Jimi Hendrix Covered Dylan’s Song in 1968 — Dylan Said ‘It’s His Song Now – ht
November 6th, 1967. Columbia Studio A, Nashville, Tennessee. 2:47 a.m. Bob Dylan sat alone on a wooden stool in the center of the recording studio, his Martin acoustic guitar resting across his lap. The session had been going for 14 hours. The other musicians had gone home. Only the engineer remained, half asleep at the console, waiting to see if Dylan had anything left to record.
Dylan looked down at the lyric sheet on the music stand in front of him. Three verses. Stark apocalyptic imagery. Watchtowers and jokers and thieves. The song was called All Along the Watchtower, and he’d written it in a single sitting a few weeks earlier. The words arriving fully formed like a transmission from somewhere else.
He adjusted the microphone, positioned his fingers on the fretboard, and began to play. The arrangement was simple. Just Dylan’s voice, his acoustic guitar, and later some subtle bass and drums. Sparse. Almost skeletal. The song lasted less than 3 minutes. When Dylan finished the take, he looked up at the engineer, nodded, made a note on the track sheet, and started packing up his equipment.
To him, it was just another Dylan song. Cryptic lyrics, simple melody, nothing particularly remarkable. One of dozens they’d recorded during these Nashville sessions. Dylan packed his guitar into its case and walked out into the November cold. He had no idea he’d just recorded a song that would define the next 50 years of his life.
But not in the way he’d recorded it. Not in this quiet acoustic version that would appear on his album John Wesley Harding 2 months later. Someone else would have to transform it first. Someone who understood electricity and volume and the power of sound to shake the air itself. That someone was practicing guitar in a London flat at that very moment.
3,000 miles away, not yet knowing that Bob Dylan had just handed him the song of his life. January 1968. London, England. Jimi Hendrix sat on the floor of his apartment in Brook Street, surrounded by record albums and guitar magazines. He was 25 years old and already being called the greatest guitarist alive.
His debut album, Are You Experienced, had torn through the music world like lightning through a tree. His second album, Axis: Bold as Love, had just been released. But Hendrix was restless. He’d mastered the technical side of guitar, the feedback, the distortion, the way you could make a Stratocaster scream and weep.
Now he was looking for something else. Songs with weight. Songs that meant something. A friend had brought over an advanced copy of Dylan’s new album, John Wesley Harding. Hendrix put it on his turntable and settled in to listen. The album was shock after Dylan’s previous work. No electric guitars, no rock and roll fury.
Just sparse acoustic songs with biblical imagery and outlaw themes. Hendrix listened to the entire album twice, studying Dylan’s phrasing, his choice of words, the way he could create entire worlds with just a voice and guitar. Then came track three, All Along the Watchtower. Hendrix sat up straighter.
There was something in this song, something underneath Dylan’s quiet acoustic arrangement, something massive waiting to be unleashed. He lifted the needle and played it again. And again. By the fourth listen, Hendrix was hearing something that wasn’t actually on the recording. He was hearing what the song could be, what it was supposed to be.
He reached for his Stratocaster, plugged into his amplifier, and began to play. What emerged from his speakers over the next hour bore little resemblance to Dylan’s gentle acoustic version. Hendrix’s interpretation was electric, urgent, apocalyptic. Where Dylan had whispered, Hendrix would scream. Where Dylan had suggested, Hendrix would declare.
His roommate, Noel Redding, walked in around midnight and found Hendrix still playing the same song over and over, each time discovering new layers, new possibilities. “What is that?” Redding asked. “Dylan,” Hendrix said without stopping, “but it won’t be for long.” January 21st, 1968. Olympic Studios, London. 7:00 p.m.
Jimi Hendrix stood in the recording booth, his Stratocaster slung low across his body, facing a wall of Marshall amplifiers. Behind the glass, producer Eddie Kramer sat at the mixing console, making final adjustments to the microphone levels. “We’re rolling,” Kramer said through the talkback. Hendrix had been thinking about All Along the Watchtower for 3 weeks.
