Back in 1974—before the flood—I went to hear Bob Dylan in person for the first time, in Fort Worth, Texas, backed by The Band. The set list is here .( I notice that they quote Bob as saying, before “It Ain’t Me Babe,” “This is another lasting song.” I can tell you that that quote is incorrect. What he said was, “Here’s another message song.”)
Among the numbers he did was “All Along the Watchtower,”
with a nod to the Jimi Hendrix arrangement.
But honestly I prefer the album cut to the live version; it sounds
lonesome and spooky in a way that the latter-day guitar pyrotechnics seem to
bury.
And that eerie song is truly a song for our time, I mean right
now. Consider: in the first verse, a joker complains to a thief that
his property is being stolen; in the second verse, the thief suggests to the joker that although some feel
that “life is but a joke,” “you and I” no longer do. In fact, the thief answers
in a series of stilted cliches: “this is not our fate,” “let us not talk
falsely,” “the hour is getting late.” He doesn’t respond to the joker at all;
there is no communication between the two.
In the third verse, princes keep watch from a tower, with
women and "barefoot servants" moving around in the background. “Outside in the
distance” two riders are approaching, and … we’re back where we started. “There
must be some way out of here,” but the song forms a closed loop. There is no
way out.
It’s actually kind of terrifying, in the same way that the
American scene today is kind of terrifying. Two sides talk in incommensurable codes, while
elites look on impassively from a height. There must be some way out of here. Hey, maybe the answer is blowin’ in the wind,
which has begun to howl.
