ALL ALONG THE FRETBOARD

A tribute to Jimi Hendrix

Jimi Hendrix is by common consent the greatest rock guitarist who ever lived -  sadly, only to the age of 27. As a new documentary about his Electric Lady recording studio is announced, here’s a tribute to his masterpiece, adapted from my biography Wild Thing: the Short, Spellbinding Life of Jimi Hendrix.

If ever I were asked to appear on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, listing the eight records I’d choose to ease my theoretical solitude, there’d be no question about which came top. Despite the allure of the Beatles, the blues, Motown and even Buddy Holly, it would have to be Jimi Hendrix’s cover version of Bob Dylan’s ‘All Along the Watchtower.’

Normally for major artists, covers are rites of passage to finding their own voices as writers and performers. But Jimi was never content merely to mimic other people’s songs and would  reimagine even a sacred track like the Beatles’ ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ as a heavy metal broadside that Paul McCartney, no stranger to accolades, called ‘the greatest honour of my career.’ 

‘All Along the Watchtower’ had been on Dylan’s 1967 John Wesley Harding album and, as usual, was a reflection of his reading rather than his life. The title came from a passage in the Old Testament’s Book of Isaiah – one also containing the phrase ‘Go set a watchman’ which Harper Lee borrowed for an early draft of what became To Kill A Mockingbird. Dylan gave the song a medieval setting filtered through the sensibility of some Victorian poet like Alfred Lord Tennyson, his great passion at the time.

The result was more than a little weird with its underpowered, organ-squealy backing – no trace anywhere of medieval flageolet or flute - and Dylan for some reason singing in an accent that at some moments sounded French, at others Rastafarian. To his enraptured public it was, and remains, an intriguing stop on his journey from folk into rock. But some were annoyed by the song’s perverse construction and the self-consciously poetic lyrics that sometimes tipped into nonsense. His former folk music mentor, the wonderfully no-bullshit Dave Van Ronk, called it  ‘a mistake from the title on down. A watchtower is not a road or a wall and you can’t go along it.’

Jimi recorded his version in November, 1967, 11 months after being transplanted from New York to London and teamed with two white Britons, drummer Mitch Mitchell and bass-player Noel Redding, as the Jimi Hendrix Experience. It remains, for me, the ultimate demonstration of his ability to produce sounds from a solid-body electric guitar that no one ever had before and no one has in quite the same way since. It is at once the quintessence of primal hard rock and a reminder that virtuosity in any medium not only demands matchless expertise and energy but discipline and understatement.

In Jimi’s hands the meandering start of the Dylan version is replaced by three power-chords that seem to come from some wild seashore with angry waves breaking, seagulls crying, bladderwrack glistening and storm clouds piling overhead. All the Tennysonian bleakness and melodrama that Dylan left out are there in a moment. 

The lyric is a duologue between ‘the Joker’ – i.e. the traditional playing-card character in stripy three-pointed hat – and ‘the Thief’, plotting escape from some unspecified confinement. Whereas Dylan’s every syllable was soaked in irony and ambiguity, Jimi’s mellow baritone plays it completely straight, with perhaps the slightest emphasis on ‘There’s too much confus-ion’ and ‘I can’t get no relief,’ which happened to express what he was already feeling about his new life in Britain.

His voice carries the same utter conviction in the Thief’s rather odd attempt to calm things down – ‘no reason to get excited’ – and sudden introduction of a crowd of satirical onlookers:

There are many here among us

Who feel that life is but a joke…

Yet still his guitar holds back: not even the great bluesman B. B. King was ever so economical with a riff. The Thief, in fact, would be a bit of a rambly bore if voiced by anyone else.

But you and I have been through that

And this is not our fate.

So let us stop talking falsely now,

The hour is getting late…

Now, at last, Jimi’s terse ‘Hey!’ announces a break which, for me, surpasses any other to have been recorded since guitars had electrical wires threaded through their bodies like keyhole surgery and metal pickups and volume-knobs and tremolo arms dentist-drilled into their cheeks. 

Forget Eric Clapton in Cream’s ‘Crossroads’ or Jimmy Page in Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’ or Mark Knopfler in Dire Straits’ ‘Sultans of Swing’ or Chet Atkins in Elvis’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ or even Chuck Berry in ‘Johnny B. Goode’; go, Jimi, go.   

It comes in four distinct movements of which only the first is a conventional solo with notes selected as judiciously and bent as elegantly as B. B. at his best. The second is played with a metal slide along the fretboard, which from Elmore James or Howlin’ Wolf would be jagged and angry but with Jimi resembles a thrill ride through some extraterrestrial cityscape, each gush of the slide like a glowing external elevator, sibilantly ascending or descending 

Down swoops one, then up goes another and another still higher until it almost seems to be dancing in time. 

Next, an extended passage with the wah-wah pedal (actually more of a ‘thwacka-thwacka’) which turns into an almost human voice, as if the guitar is musing and chortling to itself over some private joke, Because there’s no way of topping all that, the finale is a suddenly melodious run of simple treble chords in predictable order, with grace-notes played with the little finger, that beginners usually get to around lesson five. 

Back in the song, a watchtower finally materialises, albeit now less a security measure than an eyrie where ‘princes kept the view’ and some Arthurian drama seems to be taking shape, Sir Galahad or maybe the Lady of Shalott waiting offstage:

Outside in the cold distance a wild cat did growl.

Two riders were approaching

And the wind began to howl...

The guitar returns as a Banshee shriek, rising higher and higher, as if chasing Pavarotti’s stratospheric top B in ‘Nessun Dorma’. But before there’s any clarification of the two riders, just as the voice seems to realise there is some reason to get excited  – and a wind really seems to be howling  – everything starts to fade. This is the outro.

Whenever I hear it, I have the same thought: don’t go.