He’d arranged it, rearranged it, stripped it down, built it back up. What he was about to record bore almost no resemblance to Dylan’s original, except for the lyrics and the basic chord structure. Dylan’s version had been a folk song. Hendrix’s would be something else entirely. A rock and roll prophecy, electric and relentless.
The song opened with a bassline that walked like footsteps approaching. Then Hendrix’s guitar entered, not with Dylan’s gentle strumming, but with a slashing rhythmic attack that sounded like warning sirens. When his voice came in, rougher than Dylan’s, more urgent, it felt like a news bulletin from the apocalypse. “There must be some kind of way out of here,” Hendrix sang, and you believed him.
You believed there was no necessary. But the real transformation came in the guitar solo. Where Dylan’s version had no solo at all, Hendrix unleashed something that sounded like the sky cracking open. His fingers moved across the fretboard with impossible speed and precision, bending notes until they screamed, using the whammy bar to make the guitar sound like it was crying or laughing or both at once. The solo wasn’t showing off.
It was storytelling. Each phrase added meaning, creating tension and release, building towards something that felt almost religious in its intensity. When the take ended, the studio fell silent. Hendrix removed his guitar and looked through the glass at Kramer, who sat motionless at the console. “That’s it,” Hendrix said quietly.
“That’s the one.” Kramer nodded slowly. He just witnessed something he’d never seen before. An artist taking another artist’s song and not covering it, but completing it. Finding what had always been there, waiting to be discovered. The recording session had lasted 3 hours, but Hendrix had transformed All Along the Watchtower into something that would outlive both him and Dylan.
He just didn’t know it yet. September 1968. Woodstock, New York. Bob Dylan was in his living room when he first heard Jimi Hendrix had done to his song. A friend had brought over the new Hendrix album, Electric Ladyland, which had just been released. “You need to hear this,” the friend said, placing the needle on track 12.
Dylan had heard covers of his songs before. Hundreds of them. Most were respectful recreations. Someone singing his lyrics with their own vocal style, maybe changing the arrangement slightly, but fundamentally keeping the song intact. What came through the speakers was not a cover. It was a reinvention.
The opening bassline immediately signaled that this was different. Then Hendrix’s guitar entered with that slashing urgent rhythm, and Dylan sat forward in his chair. By the time the guitar solo arrived, that soaring, crying, screaming solo that turned the song inside out, Dylan was shaking his head in disbelief. When the song ended, Dylan asked his friend to play it again.
Then a third time. Then a fourth. With each listen, Dylan understood more clearly what Hendrix had accomplished. He’d taken Dylan’s cryptic three-verse warning and transformed it into something biblical, something massive. He’d found electricity and urgency that Dylan had only hinted at in the acoustic version.
More than that, Hendrix had understood the song. Not just the lyrics, but the feeling underneath them. The sense of apocalypse, of watchtowers scanning the horizon for threats that were already inside the gates. Hendrix had made that feeling tangible. Dylan played his own acoustic version after listening to Hendrix’s, and for the first time in his career, he felt like his recording had missed something essential.
Like he’d written the blueprint, but Hendrix had constructed the building. He called his manager that evening. “Find out how to contact Jimi Hendrix. I need to talk to him.” October 1968. Backstage conversation, location unrecorded. The meeting between Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix happened quietly, away from cameras and journalists.
Those who were present remembered it differently. Some said it was backstage at a concert. Others claimed it was in a New York apartment. The location didn’t matter. What mattered was that Dylan said. Hendrix was nervous, which surprised the people who knew him. This was a man who could play guitar behind his back in front of 50,000 people without breaking a sweat.
But the idea of facing Bob Dylan, the songwriter he admired most, made him uncertain. “I [clears throat] hope you don’t mind what I did to your song,” Hendrix said, his voice quiet. Dylan looked at him for a long moment. When he spoke, his words were careful, chosen with precision. “Mind?” Dylan shook his head.
“It’s not my song anymore. It’s yours.” Hendrix started to protest, but Dylan interrupted him. “I’m serious. You didn’t cover it. You completed it. You found something in there that I’d written but hadn’t fully understood.” Dylan paused. “When I perform it now, I’m going to play it your way, because you were right and I was wrong about what it needed to be.
