When Bob Dylan returned to the stage for the 2024 Outlaw Music Festival Tour, he performed "All Along the Watchtower" for the first time since 2018.
His most-played song returned to the setlist alongside other classics. The tour also included songs fans had longed to hear performed live again such as "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35," "Highway 61 Revisited," and "Silvio."
"All Along the Watchtower" remains the most-played from Dylan's enormous catalog, and his live take has long leaned heavily on Jimi Hendrix's 1968 adaptation, which reimagined Dylan's anxious poem as a raging storm.
The original appeared on Dylan's eighth studio album, John Wesley Harding. Following Dylan's raucous 1966 world tour with The Hawks (later known as The Band) and a motorcycle accident, Dylan had retreated from the spotlight.
He settled into a quiet life with his young family and began jam sessions with The Band at a rental house in West Saugerties, New York called Big Pink. These groundbreaking recordings were eventually collected and released as The Basement Tapes.
Dylan's albums Blonde on Blonde (1966) and John Wesley Harding (1967) bookended the jam sessions at Big Pink though The Basement Tapes wouldn't get an official release until 1975.
The hero of the Greenwich Village folk scene had shocked the music world by going electric, and the Nashville recordings that produced John Wesley Harding feature a return to his earlier form. Still, the Jimi Hendrix Experience expanded Dylan's acoustic tune into a psych-rock jam, nearly doubling the original's running time. If the joker and the thief needed a way out, Hendrix offered them a trip to outer space.
In hindsight, Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower" looks more like a blueprint for Hendrix's definitive cover.
The recordings from Big Pink had circulated as bootlegs for years before Columbia Records released them. Between 1962 and 1966, Dylan routinely changed popular music and the 1967 bootlegs continued his influence.
Graduating from folk hero to rock star, Dylan dragged a reluctant audience with him. So it's interesting to see him return to roots music. He recorded a sparse rendition of "All Along the Watchtower" only to witness Hendrix transform it into its iconic (and electric) form.
Both artists stayed restless and unpredictable at their creative heights. The opening verse could easily be a conversation between the two.
"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"
Before the recorded era, when music existed either as a live experience or transcribed in notation, definitive versions of compositions didn't exist. Compositions evolved through a multitude of interpretations.
Dylan is famous for rarely performing his songs the same way twice.
In 1993, he told the Chicago Tribune how the Hendrix version of "All Along the Watchtower" "overwhelmed" him. Moreover, it changed the way Dylan performed the song live.
"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," Dylan said. "I took license with the song from his version, actually, and continue to do so to this day."