ALL ALONG THE WATCHTOWER"I liked Jimi Hendrix's record of this and ever since he died I've been doing it that way... Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it's a tribute to him in some kind of way." (from the booklet accompanying Dylan's Biograph album)
“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
Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth”
“No reason to get excited,” the thief, he kindly spoke
“There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke
But you and I, we’ve been through that, and this is not our fate
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late”
All along the watchtower, princes kept the view
While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too
Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl
Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl
Original recording from Dylan's John Wesley Harding album
"Prepare the table, watch in the watchtower, eat, drink: arise ye princes, and prepare the shield./For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth./And he saw a chariot with a couple of horsemen, a chariot of asses, and a chariot of camels; and he hearkened diligently with much heed./...And, behold, here cometh a chariot of men, with a couple of horsemen. And he answered and said, Babylon is fallen, is fallen, and all the graven images of her gods he hath broken unto the ground"
Clinton Heylin - Behind The Shades:
"The thief that cries 'the hour is getting late' is surely the thief in the night foretold in Revelation, Jesus Christ come again. It is He who says, in St. John the Dive's tract: 'I will come on thee as a thief, and Thou shalt not know what hour I will come upon thee.'" Dylan later said of John Wesley Harding that he "'had been dealing with the devil in a fretful way.'"
Andy Gill - "In Dylan's version of the song, it's the haunting harmonica and simple forward motion of the riff carrying understated implications of cataclysm; as subsequently recorded by Jimi Hendrix, ... that cataclysm is rendered scarily palpable through the dervish whirls of guitar."
and
"Dylan long ago embarked upon a policy of never singing the same song the
same way twice, with widely variable results. On 'All along the
Watchtower', the extreme nasality of his delivery acts like a kind of
natural vocoder, a bizarre sound which has the perverse but welcome
effect of reclaiming the song from Hendrix's version." The Independent - Rock Review
Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel Dylan interview 1995:
Q: As a songwriter, what's the creative process? How does a song like "All Along tbe Watchtower" come about?
A: There's three kinds of ways. You write Iyrics and try to find a melody. Or, if you come up with a melody, then you have to stuff the Iyrics in there some kinda way. And then the third kind of a way is when they both come at the same time. Where it all comes in a blur: The words are the melody and the melody is the words. And that's the ideal way for somebody, like myself to get going with something. "All Along the Watchtower" was that way. It leaped out in a very short time. I don't like songs that make you feel feeble or indifferent. That lets a whole lot of things out of the picture for me.
Q: How did you feel when you first heard Jimi Hendrix's version of "All Along the Watchtower"?
A: It overwhelmed me, really. 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. Fort-Lauderdale, Sun Sentinel 9/29/1995: A MIDNIGHT CHAT WITH BOB DYLAN
August 30 1970 -Isle of Wight (the uploader of this youtube video has mis-titled it as being a 1968 performance and doesn't mention that it is Jimi's 1970 Isle of Wight performance)
Isle of Wight Festival 1970
Despite a strong line-up, poor planning and security resulted in crowd trouble (plus financial disaster for the organisers, Fiery Creations). While there were triumphs for The Who, Miles Davis and the newly formed ELP, Jimi Hendrix's set wasn't one of his strongest. Technical problems and overenthusiastic consumption of LSD resulted in an uninspiring performance. Halfway through the set the guitarist told the audience to go and buy hot dogs instead of listening to him. It was to be his last public performance in the UK and he would be dead two weeks later.
Michael Alden Hedges
(December 31, 1953 – December 2, 1997)
American composer,acoustic guitarist and singer-songwriter.
In late 1997, Hedges died at the age of 43 in a car accident along State Route 128 in Mendocino County about 100 miles northwest of San Francisco. According to his manager Hilleary Burgess, he was driving home from San Francisco International Airport after a Thanksgiving vist to a girlfriend in Long Island, New York. His car apparently skidded off a rain-slicked S-curve and down a 120-foot (37 m) cliff. Hedges was thrown from his car and appeared to have died nearly instantly. His body was found a few days afterward. After his death, his record Oracle won the 1998 Grammy Award for Best New Age Album. Hedges' unfinished last recordings were brought to completion in the album Torched, with the help of his former manager Hilleary Burgess and friends David Crosby and Graham Nash.
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