Why Bob Dylan couldn’t stand “the greatest rock and roll band” covering his songs
Some artists reach a point where they’re treated as untouchable. Their reputation towers above the music itself, built on influence, mythology, and years of critical acclaim until they seem to exist in a rarified realm a few floors above everyone else. In this heroic sphere, just a few yards shy of Elysium, songs acquire an almost sacred status, and the thought of reinterpreting one can seem too daunting to bother.
Somehow, Bob Dylan isn’t one of those stars.
Dylan may have become the voice of a generation in more than just a tokenistic manner, with a legion of songs that rewrote the rules in the 1960s, inspiring The Beatles to heightened levels of success, and even lavishing himself with a Nobel Prize along the way, but his position isn’t one of those too holy to touch. No, Dylan’s work has been reproduced, repackaged and even remixed countless times.
From The Byrds to Guns N’ Roses, from Jimi Hendrix to Timothée Chalamet and even Eastenders actor Tom Watt, Dylan’s songs have been routinely covered over the years. You wouldn’t bother when it comes to ‘A Day In The Life’ or ‘Kashmir’, but 375 separate artists have taken an official stab at ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’.
That’s not down to a lack of reverence or respect, but because, in a true folk sense, Dylan’s tracks were crafted to be passed on. After all, he said that the highest purpose of art is to inspire others, and in the hand-me-down tradition of the folk genre, he’ll now be doing that until guitars fall out of tune.
Along the way, there have been some covers that Dylan adored. And there have been some he hated. too. But there was one band whose desperation to cover his work seemingly irked the great songwriter enough to have him lambast their attempts to do so, and that band is The Rolling Stones.
It comes with great irony, therefore, that Dylan has tremendous respect for the band. In fact, he once lauded them with the highest praise of all, proclaiming, “The Rolling Stones are truly the greatest rock and roll band in the world and always will be. The last too.”
As if that wasn’t enough, the often reticent Dylan even went on to say, “Everything that came after them, metal, rap, punk, new wave, pop-rock, you name it… you can trace it all back to The Rolling Stones. They were the first and the last and no one’s ever done it better.”
However, immense respect is one thing; entrusting them with an apt interpretation of your own work is quite another. You may well love your best friend, but that doesn’t mean you’d be happy for them to get behind the wheel of your new car.
The legacy of Dylan’s gripe with the Stones tackling his songs starts before either of them even came to fruition. As Dylan was growing up, the bluesy seeds of rock ‘n’ roll were the mainstay on American radio. One of the greatest proponents of this was the legendary Howlin’ Wolf. While his rollicking ways might have proved spiritually reverberating merely coming through the radio waves, seeing him live was another experience altogether.
As Dylan once told Rolling Stone, “Howlin’ Wolf, to me, was the greatest live act, because he did not have to move a finger when he performed – if that’s what you’d call it, ‘performing.’” As fellow bluesman Cub Koda testified, “No one could match Howlin’ Wolf for the singular ability to rock the house down to the foundation while simultaneously scaring its patrons out of its wits.” And he did all this without barely moving a muscle.
The song Bob Dylan thought The Rolling Stones ruined
Howlin’ Wolf might have had emerging rocky elements in the welter of his sound, but for the most part, he rattled the rafters while remaining true to the central tenets of the blues. He sat there, and he delivered something unmistakable. Dylan did the same when he rallied against / in tune with the British Invasion, turned away from the near-Amish standards of folk and famously plugged in.
It wasn’t his first electric track, but 1965’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ was his most frenetically thrust middle finger as he unapologetically embraced charged particles. As musician and producer Paul Rothchild once said, the song challenged the supremacy of what was washing ashore from the far side of the pond. “What I realised when I was sitting there is that one of us – one of the so-called Village hipsters – was making music that could compete with them – The Beatles, and The Stones, and the Dave Clark Five – without sacrificing any of the integrity of folk music or the power of rock ‘n’ roll.”
However, when The Rolling Stones eventually went on to tackle the track, Dylan clearly thought that they sullied the integrity of the song’s folk core. “I love Mick Jagger. I mean, I go back a long ways with him, and I always wish him the best,” he said. “But to see him jumping around like he does – I don’t give a shit in what age, from Altamont to RFK Stadium – you don’t have to do that, man.”
Frenzied energy might go along great with the hoo-hoo’s of ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, but the stock-still bludgeon of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ is what makes it so beautifully disdainful. It’s a howlin’ roar, not a jumpin’ jack. Jagger’s take divorced the song from this tradition, and Dylan wasn’t happy about that.
As the Minnesotan singer opined, “It’s still hipper and cooler to be Ray Charles, sitting at the piano, not moving shit and still getting across, you know? Pushing rhythm and soul across. It’s got nothing to do with jumping around. I mean, what could it possibly have to do with jumping around?”
This all came to the fore one day when The Rolling Stones and Dylan happened to be on the same bill in Montpellier in the South of France. As Black Crowes frontman Chris Robinson recalled on the Howard Stern show, the Stones asked Dylan to join them on stage, but things went awry. “They go around to the chorus and then they come up to Bob’s turn,” Robinson explained.
Continuing, “Bob goes to the mic and doesn’t sing anything. And you see them look around and they’re like, ‘Okay.’ Cos it’s like you missed a turn at a roundabout and you gotta go all the way back around. So, they go all the way around again…and he just leans into the mic and turns away.”
Dylan eventually sang a few words before walking off stage. As he left, he offered them up the ultimate ‘You’ll go your way, and I’ll go mine’ gesture. According to Robinson, as soon as he got to the side of the stage, he looked back at The Stones, shouted, “Fuck you,” and gave them the finger. It said in no uncertain terms, ‘Now you don’t talk so loud’.
“It was the best fucking concert I’ve ever seen in my life, it’s incredible. I can see Keith, he goes ‘Don’t be like that, Bob!’” Robinson concludes with a shit-eating grin. But the debacle was symptomatic of a fundamental difference that not even immense mutual respect could bridge.
You can check out the audio recording of the track below, and it’s clear that the two artists were working from entirely different hymn sheets. As Robinson put it: “The Stones don’t jam; they don’t deviate […] they go around the chorus, and then they come up to Bob’s turn.”
The problem is that Dylan doesn’t really operate in terms of turns. His songs drift, bend, and follow their own internal logic. Which explains the anomaly that this piece began with: Dylan might be endlessly respected, but it’s the freeform, folk magic of his songs that have allowed them to be so effortlessly reinterpreted by so many. Just don’t do it while fucking jumping about or with the creator himself on the stage.
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