Two riders were approaching

Time and dimensions stretching out over a landscape that just might a Georgia O’Keefe.

Ai Along the Watchtower — Bob Dylan at a desk writing.

Bob Dylan was a master songwriter by 1967. He’d taken words to places few had been. His songs could be cool, hard, factual; they could be epic, sprawling and nagging. They could be gentle, funny, loving. He’d pulled songs straight out of newspaper reports, plucked chord changes from ancient ballads, dipped into the symbolist poets, greased the wheels with speed and weed and possibly some way heavier stuff. But eventually it had to come to a standstill and while the comedown faded, dreamlike sketches of a remembered past, the blinding light of new culture, the images of ‘the now’ competing on the TV screens, psychedelia, the war, the haunting of the past swirled around him like smoke, seeping through the tired and torn American flag finding their way into basement songs. Meanwhile down the road from the basement, another kind of magic was happening. Dylan was also writing these stark, prosaic, parablesque ditties. They were cold, hard and fast like his earlier songs. They were direct, unflinching and strong. But if you squeezed them hard enough over the decades, you’d find biblical references and biblical Old Testament reverence. Old world tales of honour, courage, justice, strange tales of strange people. But unlike the old they had a new grace, saying more with less, there was a new frontier embedded on the horizon of their chord changes and lyrics and a new voice to match the new terrain.

Dylan, looking out from his writing desk, the autumnal peace of the hills of Woodstock surrounding him, could still see something further away and although the beauty of nature and family was protecting him, beyond the green, there was dust, the two riders were approaching.

I forget exactly, but recall a poet once saying that creativity happens in movement, in transit. Try writing in a car, a taxi, a train, while running, mid flight. Everything moves you are still. You’re tapped in. Go!

Now everything was still, inside and out. Time to think differently. Time to empty your brains. Unless you turned on the TV or picked up the morning paper. But you shouldn’t do that. Open the bible instead. Step into the past, imagined or real. They’re both the same anyway.

There must be somewhere out of here, said the joker to the thief. Kenny Buttrey’s drums beating like horse hoofs in double time. The future’s chasing the past, you can hear it but you can’t quite see it from your perspective.

Princes kept the view. Where they are it is their present and where you are they’re in your future. Time and dimensions stretching out over a landscape that just might a Georgia O’Keefe.

All Along The Watchtower is a song about creativity. How it arrives, where it comes from and when you sense its arrival. It’s also a song about the number 3. 3 verses, 3 chords. The trinity. The three produced by the 1 and the 2. It feels somehow like an M. C. Escher drawing, the song could start anywhere and come out the same. It’s gypsy chords. It’s Dylan talking to himself, it’s also about how things are constructed, how reality is constructed. It’s war between the individual(s) and the group. It’s the winds of change, America, and how it was ravaged and taken away from its indigenous people. It feels like a song that has been passed down through generations, from one civilisation to the next, without anyone knowing its true meaning or origin.

The 2 riders talk about escape. The joker and the thief. The binary. The dichotomy. The dialect. Theres too much confusion. They’re blaming the ‘other’, groups of men, talking about exploitation, businessmen drinking their wine, ploughmen digging their earth. None of them along the line know what any of it is worth.

Take Arthur Koestler’s triptych. Each horizontal line through the triptych stands for a pattern of creative activity which is represented on all three panels: comic comparison—objective analogy—poetic image. The first is intended to make us laugh; the second to make us understand; the third to make us marvel.

Picture this. Verse one. The joker on horseback, finds himself in the wrong scene, the wrong place, a swapped reality. He stumbles onto the soundstage set of a Western, complete with painted scenery, or maybe it’s the Johnny Carson show or the Smothers Brothers, you choose. “There must be some way out of here”, cue audience laughter. Verse 2, the thief (who also finds himself in this bizarre situation), “no reason to get excited, there’s many here among us who feel that life is but a joke”.

The joker and the thief have transcended this scene, this rendering of reality. They’re in the centre of their lives, they’re moving. They’ve been through this before, they’re philosophers, there’s no time to talk falsely, there’s only one verse to go. Their fate is not discussing the follies of man, they’re drawn to a larger cause.

Verse 3 revelation, no closeups, a wide shot from the watchtower, they’re being perceived, they have an audience. Princes keep the view, but what view? of the riders approaching or the view of reality we all live by that the riders could overthrow? The princes, the establishment, behind their walls with their barefoot servants.

Dylan’s harp like a siren calls out across the landscape, but like sirens who is being lured to doom, the riders or the princes?

The apocalyptic nature of the song is known. A parablesque ditty that blends into the prophetic in the final verse. Parables tells us stories about something that happened and attach a moral lesson to it. The first two verses center on the outcasts and their exploitation. They end on a solemn recognition that they shall rue the day in the end because of their suffering.

The final verse shows the joker and thief approaching—bringing judgement down upon the princes on the watchtower. A passage in Isaiah (21:5-9) that the lyrics could be inspired by, tell of the fall of Babylon. But are these messengers bringing news of the fall or approaching to usher in its demise? The song will remain a mystery much as its writer.