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.
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.
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