Bob Dylan Heard Jimi Hendrix’s Cover of His Song — What Dylan Said in Response Left Everybody SILENT D

In 1968, Jimi Hendrix walked into Olympic Studios in London with a song he had heard a few months earlier on a Bob Dylan album, a song called All Along the Watchtower three, and played it for his band with the explanation that they were going to record it. The band recorded it over the course of three days.

When it was finished, what they had made bore almost no resemblance to what Bob Dylan had originally recorded. The tempo was different, the texture was different, the emotional register was entirely different. Hendrix had taken a folk song about two men standing on a watchtower watching something approach and turned it into the sound of the thing itself approaching.

When Bob Dylan heard what Jimi Hendrix had done, Bob Dylan said three words that no songwriter says about another artist’s cover of their own material. Bob Dylan said, “It’s his now.” To understand what Jimi Hendrix did to All Along the Watchtower, you first have to understand what Bob Dylan had done with it.

The song was written in 1967 during the period that produced The Basement Tapes, the same extended creative retreat in Woodstock that had followed the motorcycle accident of July 1966, the same pink farmhouse basement where Bob Dylan and the musicians who would become The Band had been making music without an audience or a deadline or a label looking over anyone’s shoulder.

Bob Dylan was writing a great deal during that period and the productivity was high enough that the material came faster than it could be fully evaluated. The Basement Tapes would eventually yield hundreds of recordings. Some of them works of considered craft and some of them experiments that were valuable precisely because they were made without the pressure of an audience waiting for them.

All Along the Watchtower emerged from this atmosphere of productive freedom. Accounts of how long the writing took vary across different sources, but the consensus among the people present places it at somewhere between 10 and 20 minutes. A short time for a song that would come to matter as much as this one did.

Bob Dylan sat down with a guitar or at a table. The exact circumstances of the composition are not recorded in sufficient detail to reconstruct. And the words arrived, the chords presented themselves, and within a short time the song existed as a finished thing. What Bob Dylan had made was something that sounded, in the original version, like an ancient folk parable.

Two voices on a hillside at night, a joker and a thief, speaking about the world below them in terms that were both specific and impossible to pin to a single meaning. The acoustic arrangement was deliberately spare and unhurried. The song moved at the measured pace of a conversation between two people who have nowhere to be.

Bob Dylan recorded the song formally in Nashville in November of 1967 as part of the sessions for the John Wesley Harding album that would appear in December. The Nashville recording retained the quality of the original basement conception, acoustic guitar, understated rhythm section, harmonica appearing briefly, the whole thing done in under 4 minutes with a lightness that suggested the song had not required enormous effort to produce.

The album version was careful and controlled and good, and it would have remained one of a large number of good Bob Dylan songs from that period if what happened next had not happened. Jimi Hendrix in 1967 and 1968 was operating at a level of creative intensity that his contemporaries found difficult to describe without reaching for superlatives that themselves seemed inadequate.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience had released Are You Experienced in May of 1967 and Axis: Bold as Love in December of the same year, and both records had demonstrated something about what Hendrix was capable of that the guitar-playing world was still processing. Hendrix did not play the instrument so much as he conducted it.

Every sound the guitar could make was available to Hendrix as a deliberate expressive choice, and the range of emotional states he could move through within the span of a single song was unlike what any other guitarist had previously done on record. Hendrix was also a devoted listener, which is a quality that receives considerably less attention than his playing, but is inseparable from it.

Hendrix listened constantly and across a wider range than his public persona suggested. Blues, classical, jazz, soul, and the experimental rock of his own era all fed into what he produced. Hendrix had the particular talent of hearing in other people’s recordings the elements that were already pointing toward where he was going, and his instinct when he encountered this kind of potential was not to note it intellectually, but to pick up a guitar and find out what it contained.

Hendrix heard All Along the Watchtower in late 1967 on the John Wesley Harding album, and his response was immediate. He played it for the members of the Experience and told them they needed to record it. The decision was characteristically intuitive. Hendrix did not explain at length what he heard in the song or articulate a theory about what his version would do with it.

