The Dylan barometer

Speaking to an audience of activists from my union Connect in mid-June, general secretary Adrian Askew quoted some words from a Bob Dylan song.

This is not that unusual. There are numbers of Dylanologists in the ranks of senior union officials.

A month or so later, a leading estate agent was quoting the same song to underline the seriousness of the threat to his business posed by the credit crunch.

The Dylan song that they had in mind was a track from the late 1967 release John Wesley Harding.

But they were not referring to the Dylan version. They were talking about a Jimi Hendrix recording. The song was All Along The Watchtower.

It is 40 years this September since Hendrix hit the British charts with the song, reaching number five - his biggest commercial success while he was still alive. Yet it is still covered in new versions and still sung by Dylan on stage in the version that Hendrix made famous.

Dylan has played the song over 1,500 times live. It still features in his set lists and can still be widely heard on the radio and elsewhere. A YouTube clip of the song has had over a million hits. That is an interesting social historical phenomenon in itself.

It is safe to say that, in 1968, except perhaps among some senior citizens, there were no popular songs from 1928 in wide currency, although versions of blues songs from that era had had a wide impact on popular music.

Quite why All Along The Watchtower has retained such popularity is more complex.

Charles Shaar Murray, in his definitive book on Hendrix Crosstown Traffic, argues that the musician liked it because the opening line "there must be some way out of here" is blues and Hendrix was at root a bluesman, intent on underlining the realities of exploitation in his music. Perhaps, but we need to go further.

In Mike Marqusee's volume on Bob Dylan and the 1960s, the excellent Wicked Messenger, the author suggests that the song was the only one that found an audience among both black and white US soldiers in Vietnam in 1968. This may give a clue to its enduring appeal but it also raises the question of politics.

Dylan's original delivery of the song was low key. Hendrix added his trademark guitar to words which were already apocalyptic so that the music and the words are in tune.

Marqusee broadly argues that, by 1968, Dylan had moved from protest singer to someone who viewed the world through the eyes of a protester but was not actively involved himself.

So, All Along The Watchtower begins with the line "there must be some way out of here/said the joker to the thief," Dylan often styling himself as the joker while the thief may be held to be the music industry. The original song concludes with imagery that comes from William Blake and the Bible, "four horsemen were approaching and the wind began to howl."

These were the Horsemen of the Apocalypse heralding the collapse of capitalism against the backdrop of a US mired in the Vietnam war and about to elect Richard Nixon as president.

More recently Dylan has been concluding the song on stage by repeating the opening line, which lessens the apocalyptic impact but suggests an ongoing crisis perhaps similar to Gramsci's "the old is dying, but the new cannot be born."

It is not, one fancies, a song that Tony Blair's band Ugly Rumours ever played on stage.