the Rock God he was to become. —Gaydos

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH5aMcMRZXI?feature=oembed&w=500&h=375%5D

• The Ramones, "My Back Pages"

  

  On the B-side of the Ramones’ covers album “Acid Eaters,” bassist C.J. Ramone grabs the mic for this breakneck version of Dylan’s pivotal turn against his protest music image. Yet there isn’t much time for nuance in this muscular take from the seminal punks, who charge through, adding their iconic gang vocals to the chorus. —Earl

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qPiRAqrR30?feature=oembed&w=500&h=375%5D

• Taj Mahal, "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry"

  

  Dylan’s explorations of the blues idiom on his early rock albums in the mid-’60s are yet more proof of his majestic magpie mastery of lifting influences and slipping them seamlessly into his repertoire of “Bob Dylan songs.” Here in one beautiful loping, loose blues tune, Dylan borrows from (at least) Charley Patton, Leroy Carr, Kokomo Arnold and Furry Lewis.
  In the hands of Taj Mahal, Dylan’s Columbia Records label mate (via the short-lived Rising Sons) in 1965, “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry” sparkles and shines and returns to the African American wellspring it was derived from. “Don’t the moon look good mama shinin through the trees” and every other word, note and image in the song belongs to Mr. Mahal as if he weren’t covering a song, but recovering something he just loaned to Bob way back when. —Gaydos

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pENIpIPZcOY?feature=oembed&w=500&h=375%5D

• Nickel Creek, "Tomorrow Is a Long Time"

  

  A brief, hushed number in Dylan’s catalog, Nickel Creek takes “Tomorrow Is a Long Time” on a predictably gorgeous walk on their fifth album, “Why Should the Fire Die?” Sara Watkins handles vocal duties solo, as the trio’s strings nestle together comfortably. It’s as soothing as music this deftly composed and expertly played can get. —Earl

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93E8vCg5RA0?feature=oembed&w=500&h=375%5D

• Lucius, “When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky”

  

  Talk about an act of reclamation. Dylan’s “Empire Burlesque” is almost universally regarded as his worst-produced album, and singling out his recording of “When the Night Comes Falling From the Sky,” it’s so unlistenable that you might start thinking it’s one of the worst-produced tracks ever released by anybody, period. So it’s a revelation to hear Lucius, the band led by singers Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig, somehow find their way past the studio dross of Dylan’s original to be able to hear that the song was ripe to be turned into something stunning. They transpose the key and let the song build over six minutes from a modest solo electric guitar intro into something so dramatic that it really does feel like the sky might be falling… in a good way. No wonder diehard Dylan fans clamor for a “Burlesque” boxed set: Maybe there’s an outtake version in the vault that’s almost as good as Lucius’? —Willman

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSr6tfB8TLc?feature=oembed&w=500&h=375%5D

• Gregg Allman, "Going, Going, Gone"

  

  “Going, Going, Gone” is a song largely without Dylan’s sense of defiance — it’s a lament that can register as defeatist, at worst, or resigned, at best, without much in the way of going-away bravado. Imagine the nerve it took for Gregg Allman, making what he apparently knew would be his final album, to cut a song he would have known would be interpreted as being about the Big Retreat. Or maybe he didn’t plan it as a farewell statement, and just thought that a thing of beauty in Dylan’s catalog is a thing of beauty. Regardless, a song that tends to be gorgeous in anyone’s hands — even Richard Hell’s (see separate entry, below) — has immeasurable resonance as a parting gift. —Willman

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUxdRraezrM?feature=oembed&w=500&h=375%5D

• Merry Clayton, "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35"

  

  In Dylan’s hands, this always came off as a joke — a great joke, mind you, and a necessary one to signal just how far he intended to veer away from any sanctimonious image he’d generated as a putative protest singer. In transforming it into a festive R&B number, Merry Clayton (the voice you remember from the Stones’ “Gimme Shelter”) doesn’t exactly rob the song of its humor, but she does make the intention to get stoned sound rooted in real stress or adversity. It’s still a romp, but no one’s going to accuse Merry Clayton of settling for slacker humor when she can make even “Rainy Day Women #12 and 35” feel like it means something. —Willman

