Bob Dylan’s original recording of “All Along the Watchtower,” like the rest of John Wesley Harding (1967), is an austere affair. Against the contemporary trends in recording, which tended in varying degrees towards the sonic opulence exemplified by Sgt. Pepper’s, and in contrast even to the “thin wild mercury sound” of Dylan’s own Blonde on Blonde album, it strips things down to an elemental level—bass, drums, acoustic guitar, voice, harmonica, three chords, and no obvious sonic manipulations. In this unadorned state the song’s themes of alienation and dread come across with an air of stark resignation.
By contrast, Jimi Hendrix’s recording of the song presents, from its powerful opening flourish, a dramatic narrative that imparts a very different meaning. Hendrix’s rendition has a heroic defiance about it. If the two approaching riders in the song’s lyrics represent uncertainty, if the wind and the wildcat represent danger, if the businessmen are the world’s agents of betrayal, and if claustrophobic confusion threatens to undermine the will of the protagonist, in this version of the song he is willing to pit his musical power against it all.
Hendrix uses various kinds of dramatic strategies in the course of the track to accomplish his transformation of Dylan’s song. In the series of guitar solos that come with each refrain, for example, he superimposes a long-range musical line—which unfolds in a steady ascent across the span of the entire piece—on top of the relentlessly repeating three-chord cycle. He also sharpens the narrative delineation of the track by way of extreme textural contrasts between verses and refrains. The significance of these gestures emerges over the course of the track. But at the beginning it is the sheer sound, the way it “leaps off the record and goes into your ear,” that lets us know we are in for something altogether different from the original version.
While the two tracks share the same song, their material elements are developed in quite different ways. In Hendrix’s version both the instrumental and the vocal performances have an intense urgency about them in their aggressive articulation and rhythmic drive. Throughout the track the timbres are more varied in color and affective significance and fill far more of the frequency spectrum than in Dylan’s version. From the highs of the cymbals and tambourines to the lows of the bass guitar and bass drum, the frequency space is put in play in a way that both animates the musical surface and delineates the track’s structural design. The Hendrix track also presents the ear with striking uses of echo and ambience, which play on our sonic consciousness like impressionistic reflections of the song’s lyrics. The echoes that trail behind their sources as they move across the stereo space resonate with the swirling confusion and untamed defiance of the song’s protagonist. And among the track’s many ambient images, that of the wood block stands out immediately; it casts a prominent shadow that disappears into the depths of the track, a sonic allusion to the “cold distance” from which the two mysterious riders approach. These are among the elements woven together to form the textural tapestry whose interaction with the song imparts the full sense of Hendrix’s recomposition.
The elements that I’ve sketched out fall into five broad categories that represent all of the sound phenomena found on records: 1) musical performance, 2) timbre, 3) echo, 4) ambience (reverberation), and 5) texture. It is the configuration of relationships among these elements that gives the Hendrix track, or any other track, its full meaning and its unique identity. In addition to their phenomenal aspect, these categories include the activities and processes that shape the sounds. Timbre, for example, may be affected by electronic processes such as filtering and compression. Ambient images may be tailored using a variety of ambience simulation techniques. Although these five categories are interdependent, in this chapter each will be explored as a discrete aspect of the compositional project. While this is partly for the sake of analytic discussion, it also reflects something of the compositional process. For in practice the compositional focus continually shifts between isolated elements, various groupings of elements, and the piece as a whole.
~~The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records -by- Albin J. Zak III
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