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.^[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]

Composition and lyrical interpretation

'All Along the Watchtower'

Short sample of Dylan's vocals from "All Along the Watchtower". Author Michael J. Kramer wrote, "Danger, paranoia, ominous brooding, even death are present in the uneasy movement between minor and major chords and in Dylan's shrill vocals."^[12]

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Release and reception

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]

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".^[39] 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".^[40] Author Nigel Williamson, in 2021, listed the song 31st in Dylan's oeuvre.^[6] In a 2020 article for The Guardian, Alexis Petridis ranked it the 28th-greatest of Dylan's songs, commenting that "there's a lot to be said for Dylan's humble original, its brevity and starkness capturing the same end-times intensity in a different way [to the Hendrix version]".^[41] The following year, The Guardian included the song on a list of "80 Bob Dylan songs everyone should know".^[42] 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.^[43]

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.^[44] In January 1969, the song was one of four John Wesley Harding songs included on an extended play release in Australia.^[45]

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."^[50] For Zak, the Hendrix version of the song is more than a simple transposition of Dylan's harmonica riffs into Hendrix playing riffs on his electric guitar, involving adding a tonal quality of a "self-proclaimed 'Voodoo Child,' raging and defiant in the guise of a lead guitar."^[51] The layering Hendrix introduces in his version is further intensified and, "unlike the sonic reserve of Dylan's recording, here the frequency space teems with dynamic activity. From the highs of the cymbals and tambourines to the lows of the bass guitar and kick drum, the ongoing agitation of the frequency space heightens the track's sense of tumult."^[51]

Zak summarizes the Hendrix adaptation of the Dylan song in three main points, stating: "There are three basic strategies apparent in this transformation (of Dylan's version): (1) the intensification of essential musical gestures and formal divisions; (2) the introduction of pitch material dissonant with the pentatonic collection of the original; and (3) the tracing of a long-range, goal-directed melodic line over the call-and-response structure of the arrangement. It is in the latter that Hendrix asserts most forcefully his protagonist claim."^[52]

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.^[49] Halfway through the session, bass player Noel Redding became dissatisfied with the proceedings and left. He would later note that he disliked the song and preferred Dylan's version.^[49] Mason then took over on bass. According to Kramer, the final bass part was played by Hendrix himself.^[46] Hendrix's friend and Rolling Stones multi-instrumentalist Brian Jones contributed the dry rattles featured in the intro, played on a vibraslap.^[46][49] This sparse version without any overdubs would eventually appear on the South Saturn Delta compilation released in 1997.^[50]

Kramer and Chas Chandler mixed the first version of "All Along the Watchtower" on January 26 in 1968,^[53] 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.^[49] Engineer Tony Bongiovi has described Hendrix becoming increasingly dissatisfied as the song progressed, overdubbing more and more guitar parts, moving the master tape from a four-track to a twelve-track to a sixteen-track machine. Bongiovi recalled, "Recording these new ideas meant he would have to erase something. In the weeks prior to the mixing, we had already recorded a number of overdubs, wiping track after track. [Hendrix] kept saying, 'I think I hear it a little bit differently.'"^[49] Apparently, Hendrix was trying to record what Zak has referred to in the song as a 'deep tone with a heavy beat' which was not highlighted in Dylan's version.^[54] 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.^[49]

Credits

• Jimi Hendrix - lead vocals, lead guitar, slide guitar, bass guitar, producer, mixing
• Mitch Mitchell - drums
• Dave Mason - twelve string acoustic guitar
• Brian Jones - assorted percussion
• Eddie Kramer, Gary Kellgren - engineers, mixing

Release, charts, and certifications

In the US, Reprise Records issued the song as a single on September 2, 1968, with the B-side featuring "Burning of the Midnight Lamp",^[55] 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.^[56] It reached number 20 on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart, Hendrix's highest ranking American single and only Top 40 hit to date.^[55][48] Track Records released the single on October 18 and it reached number five in the British charts,^[57] becoming the first UK stereo-only single to do so.^[58] Hendrix soon became reluctant about performing the song live, and after three months it disappeared from the setlist.^[49] One notable performance was at the Isle of Wight festival that appeared on the Blue Wild Angel live album in 2002.^[48][50]

Impact of the Hendrix recording on Dylan's performances

In 1995, Dylan described his reaction to hearing Hendrix's version: "It overwhelmed me, really. He had such talent, he could find things inside a song and vigorously develop them. He found things that other people wouldn't think of finding in there. He probably improved upon it by the spaces he was using. I took license with the song from his version, actually, and continue to do it to this day."^[63] 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."^[64] 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".^[65][11] From the first live performance, Dylan has consistently performed the song closer to Hendrix's version than to his own original recording.^[11]

The 1974 album Before the Flood, compiled from concert performances on the tour, included the song.^[66] Stubbs contended that through the "more heavy-duty arrangement of it on [the album]", Dylan "practically conceded that Hendrix made the song his own".^[25] Academics Janet Gezari and Charles Hartman wrote: "In effect, [Dylan] covered a cover of his own song".^[67] 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".^[67]

The live recording from Before the Flood appeared as the B side of "Most Likely You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine" in 1974. The recordings came from separate concerts earlier that year at the Forum adjacent to Los Angeles, both with Dylan backed by the Band.^[68][69] In The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, Gray noted that this is the most often performed of all of Dylan's songs.^[11] According to Dylan's own website, by November 2018 he had performed the song 2,268 times.^[70]

In recent years, Dylan has taken to singing the first verse again at the end of the song in live performances.^[71] As Gray notes in his Bob Dylan Encyclopedia:

"Dylan chooses to end in a way that at once reduces the song's apocalyptic impact and cranks up its emphasis on the artist's own centrality. Repeating the first stanza as the last means Dylan now ends with the words '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')."^[11]

Scholar of English Sukanya Saha cites the original conclusion, "two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl" as an example of Dylan's talent for providing satisfying endings for songs. Saha goes on to say, "The end rhymes in his songs make his lines appealing as they reverberate in consciousness."^[72]