All Along the Watchtower might now be synonymous with Jimi Hendrix. However, the track was originally written and released by Bob Dylan on his eighth record, John Wesley Harding (1967). The Hendrix version, released within a year of Dylan's as a single from his final studio album, Electric Ladyland, breathed new life into the song.
It signaled a new sophistication in the virtuoso's studio work, one that would later appear fully realized on the posthumous release First Rays of the New Rising Sun. Yet, the recording sessions for Watchtower – held between Olympic Studios in London and the Record Plant in New York in 1968 – were marked by frustration and studio mishaps. This heady combination would ultimately contribute to the song's brilliance.
“After a long, frustrating day, Mitch [Mitchell, drummer] and Jimi get to about take 18 or 19, and then things start to change,” recalled Hendrix producer Eddie Kramer in a 2011 Guitar World interview.
“Mitch has finally got the intro and then… crash! On the tape, you hear this other being in the studio, and it's Brian Jones from the Rolling Stones. He stumbles in, and he's out of his frickin' mind!”
During that time, Jones was already deep into his drug and alcohol addiction. As a result, he had become increasingly unreliable in the studio, even with the Stones.
“Jimi was trying to get work done,” continues Kramer, “but he didn't want to just throw Brian out, because they were really close friends. Unfortunately, on take 20, Jones started playing the piano, and all you heard was clang clang clang clang – total rubbish, out of time, wrong chords. Take 21 was even worse.”
Eventually, Jones managed to get into the control room, and as soon as he found himself in front of the mixing console, passed out. “So Jimi and Mitch resumed, and we finally got the magic take.”
However, another issue soon cropped up. Bassist Noel Redding was nowhere to be found.
“Jimi grabbed Noel's bass, which is strung for a right-handed person, and played it upside down and nailed the part. It's that beautiful looping, swooping bass tone you hear that is just a central part of the sound on the final track.”
Jimi grabbed Noel's bass, which is strung for a right-handed person, and played it upside down and nailed the part
There was a long way to go before the track was finished. Hendrix, ever the perfectionist, was also working on the acoustic guitar parts and invited Dave Mason from Traffic to play a 12-string.
“For some reason, Dave couldn't get it together,” the producer recalls. “Eventually, he got it, but there was a lot of tension getting to where the two of them were locked in.”
The four-track recording was initially transferred to a “new and innovative, but rather noisy” twelve-track one-inch tape. While Hendrix added a whole bunch of percussion and guitars to it, both Kramer and the guitarist hated the noisy machine.
At this point, Hendrix had become increasingly dissatisfied and scrapped the work they had done on the twelve-track. Instead, the two invested in what was then one of the newest sixteen-track machines – which proved to be a game-changer.
“Introducing a sixteen-track machine into the Electric Ladyland sessions was a big deal,” noted Kramer. “It kicked open the doors, technologically speaking, and gave us the tremendous flexibility of being able to manipulate individual sounds.”
