All Along the Watchtower

Nobody took a stab at the last trivia question. So I'm going to post the answer. The song is All Along The Watchtower by Bob Dylan. Dylan spent some time after he was in a bad accident thinking about the Bible. There is a debate among his biographers about whether he actually became a Christian, but a lot of his music from this time asks serious questions about ethics, faith and the apocalyptic imagery in Scripture. I think that last category is what I like best about All Along The Watchtower (its one of my favorite songs).

In this song Dylan took some of the images from the Book of Revelations and combined them with some of the reversals he found in the Gospels. In the Gospels, Jesus usually reversed people's beliefs about how the world worked. He would say things like "The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth" or that good shepherds left their flocks to go after the one lamb who has gone astray. These were the opposite of what people thought. Jesus' ultimate reversal occurred when he, God made human, was nailed to a cross and died.

The first verse of All Along The Watchtower goes:

"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.
Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth,
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth."

"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."

Here, the joker is taking his situation utterly seriously, while the thief is nonchalant. The situation in the song is the opposite of what we expect. In the second verse of the song features "two riders" (presumably the joker and thief) approaching "the Watchtower," while "princes [keep] the view."

All along the watchtower, princes kept the view
While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too.

Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl,
Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.

I think that whatever Dylan thought about Christianity at the time, he was trying to reconcile the reversals he read about in the Gospels with some of the images in the Book of Revelations. These images are fiercer than many of us are comfortable with. For example, when Jesus first appears to John he has a sword in his mouth. Its sad that Dylan didn't keep with this stuff, but perhaps if we meditate on the what's going on in the song a little bit we can understand the Bible a little bit better.

Here is a video of Jimi Hendrix (Dylan always said that Hendrix did a better job performing the song) performing the song: