This 30 Day Song Challenge piqued my interest on Facebook initially, and I figure I'll start putting my choices up here, so that I can have more room to babble on about music for a while, even if I'm the only one who ever reads them. It's nice to have a record of one's thoughts (pardon the pun).
Anyway, the first day of this challenge asks for your favourite song. I didn't even have to think about it.
All Along the Watchtower has been my favourite song for quite some time now. I've experimented with the many, many different versions out there but I always find myself coming back to Hendrix. His version is the most powerful and the most apocalyptic. Dylan's lyrics hint at something dark coming over the horizon, at some radical paradigm shift about to be instigated by the arrival of the two riders, but it's Hendrix's blazing guitars, raw vocals and shattering arrangement that really bring home the fact that something dark is coming, and that some serious shit is about to go down.
Where Dylan's original was subtle and threatening, merely intimating that something's not quite right here, Hendrix's interpretation is an all-out battle cry. The Joker and the Thief are made to be warriors, champions of the ordinary man, riding across the desert on waves of guitar solos to take on the might of the ruling classes, their banners waving in the wind and soaked in LSD.
This song is the voice not only of a generation, but of a society, an entire culture. It speaks of change and of revolution and of those brave few who dare to make a difference, those riders approaching in the cold distance, those people always reaching for change, for a better world, where business men don't drink your wine, and where you can find relief.
It's that relief that Hendrix's guitar is constantly striving for during the song. He moves up, and falls back. He moves further, and falls back, never quite reaching that note that he strives for throughout the song. He pushes a little more each time, and in the end he reaches it. He hits that final note, and he doesn't let it go, because it's the note he's been looking for all his life. In that one final note screaming from Jimi's Strat you can hear the end of anticipation, and the very beginnings of an all-out war.
It's what the song doesn't say, you see, that gives it its power. That final guitar solo fades out tantalisingly, leaving us to wonder what happens after the Joker and the Thief reach the Watchtower. The song's a prelude. A prologue. A set-up with no punchline, because the punchline changes every time depending on who's doing the telling and who's doing the listening. This song ends on a cliffhanger, a to-be-continued that never is. It's that old horror movie adage: never show the monster because the audience's imagination is more powerful than anything you could put on screen.
Dylan knew this, that the listener's imagination was more powerful than anything he could sing about, and Hendrix understood this when he took Dylan's unassuming mid-album track and made it into the ominous prelude to war that it is. He crashes into the song almost drunkenly, anger and portent seeping from his guitar, and leads you wandering through the desert to find Dylan's mythical figures preparing for the biggest thing they have ever done. Then he drops you. He leaves you outside the walls of the Watchtower wondering what went on inside.
But the point of the song---both Dylan's and Hendrix's---is not what the two riders do in the watchtower, but what they decide to do on their way there. The song is a conversation, it's a decision. The two hint at things, they talk in riddles and make sideward glances at one another, until the end, when they don't say anything, but Hendrix does. They reach their decision through Hendrix's guitar, and as far as the listener is concerned their story is over.
I know I've been rambling a lot here, so I'll get to the point now. All Along the Watchtower has stuck with me for so long because from that first shattering barrage of chords, this song had me. You can't help but listen. Those chords scream at you to pay attention, because this song's got something to say. And that's all I ask for in a song: that it says something. All Along the Watchtower told me years ago that things can change. It told me that there must be some kind of way out of here, because even if there's too much confusion things can always be simplified. I heard this song once, and the wind began to howl.
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