Bob Dylan / 2:33
Musicians
Bob Dylan: vocals, guitar, harmonica
Charlie McCoy: bass
Kenneth Buttrey: drums
Recording Studio
Columbia Recording Studios, Nashville: November 6, 1967
Technical Team
Producer: Bob Johnston
Sound Engineer: Charlie Bragg
“All Along the Watchtower” is another example of the influence of the Old Testament on the writing of Bob Dylan. This song echoes lines from the book of Isaiah, referring to the exile of the Jewish people in Babylon, their return, and the construction of the temple in Jerusalem. In chapter 21, verses 5 through 9: “Prepare the table, watch in the watchman, eat, drink: Arise, ye princes, and prepare the shield. For thus hath the Lord said to 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 the watchman shouted, ‘Day after day, my Lord, I stand on the watchtower; every night I stay at my post, and, behold, here cometh a chariot of men, with a couple of horsemen.’ And he answered and said, ‘Babylon is fallen, and all the graven images of her gods he hath broken unto the ground.’”
In Dylan’s song, the two main characters—a joker and a thief—are two horsemen talking together while riding to a watchtower. It is easy to guess who they are and what they symbolize. The joker is the songwriter himself, entertaining the crowds and the one who not long ago was the spokesman for a protest movement of complacent progressives. The thief is Albert Grossman (and the music industry as a whole), who sees Dylan only as a moneymaking machine. In the first chorus, Dylan sings, “Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth.” The “laborers” could be the critics with their sharp pens.
For Dylan, nothing is ever simple. “There’s too much confusion,” he admits. Thus, the joker and the thief share the same goal, getting out of the watchtower. This can be interpreted as a need for people to find a way out of the social and political conditions of American society in the 1960s. The text of the three verses is confusing, as Dylan told John Cohen: “The same thing is true of the song ‘All Along the Watchtower,’ which opens up in a slightly different way, in a stranger way, for we have the cycle of events working in a rather reverse order.”20
The narrative does indeed follow an unusual structure. The last two verses, “Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl / Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl,” seem to be the beginning of the story, not the end. Apparently, just before recording, Dylan changed the order of the verses, creating a sense of willful disorder. Thus it is necessary to see these last two lines of the song as an introduction and then continue with the first two lines of the last verse, “All along the watchtower, princes kept the view / While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too,” and only then the current start of the text: “There must be some way out of here.” As he mentioned on the Biograph booklet, “It probably came to me during a thunder and lightning storm. I’m sure it did.”12
Whatever interpretation is given to this song—existentialism, biblical metaphor, quest for truth, an imperfect and perverted world—“All Along the Watchtower” intrigues us by the hermetic power of the text, and, as Dylan himself says, “See, on the album, you have to think about it after you hear it.”20
The menacing character of the song is obvious from the beginning. It is based on only three chords and captivates the listener by its incessant and hypnotic harmonic structure (reminiscent of “Hurricane,” released on Desire in 1976). Dylan told Jonathan Cott in 1978 that this album is a restless disc that reflects fear. This wonderful song gets its strength thanks to the interpretation of three extraordinary musicians. Dylan’s vocal has an edge of panic, emphasizing the climate of insecurity. His harmonica playing (in E) in a high-pitched register is reminiscent of a saturated guitar sound, perhaps a sound that Dylan unconsciously had in mind, such as in Jimi Hendrix’s version. The rhythm section is perfect: Buttrey reveals his talent with a subtle and remarkable drumbeat, backed up by McCoy’s excellent bass part. Just listen to the combination of bass and drums backing Dylan’s second harmonica solo (starting at 1:29) to measure the full extent of their talent. Note: As in a majority of the tracks on the album, the song’s ending was abrupt, without fade-out. Dylan wrote a masterpiece that does not leave the listener untouched. “All Along the Watchtower” was the first song recorded on November 6. It was cut in five takes. The album track resulted from two different takes, the third and fifth (which is an insert). In fact, the cut is so smooth that it is very difficult to hear it.
Bob Dylan first performed “All Along the Watchtower” live on January 3, 1974, in Chicago Stadium for the opening night of his comeback tour. Since then he has performed it more than 2,100 times, more than any of his other songs, which shows how much this song means to him. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, Dylan has sung the first verse again at the end of the song. Critic Michael Gray states in his book, “Dylan chooses to finish in a way that at once reduces its apocalyptic import and hugely cranks up its emphasis on the artist’s own centrality. Repeating the first stanza as the last means that Dylan now ends with this: ‘Businessmen they drink my wine / Plowmen dig my earth / None of them along the line / Know what any of it is worth’ (and this is sung with a prolonged, dark linger on that word ‘worth’).”30
Jimi Hendrix recorded a cover version of Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” on January 21, 1968, with guitarist Dave Mason and Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones on piano and percussion at Olympic Studios in London. But Hendrix, the guitar hero, was dissatisfied with the mix of Eddie Kramer and Chas Chandler, and with sound engineer Tony Bongiovi’s overdubbed guitar parts during the following summer at the Record Plant Studio in New York City. This second version was released as a single on the album Electric Ladyland in September 1968. The single reached number 5 in the British charts on October 23, 1968, and number 20 on the Billboard charts on September 28, 1968.
According to Kramer, “[Hendrix] loved Bob Dylan… He was fascinated by the color of the lyrics and the tone of the lyrics, and of course the chord sequences were wonderful, too.”77 Dylan greatly admired the king of the six-string. In the booklet accompanying his Biograph album, Dylan said he liked Hendrix’s version, and adopted it in concert after Hendrix’s death. Dylan added, “Strange though how when I sing it I always feel like it’s a tribute to him in some kind of way.”12