” This was not false modesty. This was not a famous artist being gracious to a young upstart. This was genuine recognition of something rare. One artist transforming another artist’s work so completely that the original creator acknowledged the superiority of the interpretation. “From now on,” Dylan continued, “when people think of All Along the Watchtower, they should think of your version. That’s the real one.
” Hendrix didn’t know what to say. In his world, respect flowed one direction, from younger musicians to established legends. The idea that he was telling him that he’d improved on a Dylan song seemed impossible. But Dylan meant every word, and he would spend the rest of his life proving it. Over the next year, something unprecedented happened in Bob Dylan’s concert performances.
When he played All Along the Watchtower live, he didn’t play his own acoustic version. He played Hendrix’s electric arrangement, the guitar part, the rhythm, the intensity, all Hendrix. Dylan had essentially adopted someone else’s interpretation of his own song as the definitive version. Musicians who knew both men understood how extraordinary this was.
Songwriters are protective of their work. They might appreciate covers, but they rarely abandon their own arrangements in favor of someone else’s vision. But Dylan recognized something that his ego could have prevented him from seeing. Hendrix had taken a good song and made it great.
He’d found the song’s true form, the one that had been waiting inside Dylan’s simpler version. When Dylan performed it at concerts throughout 1969 and into 1970, audiences familiar with both versions heard the difference immediately. Dylan was playing Hendrix’s arrangement note for note in some places, honoring the choices Hendrix had made, the dramatic pauses, the building intensity, the way the song moved from whisper to roar.
Critics noticed. Some praised Dylan’s humility. Others found it strange that he seemed to be covering a cover of his own song. Dylan didn’t explain. He just kept playing it Hendrix’s way. In interviews, when asked about the song, Dylan’s answer was always some variation of the same theme. “Jimmy found what I was looking for.
Why would I go back to the version that wasn’t quite there yet?” This wasn’t just about one song. This was about artistic honesty. Dylan was demonstrating that the song mattered more than his ego, that finding the best version of a piece of music was more important than protecting his authorship. And Jimi Hendrix, watching from a distance, understood what Dylan was doing.
He was saying thank you in the only way that truly mattered, by playing the song right. The relationship between Dylan and Hendrix never became a close friendship, but it was marked by deep mutual respect. They existed in different musical worlds, Dylan the cryptic poet, Hendrix the guitar god, but All Along the Watchtower connected them in a way that transcended genre.
Hendrix began incorporating more Dylan songs into his repertoire. Like a Rolling Stone became a concert staple, though he never recorded a studio version. He’d introduce it by saying, “This is by the best songwriter alive,” and then proceed to transform it into something electric and urgent, just as he’d done with Watchtower.
Dylan, meanwhile, began thinking differently about arrangement and instrumentation. If Hendrix could find electricity in a simple acoustic song, what else was Dylan missing in his own work? The influence was subtle but real. Dylan’s recordings after 1968 showed a new willingness to experiment with sound, to trust that songs could transform through different arrangements.
In 1969, Hendrix told a journalist, “Bob Dylan is the only writer I really care about. He writes pictures. When I play his songs, I’m trying to paint what he’s writing.” The journalist asked if he thought he’d improved on All Along the Watchtower. Hendrix’s answer was immediate. “No.
I just brought out what was already there. Bob wrote it. I just turned up the volume.” This humility from both men, Dylan saying Hendrix owned the song, Hendrix saying he’d only revealed what Dylan had written, demonstrated something rare in music. Ego could have made this a competition. Instead, it became a collaboration across time and space, two artists bringing out the best in each other without even being in the same room.
Bob Dylan was on tour when he heard the news. Jimi Hendrix had died in London, 27 years old. Asphyxiation. The details were unclear and would remain controversial for decades. Dylan canceled his concert that night. He sat in his hotel room processing what had been lost. Hendrix’s death wasn’t just the loss of a brilliant guitarist.
