"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.

Camille Paglia’s The Birds: A Hitchcock Masterpiece

In her penetrating analysis of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), Camille Paglia interprets the film as a masterpiece of modern myth—a work that exposes the primal forces lurking beneath civilized life. She argues that The Birds transcends mere suspense or allegory; it is a symbolic meditation on nature, sexuality, and apocalypse.

Paglia situates the film within Hitchcock’s larger vision of erotic tension and moral ambiguity, but she sees The Birds as his most metaphysical creation. Nature, in her reading, is not benevolent but pagan and amoral—a vast, unconscious power that erupts into human order. The sudden avian attacks represent the collapse of rationality before the mystery and terror of the natural world.

At the film’s center is Melanie Daniels, played by Tippi Hedren, whom Paglia reads as a glamorous pagan goddess—stylish, autonomous, and emotionally opaque. Her arrival in the coastal town of Bodega Bay disturbs the fragile equilibrium of its repressed inhabitants. Paglia likens Melanie’s beauty and sexual independence to the disruptive archetypes of myth—figures like Circe or Lilith—whose presence awakens chaos.

The escalating bird assaults, then, symbolize both ecological revenge and erotic punishment: nature striking back against the human attempt to control it. Paglia reads the film’s open ending—not with moral closure but with dread-filled silence—as a modernist gesture of cosmic humility.

There are so many layers to the story including the manner in which Hitchcock seamlessly inserts various interpretations of the meaning of this avian chaos. In one scene Mrs. Bundy, an elderly ornithologist, takes a contrarian stance, saying, "Birds have been on this planet, Miss Daniels, since Archaeopteryx; a hundred and forty million years ago. Doesn't it seem odd that they'd wait all that time to start a - a war against humanity?"

Well, yes, it does seem odd, but can someone else explain what is happening? Another character tells everyone in the diner that it's the end of the world. Considering that there are more than 100 billion birds and only a few billion humans, this would not be a war many of us would be eager to fight.

Painting by the author

Ultimately, Paglia regards The Birds as a work of religious power, though without theology—a revelation of the pagan sublime. Hitchcock, she suggests, understood that terror and beauty spring from the same source, and that civilization rests upon forces it can neither master nor fully understand.

In Paglia’s reading, The Birds becomes not just a thriller, but a modern myth of nature’s return—a confrontation with the ancient gods we thought we’d outgrown. 

Paglia's book belongs to a series of BFI Film Classics. Whereas most of this 110-page volume is a scene by scene account of the film, nearly every observation contains revelations of references to previous Hitchcock films, Hollywood history, mythology and literature. 

If interested, the entirety can be found online here, though I myself felt it compelling enough to purchase it for my library. (Belated birthday present.) 

Once you've read the book, I'm certain you will be compelled to see the movie again as I was.  

URL for the online version of this book: https://api.pageplace.de/preview/DT0400.9781838719388_A39237384/preview-9781838719388_A39237384.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Apocalyptic Themes in the Music of Bob Dylan: Can This Really Be the End?

It's been frequently noted how the arc of Mark Twain's life coincided with the appearance and re-appearance of Haley's comet. One might similarly argue that the arc of Bob Dylan's career has coincided with periods of cultural upheaval that gave birth to apocalyptic fears and doomsaying. Both the tempestuous Sixties and our current cultural  unheavals have generated books, articles and (now) podcasts forecasting the end of the world. (Examples include Hal Lindsay's The Late Great Planet Earth, Billy Graham's Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle and Nevil Shute's On the Beach.) As we look around today the theme of doom has had a major resurgence, for better or worse. 

It's well known that from the beginning of his career Bob Dylan's music has often touched on apocalyptic themes. The Cold War weighed heavily on our hearts and in our thoughts. I remember practicing air raid drills in school and many Americans (including relatives of mine in Cleveland) stockpiled food and water in fallout shelters. 

