Credit: Bent Rej

The single greatest highlight of Bob Dylan’s career was a cover: “The one recording I treasure the most”

Mon 27 October 2025 9:53, UK

Think about the greatest musician of the modern age, and you’d be hard-pressed to come up with a better, more agile, creative and potent lyricist than Bob Dylan.

A true original, Dylan broke into the collective consciousness with a sense of self that was difficult not to fall in love with. Never threatening to turn his back on his own creative endeavour, he rejected every path laid out for him. It made him one of the most iconic musicians of the last century and arguably one of the most important to ever grace the earth. Such importance does come with its drawbacks, though.

Dylan was routinely cited as “the voice of a generation” when he started releasing his folk songs that captured the mindset of New York’s Greenwich Village. The smoky coffeehouses were full of beatnik poets and struggling musicians with a view to changing the world. Dylan’s dissent and deconstruction of the world around him made him the perfect figurehead for the explosion of folk into the pop scene. But another drawback was the near-constant imitation he faced.

Considering the difficulty he had with artists like Neil Young and John Lennon apparently copying his style, it’s remarkable that one of his most treasured moments came via a cover song.

Folk music might have subjected Bob Dylan to worldwide success in the early 1960s, but his first musical love was rock ‘n’ roll. Having learned the piano as his first instrument from a young age, a teenage Dylan formed a school band, The Golden Chords, wherein he emulated his early rock heroes, Little Richard and Elvis Presley.

Subsequently, Dylan became enamoured with the solo folk stylings of Woody Guthrie and paved his way to fame in the fertile streets of New York City. However, Dylan’s days as a pure folk artist were numbered. In the mid-1960s, he returned to his roots in rock, folding electric guitar runs into one side of the March 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home. A few months later, Dylan famously alienated a gathering of folkies at the Newport Folk Festival by “going electric.”

In 1966, the year of Dylan encountered the “highlight of” his “career.” Intriguingly, this wasn’t the rave response to his folk-rock masterpiece of that year, Blonde on Blonde, but a song recorded by Elvis Presley. In May 1966, Presley released a cover of one of Dylan’s songs, ‘Tomorrow Is a Long Time’.

“Elvis Presley recorded a song of mine. That’s the one recording I treasure the most,” Dylan once told Rolling Stone. “It was called ‘Tomorrow Is A Long Time.’ I wrote it but never recorded it.”

In 1987, on the tenth anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death, Dylan told US magazine: “When I first heard Elvis’ voice, I just knew that I wasn’t going to work for anybody, and nobody was going to be my boss. He is the deity supreme of rock ‘n’ roll religion as it exists in today’s form. Hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail.”

Despite Dylan’s unbound reverence for the King, he never met him, despite once having the opportunity. “I never met Elvis,” he told Rolling Stone in 2009. “I never met Elvis because I didn’t want to meet Elvis. Elvis was in his Sixties movie period, and he was just crankin’ ’em out and knockin’ ’em off, one after another. And Elvis had kind of fallen out of favour in the ’60s. He didn’t really come back until, whatever was it, ’68?”

Dylan and his friend George Harrison had the chance to collaborate with Presley in the early 1970s, but they declined. Sadly, by this time, Presley’s career had taken a nosedive amid mental health and addiction struggles. “I don’t know if I would have wanted to see Elvis like that,” Dylan added. “I wanted to see the powerful, mystical Elvis that had crash-landed from a burning star onto American soil. The Elvis that was bursting with life. That’s the Elvis that inspired us to all the possibilities of life. And that Elvis was gone, had left the building.”

Listen to Elvis Presley’s version of ‘Tomorrow Is a Long Time’ below.