What was Bob Dylan’s last number one single?
Believe it or not, but towering songsmith Bob Dylan has never topped the Billboard Hot 100 charts.
Despite boasting one of the most lauded and pored over bodies of work in popular music, the folk and rock icon has never shared a commercial success like many of his 1960s peers. No record-breaking singles achievements or flurry of pop smashes à la The Beatles or The Rolling Stones, but a glittering oeuvre of poetry that touched nigh on everybody post rock and roll.
He got close. Just as the folkies were screaming blue murder at his electric heresy, ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ from 1965’s Highway 61 Revisited scored Dylan the highest Hot 100 climber he’d ever unleashed, peaking at number two but just kept off the top spot by The Beatles’ ‘Help!’. His work has topped the charts via other artists; however, The Byrds’ take on ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ topped the US singles chart the same year and stood as one of the folk rock outfit’s defining songs.
It’s the Billboard 200 where Dylan fares a little better, Planet Waves, Blood on the Tracks, Desire, Together Through Life, and Modern Times all topping the US album charts. It’s of little surprise. Dylan isn’t one to reel off singles for the sake of pop immediacy, and many of his most loved numbers enjoy greater contextual light when sat among the journey his records offer.
Chart success came much later in Dylan’s career, peaking at number one on one of Billboard’s many rankings from a wholly unlikely song in Dylan’s deep, lyrical vault.
So, what was Dylan’s last number one?
Long songs need not impede pop success, a fact Dylan demonstrated with ‘Like a Rolling Stone’s surprise chart topping, but a 16-minute cultural odyssey thematically centred on the assassination of President John F Kennedy gleaning a number one must have been a surprise to the man himself.
Leading 2020’s Rough and Rowdy Ways, ‘Murder Most Foul’ gifted his fans his longest song yet, beating 1997’s ‘Highlands’ by a solid 20-odd seconds. It’s classic Dylan, weaving and meandering across a verbal scrawl of pop references and cultural musings, trying to make sense of a horrific blast of political violence and generational trauma, while clamouring for a shimmer of solidarity among its eclectic name-checked heroes and pioneers.
“I don’t think of ‘Murder Most Foul’ as a glorification of the past or some kind of send-off to a lost age,” Dylan told The New York Times at the time. “It speaks to me in the moment. It always did, especially when I was writing the lyrics out.”
It wasn’t just dedicated fans who took to ‘Murder Most Foul’. Touching a nerve amid its drop during the depths of the Pandemic, the totemic stature that echoed the world’s upend with JFK’s bloody end in Dallas would win Dylan big, shooting to the top of Billboard’s Rock Digital Song Sales that year, the first and last time Dylan was ever able to nab a US number one in his entire career.
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