All Along The Watchtower Hendrix Bass
Nella Mcnairy
Covered by numerous artists, "All Along the Watchtower" is strongly identified with the interpretation Jimi Hendrix recorded with the Jimi Hendrix Experience for their 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. The singer has performed the song live more than any of his other ones, with over 2,250 recitals.
Following a motorcycle accident in July 1966, Dylan spent the next 18 months recuperating at his home in Woodstock and writing songs.[2] 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.[3][4] With one child born in early 1966 and another in mid-1967, Dylan had settled into family life.[5] Dylan has claimed that he thought of the song during a thunderstorm.[6] He recorded "All Along the Watchtower" on November 6, 1967, at Columbia Studio A in Nashville, Tennessee,[7] the same studio where he had completed Blonde on Blonde the previous year.[8] 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,[9] and the sound engineer was Charlie Bragg.[10]
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.[7] 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.[11]
Musicologist Wilfrid Mellers, noting the biblical references "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".[13] 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".[14]
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."[15]
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."[16] 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."[17]
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.
Other writers such as Keith Negus have indicated that Dylan also drew on verses from the Book of Revelation to write the song.[22] Elliot Wolfson found that Dylan's lyrics also reflected his own response to a melancholy reading of his own approach to Jewish gnosis.[23] 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'".[24]
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".[25] 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".[25] Authors Philippe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon suggest that Dylan is the joker and his manager Albert Grossman is the thief.[10] In The New York Times, Robert Palmer expressed his opinion that as artists like Dylan "were finding that serving as the conscience of a generation exacted a heavy toll. Mr. Dylan, for one, felt the pressures becoming unbearable, and wrote about his predicament in songs like 'All Along the Watchtower'".[26] Hampton also wrote that the song can be viewed as an "allegory of the entertainment business, with artists exploited by managers".[19] Commenting on the songs on John Wesley Harding in an interview published in the folk music magazine Sing Out! in October 1968, Dylan told John Cohen and Happy Traum:
I haven't fulfilled the balladeer's job. A balladeer can sit down and sing three songs for an hour and a half ... it can all unfold to you... (For example, as) with the third verse of "The Wicked Messenger", which opens it up, and then the time schedule takes a jump and soon the song becomes wider ... 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.[27]
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".[28] 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".[3] Hampton remarks on how the "already allegorical characters change into something else" from the first verse to the third verse, and compares this change in perspective to the way that some of Arthur Rimbaud's prose poems in Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations change their framing.[29]
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."[30]
That whole artistic mystique is one of the great traps of this business, because down that road lies unintelligibility. Dylan has a lot to answer for there, because after a while he discovered that he could get away with anything... So he could do something like 'All Along the Watchtower', which is simply a mistake from the title on down: a watchtower is not a road or a wall, and you can't go along it.
Songwriter Eric Bogle said he was envious of Dylan's ability to write a song that is open to several interpretations.[33] Michael Gray wrote that, unlike on Blonde on Blonde, "Dylan's surrealism is stripped down to a chilly minimum on John Wesley Harding",[34] and described Dylan's use of language in songs like "All Along the Watchtower" as "impressionism revisited ... reflecting wintertime in the psyche".[34] In his 2021 book on Dylan, Larry Starr added that: "...'Watchtower' is a brief, compelling, and mysterious song. Its ominous character is captured memorably in the studio version, which utilizes for accompaniment just Dylan's guitar and harmonica... The singing is utterly straightforward, as if recounting a simple parable about the nameless joker and thief; Dylan is not about to disclose a hint of any deeper meaning...".[35]
John Wesley Harding was released on December 27, 1967, less than two months after the recording sessions.[36] 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".[37] It was regarded as the best track on the album by the reviewer for the Bucks Examiner.[38] 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.[4]
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