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Qq-43a8CFo?feature=oembed&w=500&h=375%5D

• Sinead O'Connor, "I Believe in You"

  

  Coming early in Dylan’s gospel period, “I Believe in You” was, yes, a song of spiritual devotion, but also an effective eff-you to the world — as a fair amount of gospel is! — with Dylan (correctly) prophesying that he would face a fair amount of scorn and abandonment for his religiously fervent new stand. Of course, the song has been picked up a number of times over the years by performers who didn’t exactly align with his dogma at the moment but could relate to the search for peace amid persecution. It certainly resonated with Sinead O’Connor, who went into Dylan’s 50th anniversary concert at Madison Square Garden being scorned by the masses for a stand she took on “Saturday Night Live.” “Don’t let the bastards get you down,” Kris Kristofferson famously told her that day. In the rehearsal take that was released on the event’s commemorative album, you very much hear O’Connor at that nexus of righteousness, hope and abandonment. —Willman

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2C7tAp5X6Zo?feature=oembed&w=500&h=375%5D

• Joan Osborne, “Make You Feel My Love”

  

  “Make You Feel My Love” is the most-covered of all of Dylan’s latter-day songs, with popular versions by Adele, Garth Brooks and Billy Joel. No one, though, has really found the edge in its romanticism that Osborne did when she included it on her full album of Dylan covers a few years. It’s the rawest, sparest, driest recording possible, which tends to bring out the part of the song that is less about determination and vows and more about doubt — the “I know you haven’t made your mind up yet” part. Her beautiful rendition lets you know that this is a love story joined, and departed, in progress. —Willman 

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kj8Qk5PnK1w?feature=oembed&w=500&h=375%5D

• Me First and the Gimmie Gimmies, "Blowin' in the Wind"

  

  This double-time mall punk rendition of Dylan’s most popular protest song gets its snotty takeover courtesy of all-covers supergroup Me First and the Gimmie Gimmies, with lead singer Spike Slawson finding vocal harmonies with NOFX bassist Fat Mike and breakneck guitar fills from Foo Fighter Chris Shiflett. It’s a tasty, riffy mix that works far better than it should. —Earl

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDQz4FzFrS4?feature=oembed&w=500&h=375%5D

• Townes Van Zandt, "Man Gave Names to All the Animals"

  

  This Christian reggae song for kids might be one of the oddest ducks in Dylan’s catalog, and although it’s wrongly classified as one of his worst, Townes van Zandt completely reinvents it with a forlorn acoustic rendition from 1994’s “Roadsongs.” His weary traveler vocals give a new life to the story, reconfiguring a children’s tune into something stark and eerie. —Earl

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggjDvBxj1E4?feature=oembed&w=500&h=375%5D

• Williams Brothers, "Straight A's in Love"

  

  Dylan has a habit of writing songs that are pure, unalloyed fun and then giving them away to others. “Straight A’s in Love” is one of the most wonderfully silly tunes he ever laid down, and you can see why it might not have fit easily into one of his own collections. But in the hands of the Williams Brothers (the sibling act you may remember from “The Andy Williams Show,” who grew up to make a couple of great albums in their maturity), it feels like a lost pop classic. What it really feels like, actually, as if Chuck Berry had written a song for the Everly Brothers… that is, too good to be true. —Willman

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZXGihRiEr8?feature=oembed&w=500&h=281%5D

• The Textones with Ry Cooder, “Clean Cut Kid”

  

  Carla Olson and the Textones’ version of “Clean Cut Kid” beat Dylan’s own out of the gate in the early ’80s… and, no offense to Bob, but theirs got it more right. Dylan was writing about military PTSD, basically — “They took the clean-cut kid, and they made a killer out of him, that’s what they did” — in an undeniably rocking arrangement. The writer’s version plays it for a bit too much ironic contrast; a song with that cutting a theme probably shouldn’t sound quite so much like a party ditty. Olson made it swing less and rock harder, and sang it with enough spit and vinegar to make you believe there were real lives at stake here… and she also had the benefit of a guest appearance from Ry Cooder on a searing bottleneck guitar. —Willman

