The Jimi Hendrix Experience | All Along The Watchtower
“All Along the Watchtower” is a song written and recorded by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. The song, which has been included on most of Dylan’s greatest hits compilations, initially appeared on his 1967 album John Wesley Harding. Over the past 35 years, he has performed it in concert more than any of his other songs. Different versions appear on four of Dylan’s live albums.
Covered by numerous artists in various genres, “All Along the Watchtower” is strongly identified with the interpretation Jimi Hendrix recorded for Electric Ladyland with the Jimi Hendrix Experience. The Hendrix version, released six months after Dylan’s original recording, became a Top 10 single in 1968 and was ranked 48th in Rolling Stone magazine’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.
Dylan wrote “All Along the Watchtower” along with the other songs on John Wesley Harding over the year or so following his motorcycle accident in the summer of 1966. His recuperation from the accident, which occurred near his home in Woodstock, New York, enabled Dylan to escape the excesses of touring and make a dramatic turnaround in his lifestyle. With one child born in early 1966 and another in mid-1967, he settled into family life and even took a growing interest in the Bible, as reflected in the album’s Biblical allusions, particularly in songs such as “All Along the Watchtower”, “Dear Landlord”, “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine” and “The Wicked Messenger”.
Several reviewers have pointed out that the lyrics in “All Along the Watchtower” echo lines in the Book of Isaiah, Chapter 21, verses 5-9:
Prepare the table, watch in the watchtower, eat, drink: arise ye princes, and prepare the shield./For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth./And he saw a chariot with a couple of horsemen, a chariot of asses, and a chariot of camels; and he hearkened diligently with much heed./…And, behold, here cometh a chariot of men, with a couple of horsemen. And he answered and said, Babylon is fallen, is fallen, and all the graven images of her gods he hath broken unto the ground.[11][12]The unusual structure of the narrative was remarked on by English Literature professor Christopher Ricks, who commented that “All Along the Watchtower” is an example of Dylan’s audacity at manipulating chronological time: “at the conclusion of the last verse, it is as if the song bizarrely begins at last, and as if the myth began again.”
Critics have described Dylan’s version as a masterpiece of understatement. In Andy Gill’s words: “In Dylan’s version of the song, it’s the barrenness of the scenario which grips, the high haunting harmonica and simple forward motion of the riff carrying understated implications of cataclysm; as subsequently recorded by Jimi Hendrix, … that cataclysm is rendered scarily palpable through the dervish whirls of guitar.”
The Jimi Hendrix Experience
The Jimi Hendrix Experience began to record their cover version of Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” on January 21, 1968, at Olympic Studios in London. According to engineer Andy Johns, Jimi Hendrix had been given a tape of Dylan’s recording by publicist Michael Goldstein, who worked for Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman. “(Hendrix) came in with these Dylan tapes and we all heard them for the first time in the studio”, recalled Johns. According to Hendrix’s regular engineer Eddie Kramer, the guitarist cut a large number of takes on the first day, shouting chord changes at Dave Mason who had appeared at the session and played guitar. Halfway through the session, bass player Noel Redding became dissatisfied with the proceedings and left. Mason then took over on bass. According to Kramer, the final bass part was played by Hendrix himself. Kramer and Chas Chandler mixed the first version of “All Along The Watchtower” on January 26, but Hendrix was quickly dissatisfied with the result and went on re-recording and overdubbing guitar parts during June, July, and August at the Record Plant studio in New York. Engineer Tony Bongiovi has described Hendrix becoming increasingly dissatisfied as the song progressed, overdubbing more and more guitar parts, moving the master tape from a four-track to a twelve-track to a sixteen-track machine. Bongiovi recalled, “Recording these new ideas meant he would have to erase something. In the weeks prior to the mixing, we had already recorded a number of overdubs, wiping track after track. [Hendrix] kept saying, ‘I think I hear it a little bit differently.’” The finished version was released on the album Electric Ladyland in September 1968. The single reached number five in the British charts, and number 20 on the Billboard chart, Hendrix’s only top 20 / top 40 entry there. The song also had the #5 spot on Guitar World’s 100 Greatest Guitar Solos.
Dylan has described his reaction to hearing Hendrix’s version: “It overwhelmed me, really. He had such talent, he could find things inside a song and vigorously develop them. He found things that other people wouldn’t think of finding in there. He probably improved upon it by the spaces he was using. I took license with the song from his version, actually, and continue to do it to this day.” In the booklet accompanying his Biograph album, Dylan said: “I liked Jimi Hendrix’s record of this and ever since he died I’ve been doing it that way… Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it’s a tribute to him in some kind of way.”
- Chapter X in the DC limited comic book series Watchmen by Moore and Gibbons is titled “Two Riders Were Approaching” with a brief excerpt of the lyrics at the end of the chapter, attributed to Bob Dylan. In the film adaptation, Hendrix’s cover plays during the same scene.
- In the 2000 film Hamlet, the grave digger can be heard softly singing a few lines of the song shortly before Ophelia’s funeral.
- In the 4-part Marvel Comics limited series Venom: Carnage Unleashed (1995), each of the title chapters is named after a line from the first verse of the song.
- “All Along the Watchtower” is one of seven Dylan songs whose lyrics were reset for soprano and piano (or orchestra) by John Corigliano for his song cycle Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan
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There must be some kind of way out of here
Said the joker to the thief
There’s too much confusion
I can’t get no relief
Business men they drink my wine
Plowmen dig my earth
None will level on the wine
Nobody of it is worth
No reason to get exited
The thief he kindly spoke
There are many here among us
Who feel that life is but a joke
But you and I we’ve been through that
And this is not our fate
So let us talk falsely now
The hour’s getting late
All along the watchtower
The princess kept the view
While all the women came
And went bare feet servants too
Outside in the cold distance
A wild cat did growl
Two riders were approaching
And the wind began to howl
