Many artists have covered Bob Dylan songs, but one title seems to stand out above the rest:

"All Along the Watchtower"

First heard off Dylan's 1968 album, John Wesley Harding, the song's character was much different than the electric guitar versions we hear today. For a handful of tours, Dylan would consistently play it third in every set. If you have seen him in concert lately, you would know he discontinued playing it third(actually, it is believed to have been taken out of regular rotation after the illness of May, 28, 1997). However, whether Dylan will plays it or not, you can still find the single covered by artists including U2, Jimi Hendrix, Indigo Girls, Neil Young, Richie Havens, Ellis Paul, Michael Hedges, The Grateful Dead, Rush, Frank Marino, Dave Matthews Band, Dave Mason, etc. The MP3 Posting consists of all the different recordings I could find of Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower."


The following is a list of special sound files called MP3's, which require a special player. These special players are free to the public. Two players I like in particular are Microsoft's Window's Media Player 6.0 ( plays just about every kind of media file, including sound files like ".mp3", ".wav", ".snd", ".au", ".aif", ".aifc", ".aiff", ".mid", ".rmi", ".asf", ".asx", ".ram", and ".ra" and video files like ".mpg", ".mov", ".qt", ".avi", ".ram", and ".ra.") and Winamp (for highest quality of sound, it comes with an equalizer, playlist maker, and great graphics) Also, there is a file, "watchtower.zip", which requires an unzipping tool to get to the actual file. If you don't already have one, I recommend WinZip. Good Luck!

Lyrics of "All Along the Watchtower"

"All Along the Watchtower" is only twelve lines long and takes two minutes and thirty seconds to perform. Understated, precise, economical, this important song reveals still more of the overtly moral message Dylan is expounding throughout this album. It begins with a wonderful descending minor progression from A to B minor to G: "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." This joker sounds like the old Dylan, or Mick Jagger on "I can't get no satisfaction...." But wait, this is only the premise, this joker is just a straw man: "No reason to get excited," the thief, he kindly spoke, "There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke." Dylan himself has been saying that for five years. But now he goes on to reject and transcend that childish point of view: 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. Dylan, brushed by death and blessed with rebirth, is telling us now to avoid the trap of existential angst, to eschew the irresponsible, cop-out attitude that life is just too crazy and meaningless for us to do anything about. No, he says, we've been through all that. Time is passing. Let's cut out the nonsense and get down to business. We're at the watchtower here, on the ramparts, there's no time for foolishness, life is short. Sure there's madness and confusion all around us; it isn't simple and it isn't easy. But it's up to us to make our own meaning. Life is no joke. We have to take charge of it, from within, for ourselves, warily, carefully, thoughtfully. No one's going to do it for us, either. Life's meaning and its rewards will come only from our determination, our hard work, high seriousness and - as we shall see - our love. - Alan Rinzler 1978 Bob Dylan: The Illustrated Record Italian Surrealist Giorgio de Chirico's The Great Tower depicts "two riders" approaching the watchtower. Click to enlarge.   "In John Wesley Harding Dylan reiterates his belief that compassion is the only secular manifestation of the religious experience... Indeed, while change in Dylan's universe is the natural state of things, impatience to implement change is the supreme form of egotism, the ultimate vanity: it is an individual's setting himself apart from the flow. Preoccupation with the methodology of change, like any magnification of one small aspect of the flow of life, implies a ceaseless intellectualization which precludes a possibility of the religious experience." -Steve Goldberg Saturday Review Inc.     "In Harding, Dylan superimposed a vision of intellectual complexity onto the warm, inherent mysticism of Southern Mountain music, rather like certain French directors (especially Jean-Luc Godard) who taken American gangster movies and added to them layers of 20th century philosophy. The effect is not unlike Jean-Paul Sartre playing the five-string banjo. The folk element gains a Kafka-esque chimericality, and the philosophy a bedrock simplicity that leaves it all but invisible and thus easy to assimilate." Paul Nelson Rolling Stone 1969

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