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When you are the offspring of a famous musician, your last name becomes both a burden and a curse.
This is especially true if you decide to also be a musician. While having a famous parent can help you meet the right people, it can also prompt comparison after comparison. As Wolfgang Van Halen, son of Eddie Van Halen, once put it: “Sure, the name does help open some doors, but I don’t think it helps to keep them open.”
Jakob Dylan, son of Bob Dylan, has faced similar challenges and has spent years of his musical career doing what he can to forge his own path away from the shadow of his father’s career. Objectively speaking, he’s done a pretty good job of being successful with his own band, the Wallflowers, which he formed in 1989. Between the band and his solo name, there have been three Grammy wins and tens of millions of albums sold. (Ironically, the Wallflowers won a Grammy for Best Rock Performance by a Duo Or Group With Vocal at the same ceremony his father won Album of the Year in 1997.)
One perk of being Jakob Dylan, of course, is that legendary rock musicians might be more willing to contribute to your albums. If you combine that fact with Dylan’s own singular talent, you’ve got a pretty solid recipe for good music. Below, we’re taking a look at 13 times Dylan and/or the Wallflowers collaborated with classic rock artists.
1. Mike Campbell of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
Not many teenagers get to go on the road with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, but Dylan did when his dad hired them to be his backing band in the mid ’80s. In other words: Dylan got to see up close and personal how a fully formed, touring rock band functioned and it clearly had a last impact on him. Many years after that, guitarist Mike Campbell appeared on the Wallflowers’ 1996 album Bringing Down the Horse. “I played on [‘Sixth Avenue Heartache’],” Campbell recalled to UCR in 2024, “which was really fun and I’ve always been proud of his career.”
2. Adam Duritz of Counting Crows
We’re actually going to stay with “6th Avenue Heartache” for a moment because Campbell is not the only famous guest on it. The voice you hear singing the backing vocals is none other than Adam Duritz of Counting Crows, who basically got the part down immediately. The Wallflowers’ manager called him up one evening and asked if he could come to the studio that night. “I lived up in the Canyons,” Duritz recalled to Stereogum in 2021, “so I just drove down to the studio in the Valley, got a beer, and they played me the song. I asked them to play it again, I grabbed another beer, and then I sang it once or twice. We listened to it, and I left. It was really easy. I heard it and I knew what to do right away. Sometimes you just nail it.”
3. Elvis Costello
When Dylan wrote “Murder 101,” a track that appeared on 2000’s (Breach), he knew what it needed: Elvis Costello‘s voice. “Without him on that song, it sounded like somebody trying to do their take on Elvis Costello,” Dylan explained to Stereogum in 2021. “Rather than avoid that, I thought great, just go get the guy. Don’t run from it, go right at it. … He’s one of those people you can say can sing the phone book and he’ll elevate whatever he’s doing from OK or mundane to good material. I don’t think we ever even played that song. I think it was my own personal enjoyment of being able to sing with Elvis Costello.”
4. Frank Black of Pixies
There’s something kind of sweet about Dylan having a fellow figure from the ’90s alternative rock boom be a guest on “Letters From the Wasteland” from (Breach). We’re speaking about Frank Black of Pixies, who sang backing vocals on the track.
5. Mitchell Froom of Crowded House
Mitchell Froom of Crowded House is the man responsible for arranging the horns on (Breach). Froom, interestingly, also worked on Bob Dylan’s 1988 album Down in the Groove, playing keyboards on a song called “Had a Dream About You, Baby.”
6. Mike McCready of Pearl Jam
Here’s another example of a fellow ’90s rocker lending Dylan a hand. For 2002’s Red Letter Days it came in the form of Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready, who played on several of the album’s songs. Keeping the Pearl Jam connection going, the Wallflowers enlisted producer Brenden O’Brien, who worked on a number of Pearl Jam releases, for their next album, 2005’s Rebel, Sweetheart.
7. Mick Jones of the Clash
Dylan was literally a kid when he first heard he music of the Clash, and it immediately spoke to him. “I could see that they were obviously descendants of so much great music and of course the Beatles in the way they put songs together,” he told Acoustic Guitar magazine in 2010. “I still play that Telecaster because of Joe Strummer. That’s the only explanation.” In 2012, Mick Jones of the Clash appeared on two songs from the Wallflowers’ album Glad All Over, “Misfits and Lovers” and “Reboot the Mission.”
8. Jack Irons of Red Hot Chili Peppers and Pearl Jam
But wait there’s more. If you listened to the above track you may have noticed Dylan sing “welcome Jack, the new drummer / he jammed with the mighty Joe Strummer.” That’s a clear a reference to the album’s drummer, Jack Irons, a founding member of Red Hot Chili Peppers and a member of Pearl Jam for a stint in the mid ’90s. “They treated me really nicely,” Irons said of the experience to Rolling Stone in 2022. “I always felt like a guest, in a sense. I was a band member, but those guys had been in a band for years, with all the ups and downs that comes with that. I was a guest. I enjoyed our creative process in the studio, for sure.”
9. Beck
The next five entries are not technically Wallflowers releases — they’re from a soundtrack album Dylan made in 2019 called Echo in the Canyon, which accompanied a documentary film about the music of Laurel Canyon, California in the ’60s. For it, Dylan collaborated with a number of famous rock friends. Beck joined him for a rendition of Pete Seeger‘s “The Bells of Rhymney,” made famous by the Byrds in 1965.
10. Neil Young
11. Stephen Stills
12. Eric Clapton
13. Josh Homme
