All Along the Watchtower
Jimi Hendrix recorded a Bob Dylan song and made Dylan feel like he’d written it wrong.
That’s not an insult to Dylan. Dylan said it himself — that after he heard what Hendrix did with “All Along the Watchtower,” he couldn’t play his own version anymore. He started playing it the way Hendrix played it, the tempo, the phrasing, the whole shape of the thing. The man who wrote the song spent the rest of his life performing someone else’s interpretation of it.
That tells you something about what happened in a London studio in January of 1968.
Dylan cut the original on John Wesley Harding — recorded it in Nashville in a single session, acoustic guitar and bass and some light drums, no overdubs, no fuss. He’d come out of his motorcycle accident and his self-imposed retreat and gone the opposite direction from everything the culture expected him to do in 1967. While everyone else was chasing psychedelia, Dylan stripped down. The song came out quiet and old-sounding, like something a man had been carrying around for years before he finally wrote it down.
Then it reached London, and Hendrix heard it, and the song became something else entirely.
He learned it the night before he recorded it. He walked into Olympic Sound Studios in Barnes with it barely in his hands and cut it anyway — multiple sessions over a few days in January and February, overdubbing layers with Dave Mason on acoustic guitar, Brian Jones allegedly in the building, Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell doing what they always did: holding on. Chas Chandler was producing, still early in his relationship with Hendrix, and the story goes that Chandler thought they had it long before Hendrix did. Jimi kept going back. Kept adding. Kept pulling the thing apart and reassembling it.
What came out was four minutes of music that doesn’t feel like four minutes. It feels like a field at dusk in late summer, or the moment before a storm breaks, or the last hour of something you can’t name. There’s a slow-rolling urgency to it — it never quite arrives at the place it seems to be heading, and that tension is the whole point.
The arrangement is the thing people miss when they talk about Hendrix’s playing on this record. Everyone goes straight to the guitar solo — reasonably, because it’s one of the best solos ever committed to tape, all wailing sustain and controlled chaos, Hendrix bending notes like he’s pulling them toward something just out of reach. But listen to what the song does as a structure. It opens on the solo. That’s backwards. The solo comes first, and then the verse, and then another solo, and the track just stops — it doesn’t resolve, it doesn’t conclude, it just ends on another solo fragment, mid-motion, like the story is still happening somewhere even after the tape runs out.
Dylan’s lyrics were already doing something strange. “There must be some kind of way outta here,” said the joker to the thief. Two figures on a watch tower, speaking in riddles about workers and plowmen and princes, wind beginning to howl — it’s apocalyptic, or allegorical, or both, and deliberately unresolved. Hendrix didn’t try to explain it. He just put the song inside a sound that matched its restlessness.
The track ended up on Electric Ladyland, the double album Hendrix released in October 1968 — a record he fought to control and mostly won, even as the label resisted and the band started fracturing at its edges. It was the last Jimi Hendrix Experience album released before his death, though none of them knew that at the time. He was twenty-seven when he made it.
“All along the watchtower, princes kept the view, while all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too.”
Dylan put those words on a plain acoustic guitar and they sounded like a parable. Hendrix put them inside walls of electric sound and they sounded like a warning. Neither of them is wrong. That’s the thing about a great song — it has room in it. It can hold more than one version of itself.
But this is the one that lodged. This is the one that plays at the end of things — in films when the screen goes dark and the credits roll and you’re still sitting there, not ready to leave. It’s the one that gets used when directors need music that sounds like the world tipping on its axis, because that’s what it sounds like. Not explosions. Not chaos. Something more unsettling: the feeling that something is coming, that the people on the watchtower can see it and you can’t, and the wind is already picking up.
Hendrix took a song Dylan had finished and left it open. That was the trick. Some songs are complete the moment they’re recorded. This one sounds like it’s still going — like somewhere out there the joker and the thief are still talking, and the two riders are still approaching, and nobody has quite figured out what any of it means.
That’s probably how it should be.
