January 21 1968 :: Jimi Hendrix makes Bob Dylan’s ‘All Along The Watchtower' his own and influences the man who wrote it!

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January 21, 1968, Jimi Hendrix recorded his version of the Bob Dylan song "All Along the Watchtower" at Olympic Studios in London. Rolling Stone Brian Jones (percussion) and Dave Mason from Traffic (twelve-string guitar) both played on the session. The track was released in the US as a single in 1968, peaking at No. 20.

The song first appeared on Dylan's late 1967 return to folk roots album John Wesley Harding. Hendrix claimed he had a natural gravitation toward the track. "The songs Dylan usually gave me are so close to me that I feel like I wrote them myself," he added. "With 'Along the Watchtower' I had that feeling." Less than two months after Dylan recorded the original, Hendrix was in the studio laying down his version.

In a 1995 interview with the Sun Sentinel, Dylan described his reaction to hearing Hendrix's version. 

"It overwhelmed me, really," he said. "He had such talent, he could find things inside a song and vigorously develop them. He found things that other people wouldn't think of finding in there. He probably improved upon it by the spaces he was using. I took license with the song from his version, actually, and continue to do it to this day."

I don’t think I should ever not post this . . . . . . . . . a favourite track, [album, artist(s)] and still cannot imagine what on earth it must have been like for Bobby to hear this for the very first time! Can you put yourself in his shoes and know that someone has taken a song you wrote and transformed it thus!? After two months!?

Not the quietest song on John Wesley Harding but the whole album was a such a signature statement that for Jimi to take it make this song his own and to have influenced the man who actually wrote it so that he forever plays his own tune differently is little short of staggering. 

We miss Jimi, imagine what world musics of the universe he would have created had only the technology been able to keep up (it couldn’t!)

Jimi by Elliott Landy 1968

All Along The Watchtower (Bob Dylan) and Jimi Hendrix by Ray Padgett | Flaggin’ Down The Double Es

 

Photo: Bildbyrån Kamerareportage AB collections.

Where Hendrix first heard “All Along the Watchtower” is a matter of some debate. His publicist at the time, Michael Goldstein, says he played it for him at a Greenwich Village party before Dylan’s album John Wesley Harding was even released.

Though stories differ, he met Dylan at least once, but any interactions were by all accounts inconsequential. In that same Rolling Stone interview, Hendrix reported “I only met him once, about three years ago, back at the Kettle of Fish [a folk-rock era hangout] on MacDougal Street. That was before I went to England. I think both of us were pretty drunk at the time, so he probably doesn’t remember it.”

For his part, Dylan recalls another meeting, equally inauspicious. “First time I saw him, he was playing with John Hammond,” he wrote in the liner notes to career retrospective Biograph. “He was incredible then. I’d already been to England and beyond, and although he didn’t sing, I kinda had a feeling that he figured into things. The last time I saw him was a couple of months before he died. He was in that band with Buddy Miles. It was an eerie scene. He was slouched down in the back of a limousine. I was riding by on a bicycle. I remember saying something about that song ‘Wind Cried Mary,’ it was a long way from playing behind John Hammond. That was my favorite song of his – that and ‘Dolly Dagger’… I don’t know, it was strange, both of us were a little lost for words, he’d gone through like a fireball without knowing it, I’d done the same thing like being shot out of cannon.”

Perhaps the best story – though one confirmed by neither party – was told by friend Deering Howe in Charles Cross’s biography Room Full of Mirrors. Cross writes:

    One day that fall [Howe] was walking down Eighth Street in New York City with Jimi when they spied a figure on the other side of the road. “Hey, that’s Dylan,” Jimi said excitedly. “I’ve never met him before; let’s go talk to him.” Jimi darted into traffic, yelling “Hey, Bob” as he approached. Deering followed, though he felt uneasy about Jimi’s zeal. “I think Dylan was a little concerned at first, hearing someone shouting his name and racing across the street toward him,” Deering recalled. Once Dylan recognized Jimi, he relaxed. Hendrix’s introduction was modest enough to be comic. “Bob, uh, I’m a singer, you know, called, uh, Jimi Hendrix and…” Dylan said he knew who Jimi was and loved his covers of “All Along the Watchtower” and “Like a Rolling Stone.” “I don’t know if anyone has done my songs better,” Dylan said. Dylan hurried off, but left Jimi beaming. “Jimi was on cloud nine,” Deering said, “if only because Bob Dylan knew who he was. It seemed very clear to me that the two had never met before.” 

 by Ray Padgett / Cover Me