Original lyrics to "Go Away Bomb." Bill Pagel Archives.

So it's no surprise that young Bob Dylan produce songs dealing with societal upheavals and the search for meaning in turbulent times. One such song, which he penned shortly after his arrival in New York, was "Go Away Bomb," which he wrote for Izzy Young of the Folklore Center.

Here are some other noteworthy examples:

"A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall": Released in 1963, this song is filled with vivid imagery of impending catastrophe. Purportedly written during the Cuban missile crisis, the song reflects more than just the anxiety of the Cold War era, it also paints a bleak picture of a world on the brink of destruction, with references to natural disasters, political turmoil, and moral decay.

"All Along the Watchtower": This song, which first appeared on John Wesley Harding, features apocalyptic imagery inspired by the Book of Isaiah. Dylan's lyrics evoke a sense of foreboding and uncertainty, with references to "two riders approaching" and "the wind began to howl," symbolizing an impending reckoning. The opening line sets the tone though.  "There must be some way out of here," said the joker to the thief. 

"The Times They Are A-Changin'": Released in 1964, this iconic anthem captures the spirit of social upheaval and transformation. While not explicitly apocalyptic, the song reflects a sense of impending change and the need to adapt to shifting realities. Dylan's lyrics convey a message of hope and resilience in the face of uncertainty.

[This hasn't been the only song in which Dylan shakes the tree and contemplates coming changes. See Dylan and Fifty Years of Change: Six Songs About Transitions.]

 

"Ain't Talkin'": From his 2006 album Modern Times, this song features apocalyptic imagery reminiscent of biblical prophecy. Dylan's lyrics paint a haunting portrait of a world in decline, "walking through the cities of the plague" and just walkin' "in the last outpost, at the world's end." Dylan's ominous tone reflects a sense of impending doom and existential dread. Then again, there are a lot of songs in which he opts for that ominous tone, (e.g. "Not Dark Yet")

Today, we seem to be confronting more threats than a Hydra, a mythological swamp serpent creature that would grow two new heads for each one that was severed. Wars, bombs, plagues, corrupt leaders, injustice, climate change, the tenuous energy grid... and a host of other threats seem to hover over us. 

In 1776 Thomas Paine wrote, "These are the times that try men's souls." There is a sense of peril in those words. The Great Depression produced a similarly ominous national mood, as did the Cold War--which in the Sixties was exacerbated by assassinations, riots in the streets, burning cities and and unnecessary war. 

In light of all this history, "Can this really be the end?"

* * *

Related Link: Are You Protopian, Utopian or Dystopian?

Tonight is the kickoff for Duluth Dylan Fest. If you're in the 'hood and want to be part of some of the events, visit https://duluthdylanfest.com/duluth-dylan-fest-2024/

Is This Something That Was On Dylan's Mind When He Wrote High Water (For Charley Patton)?

Photo by Chris Gallagher on Unsplash

As I've said many times, you never know when a Dylan reference will appear. Sometimes it's a song in a movie, a photo in a magazine, a commercial inserted into the Super Bowl and frequently, as in this case, a reference in a book.

A couple weeks ago I was reading Anna Merlan's book Republic of Lies, which takes a deep dive into the variety of ways conspiracy notions get generated. Chapter two explores how the notion came about that the flooding in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina was a result of the government blowing up the levees.

Merlan writes, "The idea (that the government would dynamite the levee) is rooted in two things: an infamous 1927 decision in New Orleans to dynamite the levees; and a long-standing, multi-pronged suspicion that the federal government has engaged in depopulation schemes aimed at black citizens." Even Spike Lee doesn't find the idea all that far-fetched that the government would try to push blacks out of New Orleans.

This feature of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 is something I've been unfamiliar with. On that occasion, the leaders of New Orleans, in an attempt to save the city took dynamite and blew up the levees upstream at Caernarvron, Louisiana. The result: more than half a million were left homeless. Many died.

