It joins a long list of songs he’s recently resurrected, including “Silvio,” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” and “Highway 61 Revisited”
Bob Dylan kicked off his Outlaw Tour set at Blossom Music Center in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, by playing “All Along the Watchtower” for the first time since 2018. As always, the arrangement of the 1967 song drew heavily from Jimi Hendrix’s famous cover.
Dylan has played “All Along the Watchtower” more than any other song in his vast catalog, at least 2,285 times. The very first one took place at the launch of his reunion tour with the Band on January 3, 1974, which will be released September 20 as part of the 27-disc box set Bob Dylan—The 1974 Live Recordings.
In a 1993 interview with Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune, Dylan talked about the impact of first hearing Hendrix cover the song. “It overwhelmed me, really,” Dylan said. “He had such talent, he could find things inside a song and vigorously develop them. He found things that other people wouldn’t think of finding in there. He probably improved upon it by the spaces he was using. I took license with the song from his version, actually, and continue to do so to this day.”
For a long stretch of time between 1992 and 1996, “All Along The Watchtower” was the third song in the set at nearly every Dylan concert. It fell into the encore spot throughout the 2000s, but it dropped completely out of the rotation after the November 29, 2018, show at the Beacon Theater in New York City. It’s one of many songs he’s resurrected on the Outlaw tour, including “Silvio,” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” and “Highway 61 Revisited.”
Dylan’s U.S. tour continues Friday night at the Pavilion at Star Lake in Burgettstown, Pennsylvania. It wraps up on September 17 at Darien Lake Amphitheater in Buffalo, New York. It then heads over to Europe in early October for a long series of shows that wraps up November 14 at the Royal Albert Hall in London. He should be stateside when the upcoming Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown premiers. That means there’s a tiny sliver of a chance we’ll see Timothée Chalamet and Dylan side-by-side on the red carpet at the premiere. But it’s still extraordinarily unlikely.