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBxOlT9WKjg?feature=oembed&w=500&h=375%5D

• Richard Hell & the Voidoids, “Going, Going, Gone”

  

  Excepting “Forever Young,” a song whose ubiquity is not matched by its excellence, the songs on  “Planet Waves,” the 1974 collaboration with the Band, were not often plumbed profitably by other artists. However, this pioneering New York punk band took a restrained whack at this doomy entry from the album, which is notable for Hell’s amusing and certainly unintended vocal imitation of an extremely drunk Bob Dylan (or at least what this listener imagines he would sound like in his cups). —Morris

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C60eZWvjBdo?feature=oembed&w=500&h=375%5D

• Norah Jones, "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight"

  

  One of Dylan’s most romantic songs met its warm match in the melting-like-butter tones of Jones, taking on a classic to go with her original material in her breakout year. Initially perceived (not wrongly) as a pop-jazz artist, Jones signaled here that she had intentions to dive into Americana-styled music, too. Lyrically, musically, on every level, her version feels like a warm embrace, or its imminent promise — Dylan had his own “Come Away With Me” right there waiting for her. —Willman

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3w3VgK4-ODw?feature=oembed&w=500&h=375%5D

• Nina Simone, "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues"

  

  Simone left a ridiculous amount of beautiful Dylan covers behind, too many to reasonably choose from. While, on paper, something like “I Shall Be Released” might seem even better suited for her, you have to marvel at how she could take one of Dylan’s most weirdly narrative, impressionistic stories from the mid-’60s — ostensibly a story of a man encountering some decadence on a visit to Mexico — and invest it with such feeling, she almost makes it feel like something she’s lived. What’s really important is what Simone does with a tough melody that doesn’t resolve itself in anything so obvious as a chorus. The song is all rambling anecdote, but a singer this great ensures that “low-key” is a feature, not a flaw. —Willman

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jWBiFMlGVQ?feature=oembed&w=500&h=375%5D

• Leon Russell, "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall"

  

  Dylan’s 1960s warning that the end is nigh still sounds vaguely apocalyptic in Russell’s hands in 1971 — but with those hands turning the song into a piano-pounding anthem, at least it seems like we’ll be able to ride out the rain in a Southern juke joint. —Willman

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxdhzAOzzCE?feature=oembed&w=500&h=375%5D

• Bruce Springsteen, "Chimes of Freedom"

  

  Springsteen modeled the wordy style of his first couple of albums on Dylan’s wordy style, but when he finally got around to officially releasing his own version of a song by his hero, he chose something less idiosyncratic and more anthemic, reflecting his own evolution into a populist champion. “Chimes of Freedom” was appropriate for the cause, too, of course, being part of a benefit EP for Amnesty International when that org was peaking as rockers’ cause of choice. It’s hard to say any version could outdo the Byrds’, so maybe this one doesn’t, quite — but it sure feels like Dylan penned it as a writer-for-hire for the E Street Band. —Willman 

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhvpFX63JGw?feature=oembed&w=500&h=375%5D

• Beck, "Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat"

  

  If you ever wanted to hear one of Dylan’s classic mid-’60s songs remade as a T. Rex song… Beck finally fulfilled that wish with this fuzzed-up glam-rock reinterpretation. Better late, and by proxy, than never. —Willman

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZgfcCs6cwM?feature=oembed&w=500&h=375%5D

• Ronee Blakley, "Hurricane"

  

  Is a cover still a cover if the artist participated in the original recording? Blakley, the “Nashville” singer-actor, was there by Dylan’s side when he decided to record his epic poem-song about imprisoned boxer Ruben “Hurricane” Carter in an impromptu session, pages literally flying as they whizzed through one verse after another, on the eve of her getting dragged along as a major player on the Rolling Thunder Revue tour. Last year, with four and a half decades to have learned the song instead of a matter of minutes, she revisited it in a solo version, backed by an all-star L.A. Americana band that including Dave Alvin on guitar and the late Don Heffington on drums. It’s not everyone’s favorite Dylan single, jam-packed as it is with hundreds of newsy words that don’t always ring as poetry in retrospect. But Dylan was ahead of the curve in recognizing not just that Black lives matter but that they deserve their own eight-and-a-half minute A-side from an ally. Blakley brought back that righteous verbosity with all the topically resonant fury it’s worth. —Willman

