"There Must Be Some Way Out of Here": Isaiah, Dylan, and the Sixties' Apocalypse

One of the joys of reading Scripture is discovering echoes where you least expect them. Sometimes they're intentional. Sometimes they're unconscious. Either way, they illuminate both the biblical text and the work that follows.

So it is with Bob Dylan's All Along the Watchtower. The song has always sounded biblical, but its roots run deeper than a few borrowed images. Much of its atmosphere appears to arise from Isaiah 21:1-10, a passage that is itself an apocalyptic vision filled with dread, watchmen, horsemen, and the collapse of an empire. It also helps explain why Dylan's brief, enigmatic song became one of the defining statements of the late Sixties.

Isaiah's Vision

Isaiah's oracle begins with a storm. As whirlwinds in the Negeb sweep on, it comes from the wilderness, from a terrible land... (Isaiah 21:1) The prophet is overwhelmed by a terrifying vision.

My heart falters, fear makes me tremble; the twilight I longed for has become a horror to me.

Then comes the command: Go, post a lookout and have him report what he sees.

The watchman climbs his tower and waits. He scans the horizon. Finally he cries out: Look, here comes a man in a chariot with a team of horses... 

And then comes the unforgettable announcement: "Babylon has fallen, has fallen!"

This isn't merely breaking political news. Rather, Isaiah is describing history reaching a breaking point. It is the collapse of a civilization. 

Dylan's Watchtower

Now consider Dylan's opening.

There must be some way out of here,

Said the joker to the thief...

Immediately we're dropped into a world of confusion. There are no names, locations or explanations. Only two archetypal figures trying to make sense of a world that no longer makes sense.

Then comes the second verse.

All along the watchtower

Princes kept the view

While all the women came and went

Barefoot servants too.

The watchtower is not a casual or haphazard image. In Scripture, the watchman occupies a sacred office. He stands between danger and the city. His responsibility is vigilance. He announces what others cannot yet see.

Dylan's watchtower feels like Isaiah's. Something is coming and everyone senses it. A few short years earlier Dylan sang, "The times, they are a-changin'" and there was a hopefulness there. Mr. Tambourine Man held up a torch for a new generation to light the way.  

"Two Riders Were Approaching..."

The song's final verse almost directly recalls Isaiah.

Outside in the distance

A wildcat did growl

Two riders were approaching

And the wind began to howl.

Isaiah's watchman also sees riders approaching from the distance before announcing Babylon's fall. Whether Dylan consciously borrowed the imagery or absorbed it through years of biblical reading hardly matters. Dylan knew the Scriptures extraordinarily well. The Bible shaped his imagination long before his public conversion to 1979 Christianity. Dylan used the Bible as a resource. (See 

That Thin Wild Mercury Sound by Daryl Sanders about the making Blonde On Blonde.)

In both Isaiah 21 and Dylan's Watchtower, the emotional landscape is the same. The watchman sees what others cannot. The world is unstable and judgment is approaching.

Apocalypse Before the Apocalypse

Today we tend to hear the word apocalypse as meaning "the end of the world." The Greek word actually means an unveiling—a revelation of what has been hidden. Isaiah unveils the fragility of empires. Dylan unveils the instability beneath modern civilization.

The Sixties were saturated with precisely this feeling.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

John F. Kennedy.

Robert Kennedy.

Malcolm X.

Vietnam.

Potential nuclear annihilation.

Race riots.

Burning cities.

Student revolts.

The Manson murders.

The optimism of the early Sixties slowly dissolved into something darker, as if history itself was becoming unmoored.

Heart of Darkness

In 1900 many intellectuals felt themselves on the threshold of a new era of enlightenment. Freud deliberately released The Interpretation of Dreams that year. Others rejoiced at the "liberation from Christian religion" spawned by Darwin's theory of natural selection and the elimination of any need for a God to explain how we got here. We were the product of time and chance. 

As in the Sixties, and like every era of human history, there were other voices being raised to question this optimismn at the turn of the last century. One of these was Joseph Conrad, author of Heart of Darkness, the story of a journey upriver into the Belgian Congo in the 1890s. Civilization, Conrad suggested, is a thin veneer. Strip it away, and something terrifying emerges. 

