Dylan Dissected #2: All Along The Watchtower

If you have visited my blog before, you've probably realised that I have changed my title from MrDylanRecords to 'This Is Not Our Fate'. I'm still toying around with a more permanent name for the blog, but at the moment I want to leave it as it is. The phrase is of course a lyric from one of my favourite Dylan songs, All Along the Watchtower. It is a song that perhaps surprisingly, took me a long time to warm up to. I always admired the song, but like so many others I preferred the electric version by Jimi Hendrix. It is only in the last few months that I have started to think more deeply not only about Watchtower, but the whole of Dylan's mysterious 1967 masterpiece, John Wesley Harding. The album has always fascinated me. Why and indeed how, could someone of the stature of Bob Dylan go from the claustrophobic, urban tone of an album like Blonde On Blonde to the parable-like musings of John Wesley Harding in just over a year. I deduce that he must have undergone a profound change of both mind and artistic intention. Of course he also recorded the infamous basement tapes in between these two masterworks, and although they contain much genius in their own right, I think we can see them as an aside in Dylan's album chronology. Where Blonde On Blonde seems schizophrenic, intoxicating and indulgent, John Wesley Harding seems quite the opposite; stripped back and grounded in a clear-minded morality. Although I prefer the former, I see JWH as a hugely bold artistic statement, an obvious attempt to distance himself from the drug induced chaos of the previous 2 years, which had seen him both rise and fall from the dizzying heights of fame and fortune. In a year where the rest of popular music was moving in the opposite direction towards psychedelia and the abstract, Dylan retreated to the serenity of Woodstock to regain some clarity and seek truth through his music.

After 3 stunning opening tracks that very much set the musical and lyrical mood for the album, we get the 2 and a half minute, All Along the Watchtower. This desperately short run time demands that the track to be concise and biting, which it more than delivers on. The track's intro lasts just 15 seconds with a driving guitar chord structure and a screeching harmonica layered over subdued yet noticeable drums. The instrumental does not change much, it doesn't have to. It does a great job of filling the gaps between Dylan's lines, which are clearly divided into two halves. In fact if you count the syllables of each half of each line, they almost exactly mirror each other, "There's too much confusion" (6 syllables) "I can't get no relief" (6 syllables). This way of structuring the song provides a sense of symmetry, forcing the listener to pay attention to every word. Unlike some of his earlier work which is much more descriptive and free-form, a concerted effort is made on Watchtower to make use of every word and syllable. This might not have worked as well as it does without such a disciplined structure in place, which is why the form is just as important to this song as the lyrics. The track reinforces my views on earlier Dylan songs and is something I touched on in my analysis of Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, the way he uses words to punctuate the music in order to create a nuanced and densely layered sound. The song couldn't be further from Sad Eyed Lady topically, yet it obeys the same principle of giving the words and music a sort of symbiotic relationship. In other words, the power is in both the music and words working together.

The track is just 12 lines long, which gives it a parable like quality. Dylan told Rolling Stone in 1968 that the album had 'no blank filler' and that there were no lines that you can 'poke your finger through'. Every word in All Along the Watchtower holds true to this, it has to in order to possess such power. Dylan manages to refrain from using descriptive words that he may have used just 1 or 2 years earlier, without sacrificing any of the imagery. In fact, Watchtower is easily one of his most vivid songs. The imagery of the joker and the thief, the businessmen and plowmen, the princes, barefoot servants and women, the riders approaching the watchtower, the wildcat growling. It is astonishing how Dylan manages to fit so many characters into 12 lines. He was playing to his very well established strength of storytelling and creating immersive visual worlds for his listeners, whilst also being very careful not to let pretty language overshadow the real point of the song, in this case being the joker, thief and their conversation. Perhaps this is why he reverses the verses, setting the scene for the encounter in the last stanza of the song instead of the first. This way round, the discussion between the joker and the thief is not taking place in a crowded, imperfect reality but in sort of vacuum. It is only when the last stanza is uttered that the listener can contextualise what is being said and interpret it. This delay in gratification is very interesting and in a funny way causes the listener to feel like the joker, confused and without relief. It also gives it a cyclical quality of being trapped in the chaos of life. Dylan spoke on this as well, stating he had purposefully not fulfilled the balladeers job on John Wesley Harding, instead reimagining how a story could be told in order to throw out any traditional sense of time.