It was the end of a voice that had understood how to make instruments speak in ways no one else could. Dylan thought about All Along the Watchtower, about how Hendrix had taken three verses and a simple melody and found apocalypse inside them, about how he’d probably play that song thousands more times in his life, and every time he’d be channeling Hendrix’s vision.
The song had become a kind of collaboration between living and dead, between the writer and the interpreter. Dylan would carry Hendrix’s arrangement forward for decades, keeping alive the way Jimmy had heard the song, the way he’d made it scream and cry and warn. In the days after Hendrix’s death, Dylan didn’t make public statements.
That wasn’t his way. But at his next concert, when he played All Along the Watchtower, it felt different. Not like covering someone else’s arrangement, like honoring a friend, like keeping a promise. The audience that night noticed something in Dylan’s performance, an intensity, a sorrow, a recognition that the song now carried weight beyond its lyrics.
It had become a memorial. Bob Dylan has now performed All Along the Watchtower in concert more than 2,000 times. It’s his most performed song, and in every single performance, Hendrix’s spirit is present. Sometimes Dylan plays it with a full electric band, the arrangement clearly descended from Hendrix’s version.
Sometimes he plays it acoustic, but the rhythm, the phrasing, the feeling, all influenced by what Hendrix discovered in 1968. When Dylan was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988, he chose to perform All Along the Watchtower. Not his original version, Hendrix’s arrangement. Even in that moment of honoring Dylan’s own legacy, he honored Hendrix.
Audiences over the decades have come to expect Hendrix’s version when Dylan performs it. The original acoustic recording from John Wesley Harding has become a historical curiosity, interesting to scholars and completists, but not the definitive version. That distinction belongs to Hendrix. This has created one of the strangest dynamics in popular music.
A songwriter’s own composition is best known through someone else’s interpretation, and the songwriter himself agrees with that assessment. Music historians have called it the greatest cover song ever recorded. But cover doesn’t quite capture what happened. Covers replicate. What Hendrix did was transfigure, and what Dylan did, acknowledging that transfiguration, embracing it, spending 50 years playing the song Hendrix’s way, was equally remarkable.
It was an act of artistic humility that few could match. Today, if you ask someone to sing All Along the Watchtower, they’ll sing Hendrix’s version, the electric guitar riff, the urgent rhythm, the explosive solo. Even if they’ve heard Dylan’s original, Hendrix’s interpretation has so thoroughly eclipsed it that it’s become the song’s true form.
Bob Dylan, now in his 80s, still performs it, still plays it Hendrix’s way. In 2016, when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, journalists asked him about his greatest songs. All Along the Watchtower came up. Dylan’s answer, “That’s Jimmy’s song. I just wrote it.” More than 50 years after Hendrix recorded his version, Dylan still deflects credit, still honors the man who took three verses and made them eternal.
This is the story music teachers tell when they want to explain the difference between competence and genius. Dylan’s original was competent, well-written, well-performed, meaningful. Hendrix’s version was genius. It found something that wasn’t just in the notes, but between them, in the spaces, in the air itself.
And Dylan, to his eternal credit, recognized it, acknowledged it, celebrated it. There’s a lesson in that for anyone who creates anything. Sometimes someone else will see your work more clearly than you do. They’ll find possibilities you missed. And if you’re wise, if you’re as wise as Bob Dylan, you’ll thank them.
You’ll learn from them. You’ll let their vision become part of your own. All Along the Watchtower belongs to both of them now. Dylan wrote the prophecy. Hendrix made it real, and together they created something neither could have achieved alone. That’s not just a great cover song. That’s art at its highest form, two masters, separated by approach and style, finding common ground in three verses about jokers and thieves, and watchtowers scanning the horizon.
The song endures because both men understood something essential. The work matters more than the ego. The truth of the song matters more than who gets credit for finding it. Bob Dylan gave Jimi Hendrix the words. Jimi Hendrix gave them wings. And Dylan spent the rest of his life honoring that gift by playing it Hendrix’s way.
Because when someone finds the truth in your work and brings it into the light, the right response isn’t defensiveness. It’s gratitude. And Dylan in his own quiet way has been saying thank you for 55 years.