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbbK2gKVRzc?feature=oembed&w=500&h=375%5D

• Rolling Stones, "Watching the River Flow"

  

  Two decades after the Rolling Stones lost Bill Wyman, the bass player that was the essential roll to Charlie Watts’ rock, “Them British bad boys The Rolling Stones” got back together for a cut on a tribute album dedicated to their longtime roadie and late keyboard wizard Ian Stewart. They chose to grace the 2011 LP, “Boogie 4 Stu” with one of Dylan’s great rowdy rockers, “Watching the River Flow” and Mick Jagger, Ron Wood, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman brought a rousing Chicago blues band groove to Dylan’s ode to a laidback life aquatic. —Gaydos

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WvtYgPKlw0?feature=oembed&w=500&h=375%5D

• Top Jimmy & the Rhythm Pigs, “Obviously Five Believers”

  

  Hollywood punk rockers of the ‘80s filled dives like the Cathay de Grande and Raji’s to watch this uncontrollable outfit, fronted by the forceful singer later immortalized in song by Van Halen, turn everything they touched into high-octane blues. This “Blonde On Blonde” basher was a keystone of their set and a highlight of their lone album “Pigus Drunkus Maximus,” produced by their saxophonist Steve Berlin (later of Los Lobos). —Morris

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qD23WTV8RM?feature=oembed&w=500&h=375%5D

• Low, "Knockin' on Heaven's Door"

  

  On its quietly transcendent take on “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” Low does what it does best: making slow, swaying dreamscapes — songs that lull, entrance, mesmerize. Dylan’s mantra/chorus takes on a deeper feel here, a tragedy felt in the empty spaces between vocals and slow snare hits and the silver needle thread of guitar. —Jessica Hundley

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QDb9dMhVN8?feature=oembed&w=500&h=281%5D

• Ian Hunter, “Is Your Love in Vain?”

  

  When his band Mott the Hoople arrived in the late ‘60s, vocalist Hunter was dismissed by some as a Dylan clone; he was of course much more than that, but he also undoubtedly understood the master’s music better than most. He frequently performed a heart-stopping version of this barbed, double-edged love song from “Street-Legal” (1978) during his ‘80s concerts. A stunning live clip can be found on YouTube. —Morris

  https://youtu.be/JoGH63VhRLo

• Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs, "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue"

  

  Is there anything that could have improved on the Byrds’ great covers of Dylan songs in the mid-’60s? We found out, when Sweet and Hoffs made one of them the centerpiece of their initial “Under the Covers” collection. No offense to McGuinn, Crosby, et al., but what had been missing all along was the harmonizing of a female songbyrd. —Willman

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qA-xwetZLs?feature=oembed&w=500&h=375%5D

• Cowboy Junkies, "If You Gotta Go, Go Now"

  

  As a song of somewhat humorous, possibly brusque seduction, “If You Gotta Go, Go Now” is always going to make a few people nervous: Are we OK in the MeToo age with someone being quite this blunt about a woman’s stay-or-go choices, with no other options on the spectrum of possibilities for the evening? Of course, when it’s a woman singing the song, all those undertones go away, or are at least subject to a fun juke-joint role reversal. It’s sort of doubly fun having it performed by Margo Timmins, who doesn’t usually play the role of a raunchy seductress in song, but earns a sexy laugh when the music drops out and she delivers the “…or else you gotta stay all night” as the quietest, sultriest possible ultimatum. —Willman

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-D1iIPpHN8?feature=oembed&w=500&h=375%5D

• Robbie Fulks, "Is Your Love in Vain?"