Hendrix heard something in it that needed to be pulled out and made fully visible, and the way Hendrix pulled things out of music was to go into a recording studio and play until the thing finally revealed itself. Olympic Studios in Barnes, Southwest London, was where Hendrix worked when he was in England, and it was where the recording of what would become his version of the song began in January of 1968.

The sessions ran across three days, not because the song resisted being recorded, but because Hendrix kept hearing new things in it and going back to add them. The basic structure was established quickly. Hendrix set a tempo that was significantly faster than Dylan’s version, gave the rhythm a compressed urgency that Dylan’s recording had not had, and built the arrangement around electric guitars rather than acoustic ones.

What Hendrix did with the guitars was the transformation. The opening note of the song, a single string bend that rises and then falls before the first chord, announced immediately that this was not a folk song anymore. It was an electric event, and whatever it was about thematically, its sonic surface communicated emergency and forward motion in a way that Dylan’s version, for all its qualities, had not attempted.

Noel Redding played bass and Mitch Mitchell played drums, and both musicians had spent two years playing with Hendrix developing the ability to understand what was being asked of them, even when Hendrix did not articulate it in conventional musical terms. The rhythm section they built for All Along the Watchtower served Hendrix’s guitar without competing with it, which is a harder technical accomplishment than it sounds in a song moving at that speed.

The result of the three days was a recording that ran for 3 minutes and 57 seconds and contained more acoustic information, more sonic events, more emotional movement, more texture than most albums of that era produced in 45 minutes. The final mix required additional work, various overdubs and adjustments across subsequent sessions before the track was considered finished.

What distinguished Hendrix’s approach on this recording from his handling of original material was the degree to which he was trying to extract rather than impose, to find within the structure Bob Dylan had built the sonic possibilities the structure was already reaching toward. The song was released in May of 1968 as a single and reached number five on the US Billboard Hot 100, becoming one of Hendrix’s most commercially successful releases.

By the standards of what Jimi Hendrix released during his career, this was a reasonable chart result. By the standards of what the song did to the people who heard it, the chart position was beside the point. Critics who had been trying to describe what Hendrix was doing with the electric guitar for two years found in this recording a clearer example than anything that had preceded it of how Hendrix understood the instrument’s relationship to song, not as a vehicle for technical display, not as an ornament on top of existing material, but as the primary means by which the emotional content of a piece of music was conveyed. In Dylan’s version, the words carried the song. In Hendrix’s version, the guitar was the words and the words were the guitar, and neither existed independently of the other. Bob Dylan heard Jimi Hendrix’s version of the song in 1968 after the single was released. The precise circumstances where Bob Dylan was, who was present, what was playing the record, have been described in various ways depending on the account. What does

not differ across those accounts is the nature of Bob Dylan’s reaction, which was one of the rare moments in Bob Dylan’s professional life where the carefully maintained wall of irony and obliqueness was simply not available. Bob Dylan listened to what Jimi Hendrix had done and was stopped by it in the most literal sense.

Whatever Bob Dylan had been doing before the record started was suspended while the record played. Bob Dylan listened to what Jimi Hendrix had done and was stopped by it, not in the sense of being unable to appreciate it, but in the sense of being held in place by something that required full attention to fully receive.

What Hendrix had built from the raw material of Bob Dylan’s song was not a cover version in the way that term was commonly understood in 1968. It was a revelation of the song’s interior, the discovery of a meaning that the original recording had contained but had not brought to the surface.

Bob Dylan said later in interviews spread across the following decades that hearing Jimi Hendrix’s version of All Along the Watchtower changed how Bob Dylan understood his own song. The words Bob Dylan used differed across different accounts, but the core statement remained consistent. Hendrix had found something in the song that Bob Dylan had put there without knowing it was there.

This is a statement about songwriting and listening that is considerably more interesting and more rare than simple admiration for a cover version. What Bob Dylan was describing was a phenomenon specific to creative work, the experience of making something and later discovering through another person’s encounter with it that the thing contained more than the maker had consciously put into it.

