"All Along the Watchtower" is a song by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan from his eighth studio album, John Wesley Harding (1967). The song was written by Dylan and produced by Bob Johnston. The song's lyrics, which in its original version contain twelve lines, feature a conversation between a joker and a thief. The song has been subject to various interpretations; some reviewers have noted that it echoes lines in the Book of Isaiah, Chapter 21, verses 5–9. Dylan has released several different live performances, and versions of the song are included on some of his subsequent greatest hits compilations.
Covered by numerous artists, "All Along the Watchtower" is strongly identified with the interpretation Jimi Hendrix recorded with the Jimi Hendrix Experience for its third studio album, Electric Ladyland (1968). The Hendrix version, released six months after Dylan's original recording, became a Top 20 single in 1968, received a Grammy Hall of Fame award in 2001, and was ranked 48th in Rolling Stone magazine's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time in 2004 (40th in the 2021 version). Dylan first played the song live in concert on the Bob Dylan and the Band 1974 Tour, his first tour since 1966. His live performances have been influenced by Hendrix's cover, to the extent that they have been called covers of a cover. Dylan has performed the song live more than any of his others, with over 2,250 recitals.
Bob Dylan original version
Background and recording
Following a motorcycle accident in July 1966, Dylan spent the next 18 months recuperating at his home in Woodstock and writing songs. According to Dylan biographer Clinton Heylin, all the songs for John Wesley Harding, Dylan's eighth studio album, were written and recorded during a six-week period at the end of 1967. Dylan has claimed that he thought of the song during a thunderstorm. He recorded "All Along the Watchtower" on November 6, 1967, at Columbia Studio A in Nashville, Tennessee, Accompanying Dylan, who played acoustic guitar and harmonica, were two Nashville veterans from the Blonde on Blonde sessions: Charlie McCoy on bass guitar and Kenneth Buttrey on drums. The producer was Bob Johnston, who produced Dylan's two previous albums, Highway 61 Revisited in 1965 and Blonde on Blonde in 1966, and the sound engineer was Charlie Bragg.
The final version of "All Along the Watchtower" resulted from two different takes during the second of three John Wesley Harding sessions. The session opened with five takes of the song, the third and fifth of which were spliced to create the album track. According to Gray, as with most of the album's selections, the song is a dark, sparse work that stands in stark contrast with Dylan's previous recordings of the mid-1960s.
Composition and lyrical interpretation
Music
Musicologist Wilfrid Mellers, noting the biblical references in "All Along the Watchtower", wrote that the song "heroically confronts, in grandly swinging Aeolian melody, deeply oscillating bass and thrusting rhythm, the chaos of fallen man". Mellers considered that the sense of threat expressed in the lyrics was "not exterior to the tune which remains, in its noble arches over its gravely descending bass, unruffled".
Musicology scholar Albin Zak finds a strong blues influence in the song which Dylan developed from his affinity for the blues of Robert Johnson and quotes Dylan's dedication in Writings and Drawings by Bob Dylan: "To the magnificent Woody Guthrie and Robert Johnson who sparked it off and to the great wondrous melodies spirit which covereth the oneness of us all." Zak sees "All Along the Watchtower" as showing a combination of the influences of Guthrie's ballad writing and Johnson's blues influences on Dylan. Zak compares Dylan's lyrics in the song directly to Johnson's "Me and the Devil Blues" (1938), stating that: "Dylan probes such fearful fatalism (of Johnson's lyrics) by grafting a narrative of alienation and apprehension onto a musical frame of implacable stability."
The music of the song has been described by Zak, who wrote, "The song's entire harmonic substance consists of three chords repeated in an unchanging cyclic pattern over the course of its three verses and instrumental interludes. The melodic pitch collection, shared by voice and harmonica, consists almost entirely of the pentatonic C#, E, F#, G#, B, though each part is restricted to a four-note subset. And the declamatory vocal melody gravitates throughout to one of two pitches." Zak then summarizes the entire song as: "The song's musical elements, extraordinarily delimited in number and function, combine to create an impression of unrelenting circularity, which accumulates, in turn, to impart a sense not of musical progression, but of a hovering atmosphere."
Lyrics
The original lyrics are in twelve lines, which the Financial Times writer Dan Einac commented, make it "akin to a truncated sonnet". The lyrics feature a conversation between a joker and a thief, whilst they ride towards a watchtower. Reviewers have pointed out that the lyrics in "All Along the Watchtower" echo lines in the Book of Isaiah, Chapter 21, verses 5–9:
Other writers such as Keith Negus have indicated that Dylan also drew on verses from the Book of Revelation to write the song. Elliot Wolfson found that Dylan's lyrics also reflected his own response to a melancholy reading of his own approach to Jewish gnosis. The general theme of justice is commented upon by Lisa O'Neill-Sanders, who states that Watchtower presents a "thief in the song... who consoles the victimized and exploited joker. The thief sympathizes but urges the joker to 'not talk falsely'".
Journalist David Stubbs interpreted the song as "obliquely allud[ing] to Bob Dylan's frustrations with his management and with CBS, whom he felt were offering him a royalty rate that was far from commensurate with his status". For Stubbs, the song "features a stand-off between the 'joker' and the 'thief', with the joker complaining of businessmen who drink his wine, feeding off him but refusing to give him his due".<!--accessed via database; page number not given--> Hampton also wrote that the song can be viewed as an "allegory of the entertainment business, with artists exploited by managers".