  

  You know you’re dealing with a revisionist if someone says 1978’s “Street-Legal” is one of their favorite Dylan albums, but it does have a cult that makes a very strong case for it, and/or has a runt-of-the-litter-loving streak. The country-folk-rocker Robbie Fulks did a full-album remake of “Street-Legal” that only came out as a two-record vinyl set a couple of years ago, after he’d spent years in his hometown of Chicago doing occasional full sets devoted to the polarizing album. He took a lot of stylistic liberties with the material to keep it from being any kind of staid experience, but there’s only such much variance you want to take with a song as beautifully wounded and defensive as this one. Coming right before he made a drastic shift into strictly evangelical music, “Street-Legal” can be seen as the prequel that establishes all the hurt that made him ripe for a conversion experience. “Do you love me, or are you just extending goodwill? / Do you need me half as bad as you say, or are you just feeling guilt? / I’ve been burned before and I know the score / So you won’t hear me complain / Will I be able to count on you / Or is your love in vain?” Spoken like a man who needs Jesus, or just a straight shooter across the dinner table. Fulks, for his part, will turn you into a “Street-Legal” convert. —Willman

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYszakjz6As?feature=oembed&w=500&h=375%5D

• Emma Swift, "I Contain Multitudes"

  

  You’ve got to love artists who are determined to cover Dylan’s front pages as well as his back ones. There still haven’t been a boatload of covers of songs from his 2020 “Rough and Rowdy” ways album, but give everyone time. Cowboy Junkies recently turned in an exquisite version of that record’s “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You,” but that was maybe the one song on his album remotely conventional enough that it was begging for a cover. Taking on his more stream-of-consciousness modern material is a tougher task, and Swift rose to meet it by including “I Contain Multitudes” on a recent Dylan covers album, “Blonde on the Tracks.” She does what Joan Baez, Judy Collins and so many generations of female interpreters have done before her: finds the great melodic lines that are sometimes more hinted at than explicit in Dylan’s conversational delivery, and embellishes them just enough to suggest that there’s heartfelt emotion in what may initially come off as a ramble. —Willman

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMGapwcwE6U?feature=oembed&w=500&h=281%5D

• David Lynch, "The Ballad of Hollis Brown"

  

  The director / musician / icon’s third album “The Big Dream” contains a bluesy interpretation of this Dylan tragedy. Dominated by loud drums and a tinny transmission of Lynch reciting the lyrics, strings and synths whisp around like cigarette smoke, a soundtrack fit for a nightclub instead of the South Dakota countryside. —Earl

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXnqohIm9g4?feature=oembed&w=500&h=375%5D

• Edie Brickell, "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall"

  

  “Hard Rain” was designated as a protest song for a protest movie, Oliver Stone’s “Born on the Fourth of July.” That didn’t call for one of the piss-takes of the “I’m Not There” soundtrack, that’s for sure — it called for someone with the combination of earnest and poet-laureate-literate that Brickell provides. Given the harshness of much of the veteran-themed movie, it was perfectly appropriate to buffer those discomforting edges with the soothing tones of a Brickell, and offer a hint that maybe the next generation will get lucky and it’ll only be a soft rain.

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6QnaCGJUdA?feature=oembed&w=500&h=375%5D

• Kris Kristofferson & Rita Coolidge, "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight"

  

  Safe to say there were few couples in country rock more talented (and better looking) than Kris and Rita. Both performed a host of fantastic Dylan covers, both together and apart, from impassioned duets and to poetic solos. In this Farm Aid live performance, the (by then) ex-husband and wife reunite with “I’ll Be Your Baby.” Rita slinks, Kris grins slyly and the electricity between them is palatable. Together the two take the giddy, uneasy neediness out of the original and turn the track on with their combined charm, making Dylan’s plaintive chorus a seduction, rather than a statement. —Hundley

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMVRIUTIrG8

• The Fruit Bats, "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere"

  Eric Johnson’s Fruit Bats do everything well and with a feel-good energy that makes even their ballads sound optimistic. This live version of Dylan’s rollicking country rock track simply makes you feel alive, with perfect vocal harmonies, great players and the kind of music that vibrates with the joy of the people making it. —Hundley

  https://ia802701.us.archive.org/17/items/fruitbats2010-01-26.aud.flac16/fruitbats2010-01-26t14.mp3

• Widespread Panic, "Solid Rock"

  

  And speaking of Dylan’s so-called Christian period… there’s a wealth of great material there, just musically, that’s gone under-covered because non-evangelical rockers are afraid of going there with the lyrics. But Widespread Panic realized that “Solid Rock” is, as its title metaphorically promises, one of Dylan’s great rockers, there for the faithful or faithless taking. —Willman

