All Along the Watchtower

All along the watchtower the wind is howling and the Zoo Crew is spinning one of those deep cuts that still gets the Zoo Freaks leaning in closer to the radio. Bob Dylan laid this one down on the John Wesley Harding album and it has been riding with us ever since. The song feels like it rolled in on a storm. Dylan once said it probably came to him during a thunder and lightning storm, and you can almost hear that crackle in the way the verses circle back on themselves. Recorded in Nashville back in late 1967 with Charlie McCoy on bass and Kenneth Buttrey on drums, it sits right in the middle of that album Dylan called the first biblical rock album. The watchtower image pulls straight from the book of Isaiah, with the princes keeping the view while the riders approach and the wildcat growls outside. Dylan himself pointed out in an old Sing Out interview that the song opens up in a strange way because the cycle of events works in reverse order. The last verse almost feels like the start of the story, leaving you wondering if those two riders are just arriving or have been circling the whole time. That circular pull is part of what keeps the track from ever settling down.

Jimi Hendrix took the same song and turned it into something that shook the whole landscape. Dylan has said more than once that Hendrix’s version overwhelmed him, that the guitarist found spaces inside the song other people never thought to look for. In the notes that went with the Biograph set, Dylan wrote that he liked Hendrix’s record of it and ever since Hendrix died he has been doing the song that way. Strange how when he sings it, he always feels it is a tribute. You can hear that tribute on stage even now, years later, when the band kicks into the arrangement that leans harder on the electric edge Hendrix brought to it. Dylan has played the song thousands of times, more than any other tune in his catalog, and it still shows up in set lists like an old reliable road dog that refuses to stay in the kennel. The original track itself is lean and spare, just the three of them in the studio, no extra polish, no hole in any of the lines. Dylan talked about trying not to use too many words, making sure every line carried something so you could not stick a finger through the stanza. Businessmen drinking his wine and plowmen digging his earth, the joker looking for a way out while the thief tells him the hour is getting late. That conversation still lands like a late-night talk around a campfire when the weather is turning.

Before any of those records existed, the man who wrote them was Robert Allen Zimmerman, born in Duluth and raised up in Hibbing, Minnesota, after the family moved when he was still a kid. His father worked in the furniture and appliance business, and the boy picked up a guitar around age fourteen after soaking up Hank Williams, Little Richard, and Elvis Presley on the radio. In high school he put together a rock and roll outfit called the Golden Chords and played the local hops. After graduation he headed to the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and drifted into the Dinkytown coffeehouses, where he started calling himself Bob Dylan after the Welsh poet. Woody Guthrie’s songs had already grabbed him hard. He said you could listen to Guthrie and actually learn how to live. Restless and determined to meet the man, he left school, hitchhiked east, and landed in New York City in the winter of 1961. He found Guthrie in the hospital in New Jersey and then set about making himself at home in Greenwich Village. He played Gerde’s Folk City, opened for John Lee Hooker, and got a New York Times review that caught the ear of Columbia’s John Hammond. Hammond signed him, and the first album came out the next year, mostly covers with only a couple of originals. From there the road opened up, the motorcycle accident slowed him down for a spell, and the songs kept coming, including the ones that filled John Wesley Harding once he settled back in at the Woodstock house.

The Zoo Crew keeps coming back to this track because it still feels unfinished in the best way. You can hear the same wind that Dylan said started howling outside that watchtower. For more on the man and the music, the official site is right there at bobdylan.com, and you can follow the verified accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and X. Fans who want a place to trade stories and ride along with the shows have the Bob Dylan Fan Club at thebobdylanfanclub.com, started at Bob’s own request, along with their active group on Facebook. Spin the dial over to THE ZOO any time the watchtower comes around again, Zoo Freaks. The hour is always getting late somewhere, and the records are still turning.