ALL ALONG THE WATCHTOWER
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All Along the Watchtower is one of Bob Dylan’s most celebrated songs. It holds the record for performances, with Dylan having played it over 2,000 times; often as an encore or closing number. In writing the songs for John Wesley Harding, on which the song first appeared in late 1967, Dylan demonstrated his ability to write short, suggestive lyrics. Watchtower is a prime example of this, consisting only of three verses of four lines each. Yet it has an epic scope and has been subject to multiple interpretations. This effect is largely achieved by the way Dylan – as he does in a number of songs on the album – seamlessly mixes modern colloquial language with archaic and Biblical terminology.
WATCHTOWER
The musical structure of the original recording is simplicity personified. The acoustic guitar plays a repeated haunting riff backed by bass and drums. Dylan’s harmonica fills in the gaps between verses and ends the recording. The entire song is only two and a half minutes long. Jimi Hendrix’s brilliant cover version, released just a few months later, lifts it onto another level, punctuating the verses with inspired guitar passages that supply a musical interpretation of the implications of the lyrics, so creating a bona fide rock classic on which the many cover versions which have followed have been based. When Dylan himself began performing the song on a regular basis, he himself used Hendrix’s version as a model.
Hendrix was, of course, the most talented and imaginative guitarist in rock music history. The genius of his interpretation of the song was that he somehow appeared to understand the apocalyptic implications of the lyrics on a visceral level and was able to express them perfectly through the mastery of his instrument. In his take on the song, as well as in much of his other material, he gave voice to the fear of nuclear extinction that hung like a dark cloud over the 1960s in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Hendrix himself had briefly served in Vietnam and it is no surprise that the music he made in his brief career from 1966-70 is often associated with the war to which so many anti-establishment groups in the USA and across the world were so vehemently opposed.
WATCHTOWER
Ironically it is the Thief, rather than the joker, who has a more light hearted attitude. The figure of the Joker, most famously epitomised by King Lear’s ‘wise fool’, is traditionally portrayed as both a trickster and a truth teller – the only one who can honestly express the reality of a situation. Such is the role of satirical comedians even to this day. But here the Joker gives a decidedly sober account of the crisis that he, and presumably his whole world, is up against. The song begins …”There must be some way out of here” said the Joker to the Thief…./ There’s too much confusion, I can’t get no relief”… words which perfectly summarise not only the claustrophobic cultural context of the late 1960s but the entire existential crisis which is about to unfold.
The Joker then piles up evidence of oppressive forces that are plaguing him: …Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth/ None of them along the line know what any of it is worth… Not a word is wasted here. The contrast between the contemporary sounding ‘businessmen’ and the medieval ‘plowmen’ is immediately noticeable, placing the action of the song in a highly ambiguous historical context. The reference to ‘businessmen’ suggests that the Joker has been exploited by those who prize material gain above all while the ‘plowmen’ appear to be ‘digging’ into his very soul. Dylan’s use of the terms ‘wine’ and ‘earth’ here have a particular resonance. The line could perhaps have read ‘drink up my blood’, as in Stuck Inside of Mobile whose ‘railroad men’ are said to …drink up my blood like wine…
The blood/wine catechism is central to the Roman Catholic mass in which the wine that supplicants taste is meant to be transmogrified into their saviour’s blood. It seems that the representatives of material greed are ‘drinking’ his very life blood. The Joker may be speaking for all humanity, whose planet is being ravaged by the ‘plowmen’ – perhaps symbolising the spiritual and existential ‘extraction’ of its ‘life blood’. It is suggested that both the ‘businessmen’ and the ‘plowmen’ are draining away the Joker’s humanity – and therefore that of all of us. The final line of the verse strongly suggests that both businessmen and plowmen are spiritually bereft, without any understanding of the damage they are causing.
LINKS
STILL ON THE ROAD – ALL DYLAN’S GIGS
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