Bob Dylan’s Career Changed Forever When He Heard a Cover of 1 of His Songs

Bob Dylan began his career as a protest singer, but his musical trajectory changed when he heard The Byrds cover one of his songs. The band took a different approach to the cover than Dylan had, and suddenly, a world of possibility opened to him. A member of Dylan’s set recalled how Dylan reacted when he heard the cover. 

He began his career as a folk singer

When Dylan moved to New York to pursue music, he strictly played acoustic songs. His idol was Woody Guthrie, and he was modeling his career off of his. He didn’t even own an electric guitar. When he enrolled at the University of Minnesota, he traded in the instrument for an acoustic guitar, figuring that this would be more useful to him.

“First thing I did was go trade in my electric guitar, which would have been useless to me, for a double-O Martin acoustic,” he wrote in his memoir Chronicles: Volume One. “The man at the store traded me even and I left carrying the guitar in its case. I would play this guitar for the next couple of years or so.”

He continued to play this type of music on his first few albums. 

Bob Dylan was shocked when The Byrds covered his song

By the mid-1960s, Dylan was ready to move away from protest music. He said he had never considered himself a protest singer and was ready for a change in style. In 1965, he received a career breakthrough from California band The Byrds.

The band recorded a number of Dylan covers for their debut album Mr. Tambourine Man. They began working on the covers when David Crosby received a copy of a failed demo of “Mr. Tambourine Man.” They were a folk rock band and recorded the song with electric instruments. Dylan received an advanced copy and could hardly believe what he was hearing.

“He was stunned,” a member of his set said, per Rolling Stone. “He ran around saying, ‘F***in wild!’ For Bob, it was like the Animals rocking ‘House of the Rising Sun’ all over again. Rock worked.”

Dylan went into the studio to record his album Bringing It All Back Home, which featured him backed by an electric band. 

The Byrds’ cover of ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ changed Bob Dylan’s career

The shift from acoustic to electric did not go over well with some of his fans; he was famously booed at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival for bringing out an electric band. Despite this, the album became Dylan’s first to break into the US Top 10 and eventually became his first to make over $1 million.

By going electric, Dylan was able to expand his fans beyond lovers of folk music and reach a more mainstream audience. He became one of the preeminent artists of the century because of this. Hearing The Byrds’ electric cover of his song opened Dylan up to the possibility of his music. It completely changed the trajectory of his career.