Other artists sing Dylan’s songs better than him

At the start of the new Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, Dylan’s protest-singer mentor Pete Seeger implores him not to swap his trusty acoustic for a newfangled Fender Stratocaster electric. ‘A good song can get the job done without the frills,’ says Seeger – who, for all his progressive views, wasn’t very hip to the new sound of rock ’n’ roll.

‘Yeah, but sometimes they sound really good,’ retorts Dylan. It’s a brief exchange, but it shows how the times were indeed a-changin’ – and Dylan’s own music with them. Comercially, abandonment of his folkie roots in search of his inner Rolling Stone was to prove an astute decision. His debut electric single, ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, became his first single to chart in the US. But, as the film shows, Dylan’s old coffee-house fanbase was outraged. At his live electric debut at Newport Folk Festival in 1965, the more Luddite folkies threw punches backstage. The following year, at Manchester Free Trade Hall, he was famously heckled as a ‘Judas’.

The merits of Dylan’s musical apostasy have been debated ever since, and courtesy of Timothée Chalamet’s strong performance, a fresh cohort of Dylan converts will doubtless now be comparing his acoustic and electric outputs on Spotify. The question of which is actually better – stripped-down early acoustic classics like ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, or poppy electric hits such as ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ – is probably best left to one of those Q Magazine readers’ polls beloved of rock obsessives.

But to get an idea of which format proved most popular, perhaps the best clue lies not in Dylan’s own output at all. Instead, it’s in the number of cover versions of his songs that went down better than the acoustic originals. Take, for example, ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, which Dylan originally recorded for the acoustic side of his album Bringing It All Back Home. History regards it as a classic in its own right – the typewritten draft lyrics sold for £400,000 at auction a week ago. But it’s the Byrds’ electric version which most people remember best. Courtesy of Byrds’ guitarist Roger McGuinn’s jingle-jangling 12-string electric Rickenbacker, it topped the US Billboard chart and helped establish the Byrds as a bulwark to the Beatles-led British invasion. Then there’s Jimi Hendrix’s version of ‘All Along the Watchtower’, which so eclipsed Dylan’s acoustic original that many people assume it to be one of Hendrix’s own creations.

Part of this, of course, is merely testimony to Dylan’s prodigious talents as a songwriter. It also shows, though, that however much Pete Seeger might have liked Dylan’s acoustic originals, other musicians saw room for improvement in his songs by adding their own frills. After all, Dylan’s nasal, hobo voice is an acquired taste, and the solo acoustic strumming format is not for everyone. Indeed, Seeger learned this for himself when the Byrds’ rock version of his anti-war anthem ‘Turn! Turn! Turn!’ topped the Billboard chart.

Yet the list of good Dylan covers goes way beyond that. After the Beatles, he is the most covered recording artist of all time, with more than 600 musicians creating nearly 1,500 versions of his songs, including albums devoted to covers of his work. Take, for example, the black songstress Odetta Holmes, whose 1965 album Odetta Sings Dylan contains no end of gems. There’s a marvellous, soulful version of ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’’, complete with mesmeric guitar by Dylan’s fellow Greenwich Village luminary Bruce Langhorne (the real-life Mr Tambourine Man of Dylan’s song).

Similarly sublime is Odetta’s version of Dylan’s 1962 acoustic track ‘Tomorrow Is a Long Time’, which was also covered by more than 20 others, including Joan Baez, Nick Drake, and Elvis Presley himself. Having the King cover your song was a big honour, the musical equivalent of a Royal Warrant of Appointment. Yet Dylan himself only recorded the original as a scratchy demo, and, like much of his other acoustic output, it’s basically just raw material for others to work with.

Some say this is simply because Dylan isn’t actually that good a guitarist, although as an amateur acoustic player myself, I’d dispute that. No, Dylan is not an unplugged virtuoso like Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page or Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham. But listen to him on solo songs like ‘Baby, Let Me Follow You Down’ – itself a blues cover – and you still sense a maestro’s presence.

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In any event, Dylan himself is relaxed about other artists taking his own songs and making them better. For one thing, it brings him royalties, and draws listeners to his originals. For another, he is fond of some of them. He once described Presley’s version of ‘Tomorrow Is a Long Time’ as ‘the one recording I treasure the most’. And his concert version of ‘All Along the Watchtower’ sounds more like the Hendrix version than his own – so much so that it’s been described as a ‘cover of a cover’.

It does, however, lend weight to the biopic’s premise that if you were a young, ambitious musician in the early 1960s, there was a choice to be had. Either ditch the acoustic and alienate the faithful, or stay pure and risk being seen as a bit outdated, à la Pete Seeger. The film drives this point home with archive footage of Seeger playing the banjo on a low-budget black-and-white TV folk show, where he resembles an extra from The Waltons.

Seeger, of course, was already famous in his own right, thanks partly to his activism, which saw him hauled before the McCarthy hearings in the 1950s. But there’s an arguable case that staying unplugged lowered the profile of some of the other great guitarists of Dylan’s era. As a young guitarist 30 years ago, I remember my tutor introducing me to the work of Bert Jansch and Davey Graham, two British names from the Soho folk-blues clubs. Both had impeccable beatnik cool, busking their way round Morocco, and both were legends in their era. Graham’s acoustic tour de force ‘Anji’ was the ‘Stairway to Heaven’ of its day, which every folkie sought to master, and was covered by Paul Simon on Sounds of Silence. Jansch’s ‘Black Waterside’ is the basis for ‘Black Mountain Side’ on Led Zeppelin’s debut album.

Yet when I first started learning their remarkable back catalogues, I’d never heard of either of them, despite being well-acquainted with 1960s music from pub and student union jukeboxes. They’d become – to younger generations anyway – complete unknowns. Indeed, it wasn’t really until the early 1990s that they were re-appreciated, courtesy of Acoustic Routes, a BBC documentary presented by Billy Connolly, whose own stage career began as a folk guitarist. Perhaps the pair just never sought fame enough: heroin use also blighted Graham’s career for a time, and booze did the same for Jansch’s. I do wonder, though, whether things might have been different had they – like Dylan – gone more for the frills as well.