Her father, Gilbert, came from a pioneering ranching family and was English, German and Mexican. The Tucson, Arizona native was born in 1946, the third of four kids. Check out Matthews’ version below.For better or worse, the female vocalist that defined L.A. While many artists have covered the track since Dylan’s and Hendrix’s hit the airwaves, one notable example is by jam band frontman Dave Matthews, who would often close out his popular live shows with a rendition of the song, which often opened with a bass solo and extended 10 or more minutes long. Sounds like ample reason to get excited, if you ask us. It became a Top 20 hit and in the U.K., the song became the first British stereo-only single to land in the Top 5. Hendrix released his version in September 1968, a month prior to the release of Electric Ladyland. In Hendrix’s cover, though, the musicality is taken to another level, given the guitar player’s prowess and ability to solo and provide a general sense of distorted rock to the previously otherwise clean tones. Those chords continue to repeat throughout the tune. Musically speaking, the song is rather simple: three chords and a shrieking harmonica. So he could do something like ‘All Along the Watchtower’, which is simply a mistake from the title on down: a watchtower is not a road or a wall, and you can’t go along it.” Dylan has a lot to answer for there because after a while he discovered that he could get away with anything-he was Bob Dylan and people would take whatever he wrote on faith. Yet while many offer generous critiques of the track, musician and longtime Dylan associate, Dave Van Ronk, provided some measured criticism, saying of the song and its author, “That whole artistic mystique is one of the great traps of this business, because down that road lies unintelligibility.
#HASTEN DOWN THE WIND LYRICS MEANING FREE#
Others have noted the same technique, offering that as the song ends, the listener is free to fill in the blanks of what happens next: are the joker and the thief taken, killed? Do they survive the potential onslaught that is likely about to befall them? It’s as if Dylan sparks our imagination and then leaves us before he’s even able to say, “To be continued…” Said Ricks, “At the conclusion of the last verse, it is as if the song bizarrely begins at last, and as if the myth began again.”Īll along the watchtower / Princes kept the view / While all the women came and went / Barefoot se rvants too / Outside, in the distance / A wildcat did growl / Two riders were approaching / The wind began to howl. Professor of English literature Christopher Ricks has famously commented on the odd structure of Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower,” noting that the song seems to essentially begin just as it ends.
And he answered and said, Babylon is fallen, is fallen, and all the graven images of her gods he hath broken unto the ground.” Other writers have shown that the lyrics also resemble lines from the Book of Isaiah, specifically Chapter 21, verses 5-9, which state, “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. Stubbs wrote that the track “features a stand-off between the ‘joker’ and the ‘thief’, with the joker complaining of businessmen who drink his wine, feeding off him but refusing to give him his due.” At the same time, Dylan was venturing into family life, with one child born in 1966 and another a year later.Īccording to author David Stubbs, the song’s lyrical meaning is a vague allusion to Dylan’s then-frustration with his management at CBS, which he thought was screwing him out of proper royalties for his work. Doing so, he wrote song after song, including, “All Along the Watchtower,” and the other tracks for his album John Wesley Harding. As a result, he spent the next year and a half healing at his home in Woodstock. In July 1966, Dylan got into a serious motorcycle accident. Accompanying Dylan were Music City vets Charlie McCoy on bass and Kenneth Buttrey on percussion. That was the same studio where he’d completed his famous record Blonde on Blonde in the spring of the year prior. Time is both our gift and the ax man ready to take us out of it.Īnd while the song first appeared on Dylan’s 1967 album, it has also been featured on a number of his greatest hits records and has been covered by several artists from Dave Matthews to Jimi Hendrix.ĭylan first recorded the song on November 6, 1967, at Columbia Studio A in Nashville, Tennessee. Rather, life is to be understood as a poetic sacrifice. Indeed, the song seems to tell us, there is no room for callous consumerism.
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