Credit: Far Out / Alamy / Steve Kalinsky

The Bob Dylan song Bono absolutely butchered

Wed 15 April 2026 18:45, UK

There’s a certain rhythm that comes with every U2 show once Bono gets in front of the microphone.

He wouldn’t say that he is the best singer in the world by any means, but when you listen to his voice soaring over top of those cascading guitars, you’re hearing someone who’s still searching for that sense of meaning, just like he did when he was first working on The Joshua Tree all those years ago. And while Bono is able to treat every song like it’s a hymn, that doesn’t mean that he passes with flying colours every single time he decides to fly blind behind the microphone.

Then again, there’s a certain fluidity to the way that all U2 songs are constructed. Compared to every other studio album they worked on, Bono felt that the sole purpose was to see all of their songs come to life onstage, whether that was stretching a song out until he got every ounce of emotion out of it or tipping his hat to some of the greatest rock and roll stars that had come before for a few seconds.

And for any band, standing face to face with someone like Bob Dylan would have been enough to satisfy them for the rest of their lives. Dylan was like a genius among men most of the time, but even when you look at him up to the present day, he was never trying to be a mythical figure or anything. He was a drifter in the truest sense of the word, and it was up to his audience to make sense of what he was saying all the time.

But despite having a massive reverence for Dylan, Bono remembered getting a little bit of cold feet when he actually started working with him. Anyone could have managed to tear through a chorus or two of ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ as a goof, but when working with Dylan in the 1980s for a live version of ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, Bono had to admit that he completely failed at trying to capture the same energy that he felt during U2 shows.

Granted, it would have been a bit more hopeful had he found the right words, saying, “Bob Dylan asked us, ‘You want to go onstage?’ I’d been learning to improvise onstage, and he said, ‘Do you know ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’?’, and I said, ‘I think so.’ I didn’t. I just walked out and could see that it was our home crowd in Ireland. You could see that [I] go down in flames. And Dylan was generous about it. He said, ‘Well, I make ‘em up all the time.’”

No one could blame Bono for wanting to bring something to the table, but when it comes to Dylan’s work, that’s one of the few things that you don’t really need to touch. Even though it’s one thing for him to change the words to ‘All Along the Watchtower’ on Rattle and Hum because it suited the moment better, it gets a bit more questionable when you’re trying to improvise a song on the spot at Dylan’s own gig.

If anything, Bono could have benefited from taking a few cues out of Tom Petty’s playbook when he performed with Dylan. Compared to working with The Band back in his earliest days, the Heartbreakers seemed to know every single Dylan tune like the back of their hand, and it wasn’t out of the question for them to work a song out on the spot and still make it sound great while barely grasping what the chords were.

Bono hadn’t quite reached that level yet, but the fact that he had the guts to even step out onstage with an icon like that showed everyone what he wanted out of rock and roll. He didn’t think that he was ever going to reach Dylan’s level, but he was going to try everything he could to make sure that he went down in history quoting his heart the same way that people like Dylan did.