Steve Jobs' Favorite Bob Dylan Song: "One Too Many Mornings"

The next time someone mocks your all-consuming obsession with Bob Dylan, you can now say "Let me tell you about another Bob Dylan fanatic — a different-thinking kid named Steve Jobs."

With the release of Walter Isaacson's epic, authorized, eponymous biography of Jobs, we are learning much about the man that had only been hinted at before, including his love of Dylan.

A Jobs/Dylan summary from Rolling Stone detailed that Jobs and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak first bonded over their love of Dylan's music. They would go on expeditions to Berkeley to track down reel-to-reel Dylan bootlegs and would spend hours listening dissecting his lyrics. This, said Jobs, "struck chords of creative thinking." Well put.

We also learn that Jobs and Dylan met a couple of times, first in 2004 when Dylan's tour rolled into  Palo Alto, CA.

On their second meeting, Jobs told Dylan his favorite song of his was "One Too Many Mornings," a forlorn ballad from his 1964 The Times They Are A-Changin' LP, and Dylan played it for him in concert that night.




Dylan has revisited "One Too Many Mornings" again and again throughout his career. He did an epic version on his 1966 tour with The Hawks (later The Band) with a nice support vocal from Rick Danko on the word "behind."

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A few years later, a gum-chewing Dylan took a crack at the tune with his pal Johnny Cash during the sessions for Nashville Skyline, which also produced their wonderful album-opening duet of "Girl from the North Country."



Dylan did a sweet version during the final weary leg of the Rolling Thunder Revue tour in 1976, captured on the underrated Hard Rain live record and film.



Like Jobs and Dylan, "One Too Many Mornings" was done by Joan Baez. Jobs earned his status as a hall-of-fame Zimmermaniac by dating Baez in 1982, when he was 27 and she was a cougarish 41.

She also supposedly had a fling with John Lennon during the height of Beatlemania in the mid-60s, making her the only person to TCB with the three most creative people of the last 50 years. Maybe Isaacson should do a book about her next.



One question remains: of the many versions of "One Too Many Mornings," which one was Jobs' favorite? I guess the answer is blowin' in the wind.

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