Photo by the author.

Charley Patton wrote his song "High Water" as a protest. Blacks living on the Delta were restricted as to where they could live or move to. Relief efforts treated whites and blacks differently. The event, which has been cited in numerous blues songs, including "When the Levee Breaks" by Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie (which Dylan re-invents on Modern Times), triggered one of the largest mass migrations in U.S. history.

According to a letter to President Calvin Coolidge, a complaint written by a black businessman, blacks were forced to keep working on the levee at gunpoint while whites and mules were given time to escape to safety.

What is not mentioned in this account of mass migration is how crowded the black parts of the Northern cities already were. This was pre-Civil Rights Act of 1964. Those who left the devastation in the Delta found themselves cramped into overcrowded Rust Belt ghettoes.

So the story of the flood is to some extent a story about racism. This is a factoid that I was unaware of, one that according to Merlan is fairly well-known among a segment of our society. I've not yet elsewhere read about this notion of that flood and racism, nor have I seen this connection made by any of the lyrics interpreters in Dylan circles. (Correct me, please, if I am wrong.)

Has Dylan, who famously does not interpret his lyrics for us, been attempting to subtly make this connection apparent by continuously favoring the song in his setlists? He's performed it over 700 times now since recorded in 2001 for Love and Theft.

Though most of us have little knowledge or recollection of these events, the 1927 flood "lives vividly in the collective memory of the region," write Merlan. When Hurricane Betsy struck in 1965, the levees were breached and some New Orleans residents were certain that city leaders had blown the levees to save the wealthier parts of town. There were people who claimed to hear explosions that sounded like dynamite, just as in the Katrina disaster.

* * * *

Photo by the author.

While listening to Disc Two of Travelin' Through this past week, one of two discs featuring Dylan and Johnny Cash recording songs together on Bootleg #15, the familiar Five Feet High & Rising played again, leading me to see if Johnny's song was about the same incident. It was not.

Cash, who himself was born into poverty in the Arkansas lowlands, was writing about the Mississippi River flood of 1937 that occurred when he was just shy of five. His first person account appeared on his third album as a Columbia recording artist, in 1959.

* * * *
Randy Newman, whose distinctive voice we're all familiar with from the numerous film scores he's produced, also wrote and recorded a song about the 1927 flood, simply titled, "Louisiana 1927." His is a straightforward account of the disaster after the river "rose all day and rose all night." 700,000 people were left homeless.

* * * *
Kees de Graaf, another lyric dissector, makes additional connections of note from this song, one being it's parallel to Hard Rain and the theme of "apocalyptic menace." "The flood," he writes, "overwhelms doomed people, and there is no help as the structure of society breaks down like in the days of Noah’s great flood."

Of course Apocalypse is nothing new in Dylan's oeuvre. (cf. "All Along the Watchtower.") At the same time that the Fifth Dimension was singing about the Age of Aquarius there were more books about the end of the world being produced than ever before. Against this backdrop an entire generation has been raised, now sinking into the twilight.

The song itself is a series of image fragments but when all is said and done, the conclusion is simple to understand:

It's bad out there
High water everywhere.

* * * *

Related Links
Tony Attwood breaks down High Water (For Charley Patton)
Lyrics to High Water 
Song Analysis by Kees de Graaf
When the Levee Breaks and Modern Times

New Year's Day Trivia: On this day in history, Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

Apocalypse When? A Brief History of the End of the World

While cleaning my office this past week I came across a piece of paper with a list of Bible passages that demonstrated when the end of the world would be. The calculations concluded that the meaning of all these texts added up to the Lord’s return in either 1984 or 2004, depending on how you calculate the years of Israel’s exile from their homeland.

It got me thinking about all the other predictions of apocalypse I’ve heard over the years.

