Jimi Hendrix: "All Along The Watchtower" (1968)

* First Video: Live Version




* Second Video: Studio Version





"All Along the Watchtower" is a song written and recorded by singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. It initially appeared on his album John Wesley Harding. It has been covered by other artists in different genres, most notably by The Jimi Hendrix Experience. There exists much speculation as to what the song is actually about.

In accordance with wikipedia, commenting on the songs on his album 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 balladeers's job. A balladeer can sit down and sing three songs for an hour and a half... it can all unfold to you. These melodies on John Wesley Harding lack this traditional sense of time. 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."

The unusual structure of the narrative was remarked on by English Literature professor Christopher Ricks, who commented that "All Along the Watchtower" is an example of Dylan's audacity at manipulating chronological time: "at the conclusion of the last verse, it is as if the song bizarrely begins at last, and as if the myth began again."

Critics have described Dylan's version as a masterpiece of understatement. In Andy Gill's words: "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."[


- Lyrics:

There must be some way out of here
Said the joker to the thief
There's too much confusion here
I can't get no relief
Businessmen they drink my wine
Plowmen dig my earth
None of them know along the line
What any of this is worth

No reason to get excited
The thief, he kindly spoke
There are many here among us
Who think that life is but a joke
But you and I, we've been through that
And that is not our fate
So let us not talk falsely now
Because the hour is getting late

All along the watchtower
Princes kept the view
While horsemen came and went
Barefoot servants too

All I got is a red guitar
Three chords
And the truth

All I got is a red guitar
The rest is up to you

There's no reason to get excited
The thief, he kindly spoke
There are some among us here
Say that life is just a joke
You and I, we've been through that
And that is not our fate (at least today)
So let us not talk falsely now
Because the hour is getting late
Late...