Although I think the lyrics speak for themselves, lets take a deeper look at them. The opening 2 lines read:

“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

As Dylan had not yet set the stage for the encounter, the listener does not know where 'here' is. It has been speculated that the joker and the thief may represent the two men either side of Jesus at the crucifixion, in which case 'here' would be the apocolyptic situation they found themselves in. It can also be supposed that if the joker and the thief are in fact the two riders who approach the watchtower in the final stanza, then perhaps they have been imprisoned by the powers that be (the princes perhaps?). However there is no confirmation of this. In my opinion, I don't think it matters who they are or where they are. What is clear is that the thief is in distress, desperate for salvation from some opposing force in the world. He goes on to explain the root of his suffering:

Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth

None of them along the line know what any of it is worth”

These lines touch at the very heart of the human condition. The joker is observing a world where people live for worldly pleasures, performing their daily rituals without any idea of where they're going or what they're doing. He seems stuck in a godless world where everything is futile, where nobody knows the true worth of life. Dylan seems to also be observing the nature of social structures as well by juxtaposing the businessmen with the plowmen, yet without any obvious bias for either one. He is saying that no matter what our social status or our 'role' in the world, without the truth we are incomplete. It is at this point that the thief responds:

“No reason to get excited,” the thief, he kindly spoke
“There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke

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”

It seems like he is saying that the businessmen and plowmen that the joker speaks of see life as meaningless, devoid of any purpose and truth. He is consoling the joker, attempting to put his doubts about the world around him to rest. He tells the joker that they've 'been through that', they've been in the position of these people and thus can understand its uselessness. He assures the joker that it is not their fate to live such a life and that they must push forward towards the truth. I think in these two stanzas Dylan encapsulates the two sides of the human psyche. The first displays our tendency to doubt the existence of meaning, and exhibit the need for distraction from our certain deaths, whilst the second displays a deeper and contradicting need to actively seek the truth, to never fully resign ourselves to a futile existence. The second verse pinpoints the moment of total clarity when the material world dissolves and a person realises that they must finally be strong. It echoes a line from It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) where Dylan states "you lose yourself, you reappear, you suddenly find you got nothing to fear". He is describing the awakening of a person from the perils of a broken world to a realisation that the truth is in fact out there. The last line of the stanza has obvious biblical implications. The thief acknowledges that they are running out of time. But until what exactly? It could be until Christ is crucified, or until his second coming to earth. These are the more likely interpretations, but the thief could also mean that they are simply getting old, they only have a short time left to live, therefore they must not mince words or waste time.

The final stanza puts the dialogue in some kind of context as we are plunged into one of Dylan's bizarre hotchpotch worlds, filled with interesting archetypes and imagery: 

All along the watchtower, princes kept the view

While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too

We can assume since the verse structure has been reversed that these 2 lines should be the first in the story. Princes keep the view from the watchtower, while women and servants come and go, presumably to satisfy the needs of wealthy men, symbolised by the princes. The power in these lines is their detachment from any sense of judgement. Dylan plays the observer, not the moral judicator. Without this bias we can seek something deeper in the world Dylan is depicting, and relate it to the words of the joker and the thief we have already heard. This kind of objectivity and straight talking is rare in music, even in Dylan's own work, although he struck upon it more times than most artists. There is not a single word or phrase wasted on Watchtower, every line develops the narrative and expands the consciousness of the listener. This lack of filler was clearly something Dylan was aiming to do on the song, and it wouldn't surprise me if he wrote it in a similar fashion to Like a Rolling Stone, by starting with a much longer set of lyrics and painstakingly refining it until it contained nothing but the vital information and imagery. The song concludes with these two lines:

Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl

Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl

The image of the wildcat could be symbolic of something or it could be one of the only descriptive devices in the song. Whatever the case it certainly serves to enrich the setting of the watchtower for the listener, perhaps placing it on the great rural planes of America where wildcats are most commonplace. Taking it more literally, the wildcat could symbolise the overwhelming forces of nature, capable of doing much more damage than mankind can. With the last two lines, Dylan conjures up a feeling of dread and an predicts an imminent storm for those in the watchtower. The wildcat could also represent some kind of evil, not quite upon those in the watchtower but within striking distance. Those in the watchtower can only hide from the truth for so long before it it is unescapable. The riders approach the watchtower, bringing with them the howling wind. This could also be a metaphor for the coming of truth to the unenlightened. A great shake up of the established order is underway, led by the two riders. But indeed if they are the joker and the thief, then perhaps the opening dialogue is evidence that their mission was unsuccessful. It is easy to theorise on the meaning of these last 4 lines, but ultimately Dylan wanted to leave Watchtower open-ended. The two parts are clearly related, but it is up to you to decide how they fit together. 