When Conrad traveled to the Congo in 1890, he entered one of the darkest enterprises of the nineteenth century. The region was not yet a Belgian colony but the personal possession of King Leopold II, who had persuaded European powers at the Berlin Conference (1884–85) that his control of the Congo would promote commerce and humanitarian ideals. The reality was starkly different.

Leopold's Congo Free State became a vast commercial enterprise dedicated to extracting ivory and, later, wild rubber, commodities that generated enormous profits as European and American demand soared. To maximize production, indigenous communities were compelled into forced labor under the supervision of colonial agents and the notorious Force Publique, a mercenary army that enforced quotas through intimidation and violence.

The human cost was catastrophic. Villages that failed to meet rubber quotas were burned, hostages were taken, and mutilation—including the severing of hands—became a grim symbol of the regime's brutality. Disease, famine, exhaustion, displacement, and systematic violence claimed the lives of millions of Congolese during Leopold's rule. Conrad witnessed this reality firsthand while serving as captain of a Congo River steamboat in 1890. The contrast between Europe's lofty rhetoric about bringing civilization to Africa and the naked exploitation he encountered profoundly shaped his imagination. Those experiences became the moral foundation of Heart of Darkness, a novel that strips away the pretense of imperial benevolence to reveal greed, cruelty, colonial hypocrisy, and the unsettling capacity for  darkness within the human heart. 

Francis Ford Coppola understood this perfectly when he transformed Conrad's novel into Apocalypse Now. Vietnam became Conrad's Congo. Colonel Kurtz became the man who had crossed every moral boundary. The famous helicopter assault set to Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries isn't merely spectacle, it's civilization announcing its own madness. The veil has been lifted. 

Dylan's Landscape

All Along the Watchtower belongs to this same imaginative world with no heroes or moral center. Only princes keeping watch, servants passing through, predators growling in the distance and riders approaching. "And the wind begins to howl."

I think it's great that Dylan chooses to not explain his songs, especially this one which is famously enigmatic. He puts it out there and if we choose to engage, it's almost like a labyrinth full of rabbit holes.

Jimi Hendrix's legendary recording intensified this apocalyptic atmosphere. The electric guitar  became a storm system more than an instrument. The swirling solos sound like civilization itself beginning to fracture. Dylan wrote the prophecy, Hendrix made it vivid.

Looking for the Watchman

What fascinates me is that Dylan's song never actually tells us what news the riders bring. Isaiah does: Babylon falls. Dylan, as I've noted, doesn't explain or interpret, which is a facet of his art.

 

Perhaps that's why All Along the Watchtower never grows old. Every generation imagines that the riders are approaching its horizon. Every generation feels that history is accelerating toward some undefined reckoning.

Isaiah reminds us that no empire is permanent. Conrad reminds us that darkness is not merely "out there" but within us. Apocalypse Now reminds us that technological sophistication does not guarantee moral progress. And Dylan reminds us that somewhere, on a lonely tower, someone is still watching the horizon listening for hoofbeats, waiting to announce what everyone else has been too distracted to see.

Related Links

All Along the Watchtower All Around the World... with Echoes

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2018/04/all-along-watchtower-all-around-world.html

All Along the Watchtower (2008)

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2008/08/all-along-watchtower.html

Dylan Often Sings About the Darkness He Sees: Trouble

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2020/03/dylan-often-sings-about-darkness-he.html

That Thin Wild Mercury Sound by Daryl Sanders Turns Readers into Blonde On Blonde Insiders

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2020/01/that-thin-wild-mercury-sound-by-daryl.html

Photo Caption: A Congolese man, Nsala, looking at the severed hand and foot of his five-year-old daughter who was killed, cooked, and cannibalized by members of the Force Publique in 1904.

Looking for America: Paul Simon's Quiet Masterpiece of Longing

Inside the World Trade Center

Last week I listened to Paul Simon's "America" for the first time in a while. How interesting to hear it in conjunction with our nation's 250th anniversary. The song's deceptively simple narrative unfolds into profound reflection on the human condition.