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmvx6pRXQwA?feature=oembed&w=500&h=375%5D

• Flatt & Scruggs, "Like a Rolling Stone"

  

  Bluegrass pickers have always loved Dylan, as they should. Dylan’s counterculture bona fides did not dissuade traditionalists like Flatt & Scruggs from diving into even his most lyrically idiosyncratic material. How unlikely was it that someone as inscrutable, openly rebellious and even sometimes surly as Bob Dylan was the guy to cure the generation gap? Yet there it was. —Willman

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip9axz9XBPk?feature=oembed&w=500&h=375%5D

Read More About:

• Bob Dylan,
• Byrds,
• Joan Baez,
• Johnny Cash

More from Variety

• 

  Lainey Wilson Signs On as 2024 CMA Awards Co-Host, Joining Returnees Luke Bryan and Peyton Manning
• 

  Annapurna-Remedy Deal Is Smart Solution to Gaming’s Funding Woes
• 

  CMA Awards Nominations Led by Morgan Wallen… Who ‘Had Some Help’ From Post Malone and Their Song of the Summer
• 

  Luke Bryan Reacts to Beyoncé’s CMA Awards Snub: ‘If You’re Gonna Make Country Albums, Come Into Our World and Be Country With Us’
• 

  Netflix vs. YouTube: The Post-Streaming Wars Era’s Archrivalry
• 

  Taylor Swift Beats Beyoncé’s Record for Most Solo MTV VMA Wins

Most Popular

• Luke Bryan Reacts to Beyoncé’s CMA Awards Snub: ‘If You’re Gonna Make Country Albums, Come Into Our World and Be Country With…

  

• Donald Glover Cancels 2024 Childish Gambino Tour Dates After Hospitalization: ‘I Have Surgery Scheduled and Need Time Out to Heal’

  

• ‘Joker 2’ Ending: Was That a ‘Dark Knight’ Connection? Explaining What’s Next for Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker

  

• ‘Love Is Blind' Creator Reveals Why They Didn’t Follow Leo and Brittany After Pods, if They'll Be at Reunion (EXCLUSIVE)

  

• Have We Reached Ryan Murphy Overload?

  

• ‘That ’90s Show’ Canceled After Two Seasons on Netflix, Kurtwood Smith Says: ‘We Will Shop the Show’

  

• Rosie O'Donnell on Becoming a 'Big Sister' to the Menendez Brothers, Believes They Could Be Released From Prison in the ‘Next 30 Days’

  

• Dakota Fanning Got Asked ‘Super-Inappropriate Questions’ as a Child Actor Like ‘How Could You Have Any Friends?’ and Can ‘You Avoid Being a Tabloid…

  

• Why Critically Panned ‘Joker 2’ Could Still Be in the Awards Race for Lady Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix

  

• Toxic Fandom: How Hollywood Is Battling Fans Who Are 'Just Out for Blood' — From Social Media Boot Camps to Superfan Focus Groups

  

Must Read

• Film

  COVER | Sebastian Stan Tells All: Becoming Donald Trump and Starring in 2024’s Most Controversial Movie

  By Andrew Wallenstein 2 weeks

• TV

  Menendez Family Slams Netflix’s ‘Monsters’ as ‘Grotesque’ and ‘Riddled With Mistruths’: ‘The Character Assassination of Erik and Lyke Is Repulsive…

  
• TV

  ‘Yellowstone’ Season 5 Part 2 to Air on CBS After Paramount Network Debut

  
• TV

  50 Cent Sets Diddy Abuse Allegations Docuseries at Netflix: ‘It’s a Complex Narrative Spanning Decades’ (EXCLUSIVE)

  
• Shopping

  ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ Sets Digital and Blu-ray/DVD Release Dates

  

Sign Up for Variety Newsletters

Variety Confidential

A Variety and iHeartRadio Podcast

ncG1vNJzZmiukae2psDYZ5qopV%2BhtrTA0miZnqukYq%2BwroydsKWZnmKwsMLEq6pmbWBiurC%2BxGg%3D