I remember when David Berg, a.k.a. Moses David, predicted that the possible end of the world would when the the Comet Kahoutek was coming in 1974. I was at Ohio University at the time and a bus with a lot of young people arrived in Athens to recruit students to join them. They were called The Children of God, and I well recall the tract they handed out, which was an elaborate explanation of the lyrics for American Pie. I know at least one art student who left school and ended up in a barbed-wire enclosed Texas compound.
 
In 1975, while auditing a class on the Book of Revelations by Dr. Bruce Metzger at Princeton Seminary, I learned that end times predictions have been a recurring theme throughout church history. Pope Sylvester II predicted the Lord would return in the year 1000. Christians were so fearful of the end being at hand that on the last day of the year they lay on the faces in the churches till the stroke midnight on the last day of the year. Many pilgrims headed East to Jerusalem for the occasion. When the end didn't come, they probably celebrated or reflected, relieved. But then someone got the notion that the 1,000 years of the church must not have begun at Christ's birth, but rather His death. so 1033 was the new prediction for earth's end.

Christians aren't the only once making predictions. The Mayan calendar got it's fair share of publicity last year. In the late '90's the group Heaven's Gate also made a bit of news for themselves with their 39 suicides and castration ritual.

Here are some of the other dates that have been predicted to be the end.**

1186  John of Toledo predicts the world will end in 1186 based on the alignment of the planets.

1284  Pope Innocent III (d. 1216) predicted that the world would end 666 years after the rise of Islam

1356-61  During the Black Plague many Europeans believed it to be a sign of the end times.

Feb 1, 1524  A group of astrologers in London predicted the world would end by a flood starting in London based on calculations made the previous June. 20,000 Londoners left their homes and headed for higher ground in anticipation.

1533  Melchior Hoffman, an Anabaptist prophet, predicted Christ's Second Coming would take place this year in Strasbourg. He claimed that 144,000 people would be saved, while the rest of the world would be consumed by fire.

Other dates in the 1500s which were predicted as the end included, 1504, Feb. 24, 1524, May 2, 1528, Oct. 19, 1533, April 15, 1534, 1555, 1585 and 1588. Then came the 1600s in which the world was predicted to end in 1600, 1624 (by the same London astrologers who goofed in predicting 1524), 1648, 1654, 1656 (by Christopher Columbus in 1501), 1857, 1658, 1660, 1673, 1688, 1689 and 1697 by Cotton Mather.

In the 1700s we saw still more predictions of the end followed by countless more predictions and prophecies in the 1800s right up to our very own time so that almost anyone who is anyone has made declarations, from Martin Luther, Sir Isaac Newton and John Wesley to Pat Robertson, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Falwell.

As I deliberated on these things, I had a few thoughts on how to respond to these kinds of predictions, especially the very specific ones.

1. Sincerity is not truth.
Just because someone is earnest does not mean they are correct or to be followed. Many a cult leader has been earnest in the extreme, but sincerity can never be the measure of validity. Suppose a car is travelling north on Highway 61, and the driver believes he's headed south because he is on his way to Mexico. No matter how earnest he is, in a few hours time he will be in Thunder Bay, Canada.

2. Being wrong about one thing doesn't discredit everything else they said.
I think here of Martin Luther and Sir Isaac Newton most notably.

3. Let's practice humility when making pronouncements. 
I defer here to philosopher/theologian Jacques Ellul on this matter. "Incompetence is inadmissable on the part of Christians... when providing others with a sense of direction, speaking with authority and encouraging young people to become involved. ... But Christians allow themselves to be taken in by the prevailing vogue. They see everybody expressing his own ideas so why shouldn't they do the same? That's all right as far as I'm concerned... only let them be less pretentious about it, less authoritative, less inclined to expect everyone to follow in their wake. And let them not claim to be representing Jesus Christ." (False Presence of the Kingdom, p. 155-6)

For what it's worth, we live a broken world... It would be nice to be able to return home to the Paradise we lost.

** List of dates predicted for Apocalyptic events