The Greatest Cover Songs of All-time: 3. Jimi Hendrix - "All Along The Watchtower"

0:03 Kalaroga Shark Media. I'm Garrett Fisher and this is the Hit Maker Chronicles. We're at number three on our countdown of the top ten best cover songs of all time, as voted by the staff at Kalaroga Shark Media. We're in the final three now, and this week we're looking at something extraordinary. A cover that's so transformative, so definitive, that the person who wrote the song started performing it the way the cover artist did, a cover that the original artist openly acknowledged as better than his own version. All Along the Watchtower by Jimmy Hendrix. That opening, that guitar riff that sounds like it's cutting through reality itself, That psychedelic, electric, apocalyptic energy that makes the song feel like it's describing the end of the world. It's one of the greatest guitar performances ever recorded. It's one of Jimmy Hendrix's signature songs, and it was written by Bob Dylan as a sparse acoustic folk song on his nineteen sixty seven album John Wesley Harding. This is the story of how Jimmy Hendrix took a Bob Dylan song and transformed it so completely that Dylan himself said it wasn't his song anymore, it was Jimmy's. Let's start with Bob Dylan in late nineteen sixty seven. Dylan had been in a motorcycle accident in July nineteen sixty six and had spent over a year recovering and retreating from public life.

1:34 He'd been at the center of the folk rock revolution, had gone Electric at the Newport Folk Festival in nineteen sixty five to massive controversy, had released Highway sixty one, Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, two of the most important albums in rock history, and then he disappeared. The motorcycle accident gave him an excuse to step away from the relentless touring, the media scrutiny, the pressure to constantly be Bob Dylan, the cultural icon. When he came back in December nineteen sixty seven with John Wesley Harding, the album was a complete departure from what anyone expected. No electric guitars, no elaborate production, just Dylan an acoustic guitar, a bass, and drums. The songs were sparse, biblical, mysterious, short versus cryptic lyrics, nothing explained all along the Watchtower was one of the shortest songs on the album, just three verses, no chorus. The imagery was biblical and apocalyptic, two writers approaching a watchtower, a joker and a thief having a conversation about the meaninglessness of modern life, a sense of impending doom. The song felt ancient and modern at the same time, like Dylan was channeling something from the Old Testament but setting it in the present moment. Dylan's version was recorded in Nashville with bass player Charlie McCoy and drummer Kenny Buttery. The arrangement was minimal, acoustic guitar playing

3:05 simple chords, bass and drums keeping steady time, Dylan's voice delivering the verses in that distinctive nasal tone, not trying to make it pretty, just telling the story. The song lasted two minutes and thirty one seconds. It was over before you could fully process what it was about. It felt like a fragment, like part of a longer story that Dylan was only giving you a glimpse of. John Wesley Harding came out in December nineteen sixty seven. Critics loved it. The sparse production and cryptic lyrics felt profound after the psychedelic excess that had dominated rock music that year, but it wasn't a massive commercial hit. It was respected, studied, analyzed, but it wasn't burning up the charts. And then Jimmy Hendrix heard it. Jimmy was in the middle of recording his third album, Electric Ladyland. He was at the absolute peak of his creative powers. He'd already released Are You Experienced In Axis, Bold As Love, two albums that had redefined what the electric guitar could do, what rock music could sound like. He was experimenting with every effect, pedal, every studio technique, every possible way to make his guitar express things that had never been expressed before. When Jimmy heard Dylan's All Along the Watchtower, he understood something that Dylan maybe hadn't fully realized. This song could be massive.

4:29 The imagery was powerful, the apocalyptic feeling was there, but the arrangement was holding it back. It was too quiet, too restrained. Jimmy heard it as electric rock. He heard the guitar riff that would become one of the most famous riffs in rock history. He heard the drums building intensity. He heard the whole thing exploding in January nineteen sixty eight, Jimmy went into Olympic Studios in London. He brought in Dave Mason from Traffic to play acoustic guitar. He had Noel Reading on bass and Mitch Mitchell on drums, and he started building his version of All Along the watch Tower. The recording process was meticulous. Jimmy recorded multiple guitar parts, layering them to create this dense, swirling sound. The famous guitar riff that opens the song that wasn't in Dylan's version.

5:20 Jimmy created it. That descending figure that sounds like it's falling through space. That's pure Hendrix. The arrangement built tension in a way Dylan's version didn't. Where Dylan's version was steady and calm, Jimmy's version felt urgent. The drums were more aggressive, the bass was more prominent, and Jimmy's guitar work throughout the song was extraordinary. Not flashy solos for the sake of showing off, but melodic lines that heightened the apocalyptic feeling of the lyrics. And then there were the guitar solos, two of them. The first one comes after the first verse, and it's almost like Jimmy is commenting on and what Dylan just said, translating the words into pure sound. The second solo comes at the end, and it's even more intense, more searching, more like Jimmy is trying to find something just beyond reach. The song was longer than Dylan's version, four minutes instead of two and a half, but it didn't feel long. It felt necessary.

6:22 Every second was building towards something. Jimmy's version of All Along the watch Tower was released on Electric Ladyland in September nineteen sixty eight. It was also released as a single, and it became a hit. It reached number twenty on the Billboard Hot one hundred in the US. It went to number five in the UK. It became one of Jimmy's most played songs on rock radio, and critically, it became the definitive version of the song. When people thought of All Along the watch Tower, they thought of Jimmy's version, the guitar riff, the psychedelic production, the sense of impending apocolyps. Dylan's version became a footnote the original, yes, but not the version people remembered. We'll be right back now. Here's where the story gets really interesting. Bob Dylan's response to Jimmy Hendrick's cover wasn't defensive or territorial. It was the opposite.

7:24 Dylan started performing All Along the Watchtower live using Jimmy's arrangement, not his own acoustic version, but Jimmy's electric version. Dylan brought in electric guitars, tried to recreate that driving rhythm, played it the way Jimmy had reimagined it. In interviews over the years, Dylan has been remarkably candid about this. He said that when he heard Jimmy's version, he realized that's what the song should have been. That Jimmy had understood something about the song that Dylan himself hadn't fully grasped when he wrote it. Dylan has said it overwhelmed me. Really, he had such talent. He could find things inside a song and vigorously developed them. He found things that other people wouldn't think of finding in there. He probably improved upon it by the spaces he was using. I took license with the song from his version, actually, and continue to do it to this day. Read that again, I took license with the song from his version. Dylan one of the greatest songwriters in the history of popular music.

8:24 Openly admitting that he borrowed from Jimmy Hendrix's interpretation of his own song. That's unprecedented. That's a songwriter saying you understood my song better than I did. You found something in it that I missed. Your version is the version. This isn't just about ego or humility. It's about recognizing that sometimes a song has potential that the person who wrote it doesn't fully realize. Dylan wrote the words, wrote the melody, created the foundation, but Jimmy built the house, and Dylan was secure enough and honest enough to acknowledge that. Jimmy M. Hendricks died in September nineteen seventy at age twenty seven. He only had two years to perform All Along the Watchtower live after recording it, but in those two years the song became one of his signature pieces.

9:12 It showcased everything he could do with a guitar, melody, rhythm, texture, emotion. It proved he wasn't just a virtuoso showing off, but a musician who could serve a song while still making it his own. After Jimmy died, All Along the Watchtower became even more iconic. It was played constantly on classic rock radio. It appeared on Greatest Hits compilations. It was used in films, most famously in Battlestar Galactica, where it became a crucial plot point. The song took on a life beyond both Dylan and Hendrix, becoming part of the cultural fabric, and every time someone covered it after Jimmy's version came out, they were covering Jimmy, not Dylan. The acoustic folk arrangement disappeared, the electric arrangement became the standard.

10:00 That's the power of a truly transformative cover. It doesn't just reinterpret the song, it becomes the song. So why did Jimmy's version work so much better than Dylan's? What did Jimmy understand that Dylan didn't. Part of it is the instrumentation. Dylan's acoustic version is introspective, mysterious, quiet. It treats the apocalyptic imagery as something distant, something to be observed calmly. Jimmy's electric version treats the apocalypse as immediate, urgent, something happening right now. The distorted guitars, the driving rhythm section, the intensity of the performance. It all matches the Biblical imagery in a way that acoustic folk can't. Part of it is Jimmy's guitar work. Those melodic lines between verses aren't just decoration their commentary. They're Jimmy processing what the lyrics are saying and responding with his guitar. It's like a conversation between Dylan's words and Jimmy's instrument. And part of it is just feel. Jimmy's version feels dangerous. It feels like something important is happening. Dylan's version feels like a guy telling you a story about something that happened once.

11:10 Jimmy's version feels like you're living through it. The song structure helps two three verses, no chorus, cryptic lyrics. It's not a typical pop song structure. Dylan's version treats that as a reason to be minimal, to let the strangeness speak for itself. Jimmy's version treats it as a reason to build intensity, to make each verse feel more urgent than the last, to create momentum even without a traditional chorus. Both approaches are valid, but Jimmy's approach made the song a rock classic. Dylan's approach made it an interesting deep cut on a respected album. In the decades since, All Along the Watchtower has become one of the most covered songs in rock history. Dave Matthews Band, You Too, Neil Young, Pearl, Jam, The Grateful Dead, everyone done a version, and almost all of them base their arrangement on Jimmy's version, not Dylan's.

12:06 Dylan himself continues to perform it live, and his live versions have evolved over the years, but they still owe more to Jimmy's arrangement than to his original recording. That's Dylan acknowledging, night after night, year after year, that Jimmy got it right. All Along the watch Tower is number three on our countdown because it represents the ultimate inartistic generosity and recognition. Bob Dylan didn't have to admit that Jimmy's version was better. He could have insisted on performing his original arrangement. He could have been defensive about it. Instead, he embraced it, He learned from it, He made it part of how he understood his own song. That's not just a great cover story. That's a great story about artistry, about ego, about being secure enough to recognize when someone else has improved on your work. It's also number three because Jimmy Hendrix's version is one of the greatest rock recordings ever made. That guitar work, that arrangement, that performance, it's everything that made Jimmy special distilled into four minutes.

13:09 It's not showing off, it's not excess, it's just brilliant musicianship in service of a great song. And it's a reminder that the best covers don't just pay tribute to the original. They find something in the song that the original missed and bring it to light. Bob Dylan wrote All Along the Watchtower, but Jimmy Hendrix made it eternal. This is Garrett Fisher and this is the Hit Maker Chronicles. Join us next Sunday for number two on our countdown of the top ten best cover songs of all time.