"Together" With Bob Dylan: His Greatest Collaborations

For Douglas Brinkley's feature "Bob Dylan's America," check out our new issue, on stands now.

All but one of the tracks on Bob Dylan's new album Together Through Life are co-written with Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter. It's the most help he's ever had on a single album, but hardly the first time Dylan has written with a partner. Over the past 45 years he's shared credit with Tom Petty, Rick Danko, Sam Shepard, Carole Bayer Sager and even Gene Simmons and Michael Bolton. Here are the stories behind five of those collaborations — click here to listen along:

"Hurricane" (with Jacques Levy)
Dylan teamed up with New York play director and songwriter Jacques Levy to write most of the songs on 1975's Desire. Dylan was inspired to write "Hurricane" after reading Rubin "Hurricane" Carter's memoir The Sixteenth Round, though he struggled with the lyrics since he hadn't composed many topical songs since the early 1960s. Levy's experience with playwriting proved to be an asset. "Bob wasn't sure he could write a song," Levy told Dylan biographer Clinton Heylin. "He was just filled with all these feelings about the Hurricane. The beginning of the song is like stage directions. 'Pistol shots ring out in a bar-room night.' " The tune is a classic, but Levy and Dylan got several of the facts about the case wrong and were later sued by one of the people mentioned in the song.

"Silvio" (with Robert Hunter)
During rehearsals for Dylan and the Grateful Dead's 1987 stadium tour, Robert Hunter supplied Dylan with the lyrics to this barn barner — which is the clear highlight of 1988's Down In The Groove. It wasn't a hit, but Dylan treated it like it was, playing it live 595 times between 1988 and 2004.