“All Along the Watchtower” is a song by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan from his eighth studio album, John Wesley Harding (1967). The song was written by Dylan and produced by Bob Johnston. The song’s lyrics, which in its original version contain twelve lines, feature a conversation between a joker and a thief.
The song has been subject to various interpretations; some reviewers have noted that it echoes lines in the Book of Isaiah, Chapter 21, verses 5–9. Dylan has released several different live performances, and versions of the song are included on some of his subsequent greatest hits compilations.
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. Dylan has performed the song live more than any of his others, with over 2,250 recitals.
Bob Dylan original version
Following a motorcycle accident in July 1966, Dylan spent the next 18 months recuperating at his home in Woodstock and writing songs. 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. With one child born in early 1966 and another in mid-1967, Dylan had settled into family life. Dylan has claimed that he thought of the song during a thunderstorm. He recorded “All Along the Watchtower” on November 6, 1967, at Columbia Studio A in Nashville, Tennessee,[8] the same studio where he had completed Blonde on Blonde the previous year. 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, and the sound engineer was Charlie Bragg.
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. 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.