“All Along the Watchtower” also has one of the fastest take-offs in rock ’n’ roll—with the very first line we are off and roaring. (Dylan’s “Hurricane” achieved the same difficult feat.)

Note how Jimmy Hendrix, in adding two worthless syllables (“There must be some kinda way out of here”), totally destroys the effect.

--Greg Feeley

Listened to "Blonde on Blonde" in the summer of 1990, during a very, very bad year of my life. I was in my early twenties then, living alone in the big house of a family who spend the summer in Sweden. I rummaged in the father's stock of boring classical LPs and found Bob Dylan. The only popular music in the whole house! For my generation Dylan sounded almost as oldfashioned as Bach. But I sat there in an old armchair, staring out of the window and listened to Blonde on Blonde all day long. for many, many days until I knew the lyrics by heart. I still know them. "To live outside the law you must be honest." Yes.

I remember reading, 40 or so years ago (I think in Rolling Stone), another critic's view that the song's last verse is actually its first, or is simultaneously its first and last, and ever since have heard the story retell itself in that order even as Dylan and so many others sing it as writ.

But "barefoot servants" does seem to be Dylan's original wording. It's what I've always heard him sing, and it's how that line appears in the various editions of Dylan's own book "Lyrics" (I've have just checked the "Lyrics 1962-1985" edition).

And "barefoot servants" makes it own vividly scene-setting sense, I feel, and a bit more than does the more stock and slightly more abstracted "foot-servants," which also doesn't scan quite as well.

Ayup!

I guess it depends on how the lyrics of the songs were acquired. From Dylan's written pages, or from listening and transcribing? Were the transcribed or copied lyrics submitted to Dylan for correction? (That would have placed Dylan in a quandary -- choose between what i did sing and I wanted to/should have sung?). Now that he has a Nobel specifically for what he wrote, all this will become increasingly urgent to decide.

Thanks for the analysis of "All Along The Watchtower". I have been performing the song with blues/rock bands for maybe 10 years. I started with the Hendrix version & couldn't get it to work so I do it Reggae. I have indeed been singing "barefoot servants too", thanks for the correction. I really like the moebius strip concept. Other notes:

1) I have been told by other players that "Watchtower" is the most commonly played song by bar bands.

2) Between the 2nd & 3rd verse everybody takes solos. Coming into the 3rd verse, I channel my chi, fill my lungs, tighten my diaphragm, and belt out "All along the watchtower" with everything I have. I have said many times that this is how I expect to die. Massive cerebral aneurysm belting "All Along The Watchtower".

3) I do the song in Bm, Bm A G A, but every 4th time through do instead Bm A Em7 F#m7

Well okay then. More strangeness even than I thought.

If Dylan has a Nobel Prize for Literature, surely it can't be too long until Ursula Le Guin has hers.

My Address to the Academy is already written.

Recently I had the deep pleasure of teaching and singing Dylan's mystical, gorgeous song "Lay Down Your Weary Tune" to an audience that, for the most part, had never heard it. It's my favorite of his, though obscure, I guess.

I can't think of any poetry I've read that does a better job of properly reducing us humans in the face of giant Nature....in this case, humbling our own best musical offerings in comparison with the Music of the seas, the rivers, the winds.

In this act of humbling it achieves nobility, yes Nobelity, especially as the lyrics are paired with a melody and chord progression vaguely oldish, Scottish, heroic.

Here are the words:

Lay Down Your Weary Tune
Bob Dylan

Lay down your weary tune, lay down
Lay down the song you strum
And rest yourself 'neath the strength of strings
No voice can hope to hum

Struck by the sounds before the sun
I knew the night had gone
The morning breeze like a bugle blew
Against the drum of dawn

Lay down your weary tune, lay down
Lay down the song you strum
And rest yourself 'neath the strength of strings
No voice can hope to hum

The ocean wild like an organ played
The seaweed wove its strands
The crashing waves like cymbals clashed
Against the rocks and the sand

Lay down your weary tune, lay down
Lay down the song you strum
And rest yourself 'neath the strength of strings
No voice can hope to hum

I stood unwound beneath the skies
And clouds unbound by laws
The crying rain like a trumpet sang
And asked for no applause

Lay down your weary tune, lay down
Lay down the song you strum
And rest yourself 'neath the strength of strings
No voice can hope to hum

The last of leaves fell from the trees
And clung to a new love's breast
The branches bare like a banjo moan
To the winds that listen the best

I gazed down in the river's mirror
And watched its winding strum
The water smooth ran like a hymn
And like a harp did hum

Lay down your weary tune, lay down
Lay down the song you strum
And rest yourself 'neath the strength of strings
No voice can hope to hum

Seeing it here, I find I can still sing it. All I remembered, though was the melody and the chorus.

You're right. It is an old one.

Thats astonishing...

I must ask, apropos of Dylan, and my current reading of Love & Sleep, if the references to "Down Along the Cove" in Chapter 10 of the Genitor section are deliberate? They certainly give the song a macabre dimension that I hadn't noticed before.

I appreciate your clarifying: I was taking "cove" to mean a small bay, so this makes more sense in context.

I've never visited the Live Journal site. I was happy to come across the Chemical Wedding in a local bookstore several months ago. I wish I'd been aware of the Kickstarter campaign beforehand.

Many, many years ago, I chanced upon an uncorrected proof of Aegypt in a local thrift shop. I don't know why I didn't pick it up, but I always kick myself for not doing so.

Anyway, cheers!