The biblical allusions in All Along The Watchtower are impossible to miss, and the track can certainly be read in a religious context, but I don't think it is required in order to get something from it. One thing's for sure though, Dylan's writing at this time was being heavily influenced by the large King James Bible that he kept on his kitchen table in Woodstock - he even talks about it in Chronicles. Despite claims that Bob was an atheist in his formative years, there is no doubting that he always had an interest in religion. Even his early work contains direct references to christianity, and by JWH nearly every track seems intimately linked with bible texts. With this song for instance we see strong similarities to a passage in the Book of Isaiah. On Watchtower and others on JWH, I feel Dylan manages to weave these deep moral threads into songs that are both alluring and thought provoking, whilst still maintaining his trademark storytelling. A decade later, he would embark on a series of albums dubbed his 'born again trilogy', which were ultimately branded as far more dogmatic and evangelical than what he gave us on John Wesley Harding. This is what gives the album a liberating quality. It never feels like we are being spoken down to by the narrator, but rather taught lessons about ourselves that perhaps we already knew but had long forgotten. The jarring nature of a song like Watchtower brings these deep truths back into our mind's eye and forces us to confront some difficult questions about ourselves and our society.

As is always the case with art, it is easy to conflate the artist with the work being produced. Understanding the context of where Dylan was at this point in his career may provide us with evidence of the song's origin and influences, but it is important to note that this is almost certainly not a personal song. Some have suggested that Dylan may have cast himself as the joker in Watchtower, along with Elvis as the thief for stealing African American music for the white race. For sure, the first verse does seem to be in line with how Dylan might have been feeling during the mid sixties. The world tour of '66 had all but killed him, and as he retreated to Woodstock it seemed he wanted one thing above all, a bit of relief. This is certainly one way to read the song, yet I feel it significantly dampens the transcendental power and mystery of it all. For me, this is a song that needs to be read objectively. It is really interesting to see the shift in Dylan's songwriting at this time. Having carved out the path for the modern singer-songwriter with his previous 7 albums, he seemed weary of having to carry such a responsibility on his shoulders. His work on this album could be seen as a regressive step back from the high water mark in creative expression that was Blonde on Blonde, but this is not the case. Instead it is an example of an artist digging back into the very roots of American music, and coming out with an album that sounded both old and new at the same time.

All Along The Watchtower is one of Dylan's most cryptic compositions. It attempts to force the listener to contemplate one of life's greatest questions, what is it all worth? Moreover, what might it cost to pursue to truth? For me, the song works because it can be read in a multitude of ways, not confined to its obvious biblical allusions but well anchored by them. The reverse verse structure combined with its unnerving instrumental has the listener unable to avoid its sense of an almost unbearable truth about the human species. Dylan clearly loves the song, having now played it a staggering 2257 times in concert, whilst it has also become one of his biggest hits. I view it as the majestic centrepiece on perhaps his most overlooked album, a track that continues to give me more and more each time I return to it.

I want to thank Nerdwriter1 on YouTube for his fantastic video about this song. His analysis formed the basis for this blog post and taught me many things that I didn't know about the track. I strongly encourage you all to go and check it out, along with the rest of his awesome channel!

Dylan Dissected #1: Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands

I have been digging back into Bob Dylan's catalogue recently, as I often do considering he is my favourite artist of all time and has perhaps the richest discography of any musician in popular music to date. I keep having the urge to listen to Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, Bob's ode to his then wife Sara Lownds. It has always ranked among my favourite songs of his 'wild mercury' period in the mid 60's (his best period in my humble opinion), only behind masterpieces like Visions of Johanna. But I've never really considered why the song is so powerful. Many critics have cited its lyrics as sloppy and overly pretentious, a critique I don't think can be thrown at many Dylan songs. I do see where these people are coming from though. Reading the lyrics is mystifying to say the least. The metaphors seem slightly strained and sometimes even non-sensical. And yet, the song has always drawn me back, always fascinated me, always had me listening intently to each line. It made me want to look at the song in a bit more depth, so I thought about the song in the context of both Dylan's life and art in general.

After a little research, I found that Dylan also adored this song, and claimed it to be the best song he'd ever written upon its completion in February 1966. There are legendary stories about how Dylan worked in the studio, especially for Blonde on Blonde, keeping his musicians waiting for hours on end whilst he spontaneously added to his songs before sporadically recording them with little to no direction. When it came to Sad Eyed Lady, the band expected to only be playing for a few minutes and had no idea that Dylan intended them to play for almost 12!. As the verses kept coming they just kept playing, with no idea of when the song would finish. From the reports of the musicians who played on it and Dylan's own comments, it is clear that Sad Eyed Lady evolved very naturally. It is a song that sounds like mother earth, something beyond perceivable reality but at the same time inherently real. Upon hearing the acetate, Dylan quipped that it sounded like “old-time religious carnival music” – a description that I think fits it perfectly. There is something ancient and timeless about the sound of it, from the surreal imagery of the lyrics to the soft tone of the band, who all perform sublimely on the track. It is almost lullaby like in how it moves, swaying the listener back and forth until they fall under its dreamy spell.