The unusual structure of the narrative was remarked on by English literature scholar Christopher Ricks, who commented that "All Along the Watchtower" is an example of Dylan's audacity at manipulating chronological time, noting "at the conclusion of the last verse, it is as if the song bizarrely begins at last, and as if the myth began again". Heylin described Dylan's narrative technique in the song as setting the listener up for an epic ballad with the first two verses, but then, after a brief instrumental passage, the singer cuts "to the end of the song, leaving the listener to fill in his or her own (doom-laden) blanks".
Andy Gill commented that "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."
Dave Van Ronk, an early supporter and mentor of Dylan, made the following criticism:
Songwriter Eric Bogle said he was envious of Dylan's ability to write a song that is open to several interpretations. Michael Gray wrote that, unlike on Blonde on Blonde, "Dylan's surrealism is stripped down to a chilly minimum on John Wesley Harding", and described Dylan's use of language in songs like "All Along the Watchtower" as "impressionism revisited... reflecting wintertime in the psyche".
Release and reception
John Wesley Harding was released on December 27, 1967, less than two months after the recording sessions. Peter Johnson of the Los Angeles Times wrote that the track "brings out Dylan's talent for imagery", but felt the recording seems "fragmented and unfinished". It was regarded as the best track on the album by the reviewer for the Bucks Examiner. This sentiment was shared by Troy Irvine of The Arizona Republic, who felt that John Wesley Harding was better than any of Dylan's earlier albums.
Journalist Paul Williams regarded the song as "an extraordinarily successful interaction" between Dylan, McCoy, and Buttrey, featuring "some of the best cinematography in modern song-writing". In 2013, Jim Beviglia rated it as the 92nd-best of Dylan's songs, writing that Dylan "creates a stifling air of portent and tension with his three succinct verses". Author Nigel Williamson, in 2021, listed the song 31st in Dylan's oeuvre. The following year, The Guardian included the song on a list of "80 Bob Dylan songs everyone should know". Rapper Kanye West identified it as his "favorite song of all time" in a 2022 interview in which he also expressed a desire to work with and write with Dylan.
The track was released as the B-side to "Drifter's Escape" in Italy on March 1, 1968, and as an A-side, backed with "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight", in the Netherlands and Germany on November 22, 1968. In January 1969, the song was one of four John Wesley Harding songs included on an extended play release in Australia.
The Jimi Hendrix Experience version
The Jimi Hendrix Experience began to record their version of Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower" on January 21, 1968, at Olympic Studios in London. who worked for Dylan's manager Grossman. "(Hendrix) came in with these Dylan tapes and we all heard them for the first time in the studio", recalled Johns.
Stubbs writes that this was the second of Dylan's songs Hendrix had adapted to his own style, the first being "Like a Rolling Stone" played earlier at Monterey.
Music
Dogget described the interpretation of the song: "Hendrix used the sound of the studio to evoke the storms and the sense of dread, creating an echoed aural landscape."
Although Zak has written of both the Dylan and the Hendrix versions of the song as influenced by blues players such as Robert Johnson, he has stated that the Hendrix version is much closer in its blues style to the songs and style of Muddy Waters, stating: "If Dylan's crying blues is reminiscent of Robert Johnson, Hendrix's shout calls to mind Muddy Waters and his 'deep tone with a heavy beat'."
Recording
According to Hendrix's regular engineer Eddie Kramer, the guitarist cut a large number of takes on the first day of recording in January in London, shouting chord changes at Dave Mason who featured at the session and played an additional 12-string guitar. 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 City. By the end of the sessions, Kramer and Hendrix had 16 tracks to use for mixing the song that soon became the intended single of the album. over a month prior to the album release on Electric Ladyland. Dylan gave it a glowing review in the Melody Maker magazine, which pleased Hendrix greatly. It reached number 20 on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart, Hendrix's highest ranking American single and only Top 40 hit to date. becoming the first UK stereo-only single to do so. Hendrix soon became reluctant about performing the song live, and after three months it disappeared from the setlist. In the booklet accompanying his 1985 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." In 1974, Dylan, with the Band, embarked on his first concert tour since his 1966 world tour. From the first show of the Bob Dylan and the Band 1974 Tour on January 3, 1974, in Chicago, the shows featured what Heylin described as a "Hendrixized" version of "All Along the Watchtower". Stubbs contended that through the "more heavy-duty arrangement of it on [the album]", Dylan "practically conceded that Hendrix made the song his own". They opined that as Dylan's vocal range has narrowed and his delivery of lyrics became more brusque, listening to the song in concert, audience members "must either take it as a painfully constricted, even dismissive reference to the song the album gave us in 1967, or hear in it a compendium of all the history, Dylan's own and others', musical and other, between then and now, or as much of that history as we can know". In The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, Gray noted that this is the most often performed of all of Dylan's songs.
In recent years, Dylan has taken to singing the first verse again at the end of the song in live performances. As Gray notes in his Bob Dylan Encyclopedia: