All Along The Watchtower

I had my mind made up / and you changed it

Dylan wrote those words in 1967, locked in a farmhouse in Woodstock with the Band, recording the songs that would eventually become The Basement Tapes. He wrote twelve verses and kept two. The version he released, on John Wesley Harding, ran under three minutes — guitar, bass, a pair of violins, and almost no room to move. It was the tightest thing he’d made in years. Controlled. Finished.

What DMB did with that song at the Wetlands Preserve in New York on November 4, 1994, is the opposite of controlled. It runs seven and a half minutes and sounds like it could have kept going until morning.

The Wetlands was a club in lower Manhattan, on Hudson Street in Tribeca, and it was the kind of room that understood this music before the rest of the country did — a small stage, a real sound system, a crowd that came to listen. The venue ran on environmental politics and late-night improvisation; the Grateful Dead’s influence was in the walls. It closed in 2001, which means the 1994 DMB set happened right in the middle of the Wetlands’ best decade, when it was still figuring out what it wanted to be, which is also exactly when Dave Matthews Band was figuring out the same thing.

Live Trax Vol. 20 captures them at that in-between stage — not yet the arena act, not quite the bar band anymore. Somewhere in the gap between those two things, they were playing rooms like the Wetlands and finding out what the songs could hold.

Carter Beauford is the reason this version works. The drums don’t mark time here — they push. From the first pass through the verse, Beauford is already somewhere past the beat, finding a pocket and then widening it, and the band follows him there. Boyd Tinsley’s violin does what violin almost never does in rock music: it keeps tension instead of releasing it, sawing against the groove rather than floating over it. Stefan Lessard holds the low end steady while everything above him is moving.

What Matthews adds is restraint, which is the surprising thing. He plays rhythm mostly, lets the spaces breathe, and when he does step forward, he steps back before the moment turns into a solo. The whole band does this. They understand that a song about watching and waiting should not be in a hurry. The lyric tells you that. The hour is getting late. So they take their time.

This is a song about someone who knows something bad is coming and cannot stop it. Two men in a conversation, one in despair and one steady, and somewhere outside there are riders approaching and the wind begins to howl. Dylan ended it there — no resolution, no answer, just the sound of what’s coming. The ambiguity is the point. Nobody explains what happens after the riders arrive.

The band at the Wetlands doesn’t explain it either. They just stay in the tension. They build through the middle section until the room is full of it, and then they let it come down slowly, and then they lift it again, and by the time they’ve moved through the last chord the song has been held up to the light and turned and held up again. You have heard what’s in it. You still don’t know what happens next.

Dylan said that the day he heard Hendrix’s version of this song was the day he realized another musician could take something he’d written and show him what it actually meant. That’s a generous thing to say, and a true one. The song has been passed forward like that — each version a new pair of hands, each version finding something the last one left on the table.

The Wetlands crowd knew what they were hearing. You can tell from how quiet the room gets in the spaces, how the applause at the end sounds like relief.