Hendrix had been the instrument through which the song’s full potential became audible to the person who had written it. The practical consequence of Bob Dylan’s encounter with Hendrix’s version became visible in Bob Dylan’s own performances of the song from 1974 onward. Bob Dylan had been absent from touring for 8 years.

When the Before the Flood tour with the Band began in January of 1974, it was the first time in nearly a decade that Bob Dylan was performing in front of large audiences, and the set included All Along the Watchtower. The way Bob Dylan performed it made immediately clear that something had changed in how Bob Dylan understood the song.

When Bob Dylan returned to touring and began performing All Along the Watchtower live, Bob Dylan did not attempt to simply reproduce his own original recording. Bob Dylan performed the song at a significantly faster tempo than the John Wesley Harding version, closer to the urgency that Hendrix had established, with an electric arrangement that acknowledged what Hendrix had demonstrated was possible inside the song structure.

Bob Dylan was, in effect, performing Hendrix’s understanding of the song rather than his own original conception of it. This was not imitation, it was acknowledgement. The recognition that Hendrix had done something to the song that could not be undone, and that any subsequent performance of it would necessarily take place in relation to what Hendrix had shown.

The statement Bob Dylan made has attracted a great deal of attention over the decades because of how unusual it is for any songwriter to say it, and also because of the specific generosity it contains. There is nothing reluctant in the statement. Bob Dylan did not say that Hendrix had made an interesting version, or that Hendrix had done something clever with the material.

Bob Dylan said the song belonged to Hendrix. This is the language not of admiration, but of session. The acknowledgement that ownership of the song had moved from the person who wrote it to the person who had most fully understood it. The standard relationship between a songwriter and a cover version of their song is one in which the songwriter retains authority over what the song is and what it means, and the cover version is understood as an interpretation that may be interesting or successful, but remains secondary to the original. What Bob Dylan was saying by claiming Hendrix owned the song was something different from a compliment. Bob Dylan was saying that the hierarchy had reversed, that the cover version had become the primary version, that what Hendrix had done in Olympic Studios in January of 1968 had replaced what Bob Dylan had done in Nashville in November of 1967 as the definitive articulation of what the song contained. Jimi Hendrix died in September of 1970, 27 years old, at a

hotel in London. He had been in the process of planning a new direction for his music, had recently formed a new band, and had spoken to people around him about the things he wanted to do next. None of that happened. What remained was the body of work he had produced in 4 years of intense recording, an extraordinary and abbreviated catalog that included near its center the 3 minutes and 57 seconds he had spent in January of 1968 rebuilding a song Bob Dylan had written in 15 minutes in a Catskills basement. His recording of All Along the Watchtower outlasted him in the way that very few things outlast the people who make them. Bob Dylan has performed the song in virtually every touring setlist since 1974. Not every performance and not every tour, but consistently enough that the song has become one of the fixed points in Bob Dylan’s relationship with his own catalog. A song that Bob Dylan plays in a way that acknowledges its second birth in Hendrix’s hands, rather than

pretending it was only ever what Bob Dylan first made it. This is an unusual thing for an artist to do, and it is one of the reasons the story of the two versions has remained worth telling for more than 50 years. Every time Bob Dylan plays All Along the Watchtower on stage, Bob Dylan is making a choice, the choice to perform the song at a tempo and with an intensity that Jimi Hendrix established in recognition of what Hendrix revealed.

The song was Bob Dylan’s for 20 minutes in 1967 during the writing, and it was Bob Dylan’s for a few months of 1968 between the Nashville recording and the moment Hendrix’s version arrived. After that, by Bob Dylan’s own accounting, it belonged to someone else. And what it became in that other person’s hands is one of the clearest demonstrations in the history of popular music of what it means for two artists to encounter each other through a piece of work, and for the encounter to change the work permanently for both of them. If this story changed how you hear All Along the Watchtower the next time it comes on, tell us in the comments. Which version do you reach for first? And if you want more stories like this one, the moments when two artists collided and left both of them different, subscribe right now and turn on the notification bell, because next week we have something even bigger waiting.