In the 1960s Simon & Garfunkel recorded numerous songs that captured the angst of "my generation." Haunting songs like "Sounds of Silence" and "The Only Living Boy in New York" connected with young people living through that period of disruptions that included assassinations, race riots, burning cities, the Cold War and Vietnam. 

The song is essentially a short story. It begins with the playful, "Let us be lovers, we'll marry our fortunes together / I've got some real estate here in my bag." The "real estate" is nothing more than what's in his suitcase or sleeping bag. They're young, broke, and full of possibility. After purchasing a pack of smokes and Mrs. Wagner pies they simply "walk off to look for America." Optimistic Sixties youth. 

In the second stanza we learn that the narrator's girl friend is Kathy as they board a Greyhound in Pittsburgh, something I myself have done twice in my life, both being personal turning points. Perhaps that's one reason this song has stayed with me. Certain songs attach themselves to the intersections of our lives and are never heard the same way again.

"Kathy", I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh

"Michigan seems like a dream to me now"

It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw

I've gone to look for America

Their banter on the bus is lighthearted. Who hasn't had these moments with someone you enjoyed being with, playing games with the faces.

She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy

I said "Be careful, his bowtie is really a camera"

Like children cloud-gazing, they entertain themselves by transforming ordinary life into adventure. After a while, though, the mood begins to change. I can imagine it as a movie soundtrack in which the first notes of a gloomier tune can be heard. 

"Toss me a cigarette, I think there's one in my raincoat"

"We smoked the last one an hour ago"

So I looked at the scenery, she read her magazine

And the moon rose over an open field

 

I've been in all these scenes before, night settling in, moving through time looking at scenery and retreating into the thoughts in my head, and she retreating into her magazine. This line says so much with such brevity: "So I looked at the scenery, she read her magazine..." No external drama here as the song shifts to a darker place.  

"Kathy, I'm lost", I said, though I knew she was sleeping

I'm empty and aching and I don't know why

Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike

They've all come to look for America

It's a heartbreaking confession. "Kathy, I'm lost. I'm empty and aching and I don't know why."

And perhaps the saddest part is how this kind of awareness, when it goes unshared, isolates us. We can sit beside someone we love, traveling the same road, and still find ourselves alone inside our own thoughts.

Simon avoids giving an answer as to why the narrator feels this way. Beneath the surface, he feels something he doesn't fully understand, an angst that is existential, not circumstantial. And the kicker, which is repeated at the end, is that this is something pervasive. While counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike he imagines that they are all in the same soup, lost but looking, yearning for something.

Thus, America is not a geographical destination but something much larger, an idea—a symbol of fulfillment, belonging, identity, perhaps even purpose itself. We're all searchers, seekers of a place where we belong, people striving to understand why we are here and what it means to be human.

Here we are, nearly sixty years later, with more technology, more entertainment, and more information than Simon's two travelers could have imagined. Yet the longing he captured has not disappeared.

Perhaps that's why America has endured. It's not really a song about highways or Greyhound buses or even the United States. It's about that quiet ache almost everyone experiences sooner or later—the feeling that there must be something more. Simon never tells us whether Kathy and her companion found what they were looking for. He simply reminds us that we are all fellow travelers, counting the cars on our own New Jersey Turnpikes, looking for a place to call home.

A 30-Year-Old Ad Copy Checklist That Still Works

While doing a little spring cleaning I came across a folder with a sheet of paper in it titled “Tips for Writing Ad Copy.” It was a checklist that I created 30 years or so ago to orient my thinking when writing ad copy. For many of you (in advertising) these things may be obvious, but as Vince Lombardi famously said on the first day of training, “This is a football.” In other words, it never hurts to be reminded of the basics.

Here are some tips from that sheet, followed by a handful of tips from great ad men of the past. 

 

1. The Headline Does the Heavy Lifting

David Ogilvy observed that five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. The headline determines whether anyone keeps reading.

 

In 1988 when Donn Larson of Westmoreland, Larson and Webster shared with me his three-page list of ad copywriting rules, the first rule was that the headline should make a promise. 

 

There’s a maxim about writing that I think fits here: “Well begun is half done.” Getting your headline right is worth the effort.

 

2. Stop Talking About Yourself

One of the biggest mistakes advertisers make is believing customers are fascinated by their business. They're not. People are interested in solving their own problems. That’s why “YOU” is one of the five most important words in advertising. (If you keep reading, you’ll find the other four.)

 

Every business owner wants to say, "We've been serving the community for 42 years with experienced professionals dedicated to quality service." The customer is thinking, "Can you fix my problem? How much will it cost? Can I trust you?"

 

3. The Writing Itself

Write as though you're writing a letter to a friend over coffee instead of making an announcement to a stadium full of strangers. I forget where I first heard this tip, but whenever I’ve been stuck regarding how to organize my thoughts and get started, I think of my brother. “Dear Ron, …” 

 

Conversation beats proclamation every time.

 

4. Sell Benefits, Not Features

This is just a reminder of a tip we’ve all heard before and is worth repeating. Features describe what something is. Benefits explain why it matters.

 

A vacuum cleaner may have a 1,200-watt motor, but nobody lies awake at night wishing for more watts. They want a cleaner house in half the time. A bank doesn't simply offer online banking. It offers convenience. A contractor doesn't sell windows. He sells lower heating bills, quieter rooms and greater comfort.

 

Customers buy outcomes, not specifications.

 

5. Pictures Still Matter

There's an old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. In advertising, that may be an understatement. People process images instantly. A great photograph can create engagement before the first sentence is read. 

 

Choose images that reinforce your message instead of merely filling space. And don’t forget your logo. Your logo embodies your identity and reputation. I love the Apple logo not because I like apples, but because of what it represents.

 

6. Always Tell People What to Do Next

I've seen beautifully designed ads that forgot the most important step. They never asked for the sale. Advertising should always include a clear Call to Action. 

Visit our showroom or website.

Call today for a free consultation.  (Don’t forget the number.)

Schedule your appointment.

Download the guide. 

 

The simpler and more specific the request, the better the response.

*

Going back to those five most important words, they are: You, New, Free, Save and Now. I don't know if they're magical, but they all have one thing in common. They focus on the customer's interests rather than the advertiser's ego.

 

 

Here are tips from five ad men whose work has stood the test of time.

David Ogilvy

Quote: "The consumer isn't a moron; she is your wife."

Lesson: Respect your audience. Never talk down to people. Treat customers as intelligent individuals who simply want honest information to help them make a good decision.

 

Claude Hopkins

Quote: "Advertising is salesmanship in print."

Lesson: Every ad should do the work of a good salesperson. It should answer questions, overcome objections, and give the reader a reason to act.

 

Leo Burnett

Quote: "Make it simple. Make it memorable. Make it inviting to look at. Make it fun to read."

Lesson: Clarity beats cleverness. If readers have to work to understand your message, you've probably lost them.

 

Bill Bernbach

Quote: "The most powerful element in advertising is the truth."

Lesson: Great advertising doesn't invent reasons to buy. It discovers the genuine strengths of a product or service and communicates them with honesty.

 

John Caples

Quote: "The most frequent reason for unsuccessful advertising is advertisers who are so full of their own accomplishments that they forget to tell us why we should buy."

Lesson: Keep the spotlight on the customer, not yourself. Your reader is asking one question: "What's in it for me?"

 

 

Advertising has changed dramatically over the past century. Newspapers have been joined by websites, social media, podcasts, streaming services and AI-generated content. But human nature hasn't changed. People still respond to honesty, clarity, relevance and a compelling reason to act. Master those fundamentals and your advertising will always have an audience.

 

The tools of advertising will continue to evolve, but the fundamentals remain unchanged. Understand people. Tell the truth. Make a promise worth believing. Then invite your reader to take the next step.

 

This article originally appeared in the July issue of Business North

Related Links

Advertising Lessons from One of the Great Ones: David Ogilvy

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2013/09/advertising-lessons-from-one-of-great.html

A David Ogilvy Anecdote on Hiring

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2020/09/a-david-ogilvy-anecdote-on-hiring.html

An Anecdote about Claude Hopkins from Tim Wu's The Attention Merchants

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2020/10/an-anecdote-about-claude-hopkins-from.html