The sixth “Now It Goes Like This”—my series tracking all the different ways Bob Dylan has performed his songs live—tackles a big one: “All Along the Watchtower.”
Let’s get it out of the way right up top: The biggest “Watchtower” arrangement change was not made by Dylan himself. It was made by, of course, Jimi Hendrix. Hendrix’s cover (which I explored the history of here) set the template for almost every version performed subsequently, including the thousands by Dylan himself. Bob Dylan generally performs “Watchtower” like he’s covering Jimi Hendrix, not the other way around. The John Wesley Harding original now sounds like an alternate-version outtake, maybe something they’d unveil decades later on a Bootleg Series. “Wow, can you believe he once tried to record ‘All Along the Watchtower’ acoustically?”
Because he was off the road when John Wesley Harding came out, he never played a pre-Hendrix version. But he quickly made up for lost time. “All Along the Watchtower” has now been performed more than any other Bob Dylan song. Over two thousand times. Given that number, you’d expect an insane number of different arrangements. Nope! In the '90s especially, it felt like he performed it a million times the exact same way. The differences from night to night were how energetically he sung it, and how shreddy were the guitar solos (on a scale that ran from “quite shreddy” to “extremely shreddy”). The basic arrangement didn’t change much.
That consistency over the decades makes the unusual arrangements that doexist really stand out. And some are quite dramatic! Including the brand-new one that inspired this entry. Let’s dive in.
