26. All Along the Watchtower

This write-up is dedicated to Caleb Mulkerin.

There are songs of Dylan’s about which so much has been written over the years that there doesn’t seem to be much to add. I’ve been lucky in that a lot of the songs on my list so far have been the more or less neglected kind, perhaps admired in certain niches of Dylan fanhood, but not copiously discussed in the world of music scholarship—not seriously at least. There’s plenty of “Under the Red Sky was the clumsy and disappointing follow-up to 1989’s Oh Mercy” to go around, but not a lot of the kinds of things that Robert Christgau, Michael Gray, or Christopher Ricks have written about the album. So there are songs like 2 x 2 (my #91), and then there’s… All Along the Watchtower.

I decided, as I approached this write-up, that I would jump in blind. That is, I figured I wouldn’t go reading through the essays that have been written about the song so far—there are so many, and they’d leave me nothing to say. I figured I would go ahead and say what I hear in the song as if I were its first commentator. In other words, I would pull a Buried Giant. That was the novel in which Kazuo Ishiguro made his first, and so far only, venture into fantasy. Personally, as a big fantasy head, I don’t think he did a very good job, but he clearly had so much fun “discovering” all the tropes for himself that I couldn’t help but get caught up in his excitement. Well then, allow me to be your Ishiguro as we step across the border and enter the unknown, unmapped regions of… All Along the Watchtower.

I’ve long been a fantasy head. The first books I remember adoring with all my heart were Tove Jansson’s Moomin series (bedtime reading when I was three or four) and J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (bedtime reading when I was four or five). At nine, I read Tad Williams’ Memory, Sorrow & Thorn. I played through every Squaresoft SNES RPG. I watched the cream of the fantasy anime of the 1990s: The Record of Lodoss War, The Slayers, Fushigi Yuugi. My love for that mode of storytelling has always stuck with me, always sustained me. My single favorite writer today is Ursula K. Le Guin, and my single favorite of her works The Annals of the Western Shore, which are what some folks call high fantasy. When I began to write prose fiction in earnest a few years ago, I chose fantasy as my field.

I say all this to emphasize that when I come across a great instance of world-building, I recognize it. And All Along the Watchtower is amazing. It has three brief verses, two of them the record of a conversation, and yet the world the story takes place in feels full and complete. One gets the sense that the universe of Watchtower has existed as long as ours, and will endure about as long. When we hear the song, we merely witness a few minutes of a long, long history. But that world doesn’t need us, the listeners, to be there: it will go on just as well without our attention. The thief, the joker, the princes, the watchtower women, and the servants all have their own lives and destinies. We, out here in the midst of our own, are honored to be given the glimpse Dylan gives us.

It didn’t occur to me that the structure of the song was or might be circular until I found people (including the songwriter himself) talking about it that way. It didn’t occur to me that the thief and the joker of the opening verses might be the riders in the last. And of course they needn’t be. But it is Bob’s tendency throughout John Wesley Harding to begin a song with its title (see the title track, As I Went Out One Morning, I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine, Dear Landlord, I Am a Lonesome Hobo, I Pity the Poor Immigrant, Down Along the Cove, and (approximately) The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest and The Wicked Messenger). It’s cool that (as in Drifter’s Escape, where the title is saved for the final line) the title in All Along the Watchtower is withheld. When it finally comes up in the beginning of the third verse, the listener feels like it’s been a long time coming, and that in this verse something of great import will be communicated, whereas in fact, as the words of the album’s next song go, “Nothing is revealed.”

Jimi Hendrix’s cover does a great job with this feint, Jimi’s voice rising like the storm winds of the final line as he sings the title phrase. Hendrix’s cover does a great job, period. Since I love Dylan as a singer even more than as a songwriter, it’s rare for me to meet a cover that can match or surpass a Dylan version of a song he wrote, but Jimi’s Watchtower really is a magnificent thing.

Its YouTube page has some uncommonly warm and touching comments among the highest-voted. YouTube comment sections are obviously not the reading material I reach for when I want to be uplifted, but sometimes one is surprised. Here’s a selection:

“Hendrix never died. Earth was just part of his tour.” (blake dreher)

“Bob Dylan: This is my song.
listens to Jimi Hendrix’s cover
Bob Dylan: This was my song.” (Giorno Giovanna)

“0% nudity
0% flashing money
48% Drugs
52% Guitar
100% awesome.” (Justintime Forparties)

“Hendrix didn’t die, God just wanted guitar lessons.” (Joseph Hasken)

“Dylan & Hendrix is like Jesus and Moses collaborating together.” (juwan)

Like Idiot Wind and Blind Willie McTell, All Along the Watchtower is a song that I’ve yet to hear a lackluster Dylan live recording of. And unlike many of my other favorite Dylan songs, Watchtower has a long history of live performance. I adore the 2018 reimagination of the song as a reggae tune (I would, wouldn’t I?). But everywhere I turn, I find a good version: in 1981, with Dylan caressing the words in that bizarre 1981 way; in 1994, when it was usually played soon after the like-spirited Jokerman; in 2009, with the band sounding dark and gritty, and Dylan coming up with great new melodies for the lines.

 In fact, I get the sense that All Along the Watchtower may be nigh on impossible to perform badly. That’s not to say everyone can do an amazing job with it, but that there’s something about the song (like others on John Wesley Harding, and probably like the Under the Red Sky material too, though for now there’s little evidence to support my claim on the latter album’s behalf) that seems to invite transfiguration. When Henn Sie and I met in Colorado to finish writing our album of collaborations, we began the sessions with a rough runthrough of All Along the Watchtower which, despite all the wealth of great versions to choose from (see also Neil Young’s on Road Rock, or the live versions that Bob Weir sang with the Grateful Dead when, in 1987, All Along the Watchtower became a favorite to come out of the Space jam with), I continue to enjoy listening to. I don’t know to what I should ascribe this: to the simple chord progression? To the excellent melodies? To the beautiful but impenetrable words?

Speaking of covers, though, word has it that Big Blood have performed All Along the Watchtower, if only inside the confines of their South Portland home. How I wish I could have been there when they did.