Day 242: The Poetics of Rock

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

Day 131: Book Excerpt: Bob Dylan

The whole Bangla Desh set was premiered over the radio a few nights ago, neatly coinciding with the Indian Army’s rout of the West Pakistani forces and the liberation of the East, thus putting the sweet seal of history on the cause that launched this record in the first place. Three of us sat listening for an hour or more, though admittedly we weren’t as polite as the audience at George Harrison’s Concert for Bangla Desh at Madison Square Garden last August: we turned off the first half-hour of Ravi Shankar. Then the Harrison-Leon Russell-Mad Dogs & So On part began.

I found most of it dull, and after a bit the whole show began to bother me immensely. Admittedly the huge band was tight and well-rehearsed. Harrison sang with conviction and Eric Clapton was spectacular. OK, it was well-produced. Well-produced oatmeal.

Every other song seemed to be about one of three things: 1) God saving us. 2) This is the way God planned it. 3) Chant the name of the Lord and you’ll be free. (Nick Tosches has suggested that this course of action did not seem to be getting the people of Bangla Desh very far; nasty of him to bring that up.)
All of the devout rockers on Harrison’s stage seemed to be missing their own point. If this gibberish had any relation to reality, or even any internal consistency—perils of pantheism—then the same god that allowed this wonderful concert to take place was also raining hot death on the other side of the globe. To achieve some kind of spiritual balance, perhaps.

Well, it reminded me of Joseph Heller’s God, the Vicious Practical Joker. The songs chosen made a mockery of what the event was supposedly about—raising funds and world awareness for the plight of refugees from the war in East Pakistan and the fight for Bangladeshi independence—and I imagine this comes across much more blatantly on record than it did at the concert itself, since the electric presence of the stars doesn’t blank out any doubts in a mindless glow of being there with George, Ringo, and Bob Dylan. Which is nothing to sneeze at: I’d have liked to have been there too. But I wasn’t, and I have to take what I can get, along with the rest of the audience that wasn’t there either, and what I get is a feeling of being sold down the river, smothered by some of the silliest ideals of western civilization, and flattered by a superstar glitter that fails to hide the almost total emptiness of the production.

There’s a line in Harrison’s “Beware of Darkness” where he warns, “Beware of maya,” maya being an Indian word for “veil of illusion”—and without even going into the fact that the avoidance of darkness is a perfect definition of illusion, it has to be said that a veil of illusion is precisely what this concert has to offer.

There are some exceptions to the bland sound, the horrible fake gospel shouts, and the silly songs. Leon Russell makes a valiant attempt to erase the pompous mood of the event, delivering a wild version of “Jumping Jack Flash,” braking into a long jive story that resolves itself into the Coasters’ “Youngblood” and finally edges out and roars back to where it began. That’s exciting, and as anomalous to the general drift of the concert as two other high points, Ringo’s “It Don’t Come Easy” and Dylan’s last number, “Just Like a Woman.” If the genius of this man seems occasional now, when it comes it is staggering, and nothing can touch it. Ah, Bob Dylan!

One of the best things about Dylan’s side of the set is that it can make you feel like a fan again. A Bob Dylan fan. It’s moving to hear George Harrison say, “I’d like to bring out a friend to us all, Mr. Bob Dylan,” and implicitly join in the cheers; to recognize, in yourself, the thrill the audience is experiencing; to delight in the applause that breaks in on the choruses they and you have publicly celebrated and privately cherished for years. In spite of the fact that the movie promises to be uniquely boring, I’ll be there to see how Ringo looks playing tambourine with Bob Dylan.

Dylan’s performance is steady, but most of his material seems just out of his reach, as if he couldn’t quite catch the emotional rhythm of the songs. But from the first notes of “Just Like a Woman,” it’s clear that something else is happening. Here he rises to one of the great performances of his career. He sings the song the way Hank Williams would sing it if he were still alive, with the ghostly chill of “Lost Highway.” It may well be the equal of anything he has ever done, and if it took him five years to regain the power he once had, then what matters is not how long it took, but that he has regained it. What began, some years ago, as a change in attitude, seems finally to have grown into a changed point of view, and an authentic, as opposed to a contrived, maturity.

His performance reveals nuances of emotion and commitment that do not even seem to be implied in the recording we know from Blonde on Blonde. What is absent from the song, now, is the sense of bitterness that emerged both as a complaint and contempt five years ago, and the performance here imposes an enormous agony on the simple matter of living through the day, until finally, in the last verse, it increases in intensity and Dylan’s voice is acting out a resistance to the calamity of life that stops a long way short of forgiveness.

~~Bob Dylan -by- Greil Marcus