So in my attempt to try and pin down the song, I have concluded that I love it for a similar reason to why I love the rest of Blonde on Blonde. I think by this point Dylan had almost completely transcended the medium of songwriting, and passed into a realm only a few artists in history have managed to reach. If you look at the lyrics for the songs on Blonde on Blonde, they aren’t technically his best. I think many tracks from Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 display a sharper example of Dylan’s genius, but those albums don’t quite possess the abundance of nuance of Blonde on Blonde. Sad Eyed Lady, amongst other songs on the album, gives the listener a sense that they are tapping into a higher reality, a pool of knowledge that one must nearly completely lose themselves in the music to find.

It is not the words on Sad Eyed Lady that astonish me. They are good, and taken at face value then one can find some really interesting imagery in there. But what really defines a song like this is its complete sound. This is backed up by a few things Dylan said during this period. I read somewhere that when asked about how people should listen to his songs, he replied that although the words are important, their main purpose was to punctuate the music. In other words, the sound of the words and instrumentation together is where the truth and message of the song lies, rather than any literal interpretation of the words. He reinforced this point at his famous San Francisco press conference in December of ’65 when asked if he writes the words or music first, cryptically responding that he just “writes it all”, implying a very holistic approach to songwriting. Of course he talks about having finally created that “wild mercury sound” that he heard in his head before Blonde on Blonde. Songs like I Want You and Sad Eyed Lady encapsulate this, and even though I don’t really know what the term means, somehow I understand what he is saying.

When I listen to the first 3 sides of Blonde on Blonde, I hear the city. It is metallic, rough edged and claustrophobic stuff for the most part. Visions of Johanna describes a vacuous party, Fourth Time Around an encounter with a prostitute, whilst Stuck Inside a Mobile captures a sense of disillusionment and entrapment in urban life. Yet by the time we get to Sad Eyed Lady, the whole pace of the album changes and it opens up. We get the chance to breathe with Dylan, meditate with him if you will. Dylan’s hypnotic voice is the same as it is on much of the rest of the album, yet it summons a different energy entirely, a much more peaceful one. I hear Dylan giving himself completely to the music in this song, almost stepping aside to make room for a more objective truth to come through. It is definitely one of Bob’s least self-conscious songs, which reminds me of what Allen Ginsberg said in No Direction Home, that by 1965 Dylan had become a sort of shaman, able to tap into a higher dimension and transmit it to his audience through the medium of music.

Thinking about the song in the context of Dylan’s marriage to Sara is definitely relevant, but far from the defining characteristic of the track. There is no question that it was inspired by her, as Dylan admitted himself 10 years later. After doing some more research on Sara, it appears that she was a very private person. She had a certain duality to her personality that intrigued the young Bob, and Sad Eyed Lady is a very fitting tribute to her indeed. Nevertheless, I still believe that the song is much more than a love letter to Sara. She is depicted in a divine light and as a symbol of eternal love in a world gone wrong. There seems to be an implicit acceptance in the words and the way Bob is singing them. He doesn’t want to change anything about this woman or the world she inhabits, he simply wants to observe and admire everything unfolding in front of him. This is of course, very un-Dylan like. The songs and albums that preceded Blonde on Blonde showed a songwriter who wanted to challenge ideas and perceptions at every chance he got. One could argue it was a step in the wrong direction for Dylan to waver too far from the finger pointing material he was writing just a year or so earlier, but personally I see songs like Sad Eyed Lady as an example of Bob maturing as an artist and a person, without sacrificing an ounce of his ability to dig deeply into the collective unconscious.

Sad Eyed Lady is not Dylan’s best song lyrically. It does indeed contain countless lines that are among his best, but also a few that seem thrown in to draw out the length of the verses. But thanks to what the fantastic session musicians manage to achieve musically, combined with Dylan’s enthralling vocal performance, it remains one of his greatest achievements as a songwriter. Roger Waters once said that after he heard Sad Eyed Lady he finally realised that it was possible to write 12 minute songs that don’t become tedious to listen to. The song was boundary pushing in more ways than one, being the longest track Dylan had recorded to that point and occupying a whole side on the first significant double album in rock history. It is a song I will always keep coming back to, learning and feeling more each time I do.