Bob Dylan had written the song. Bob Dylan had recorded it first. Bob Dylan had made it famous, but the night he heard Jimi Hendrix play it, he understood that it no longer belonged to him. This is not a metaphor. This is not the kind of thing people say about music to sound profound at dinner parties. This is what Bob Dylan himself said, in his own words, in multiple interviews across multiple decades, every time someone asked him about All Along the Watchtower.

 He said it plainly, without self-pity and without false modesty, the way a man states a fact that he has long since made his peace with. He said, “Jimi Hendrix’s version is the definitive version.” He said, “It’s his song now.” He said, “Whenever I perform it, I’m covering Jimi Hendrix.” To understand what that admission costs a man like Bob Dylan, you have to understand what All Along the Watchtower was when Dylan wrote it.

 It was 1967, and Dylan was at the lowest point of his public life, and one of the most fertile points of his creative life, which is a combination that tends to produce extraordinary work. He had been in a motorcycle accident the previous summer, the details of which have never been fully clarified, the mythology around it having long since overtaken whatever actually happened, and he had retreated to a house in Woodstock, New York, with his family and a small group of musicians, away from the touring schedule that had been grinding him

down, away from the press that had been picking at him for years, away from the audience that had booed him for going electric and the other audience that had celebrated him for it. Dylan wrote. He wrote constantly. He wrote in a basement with the band, recording songs with the casual productivity of a man who has temporarily stopped caring whether anyone hears them.

 He wrote songs that were funny, songs that were strange, songs that seemed to come from a completely different tradition than anything he had made before. And somewhere in that period, sitting alone with an acoustic guitar, he wrote All Along the Watchtower in what he later described as a single sitting, in less than an hour, as if the song had been waiting somewhere nearby and simply needed him to be still enough to hear it.

 The song was recorded and released on the John Wesley Harding album in December 1967. It was spare, quiet, deliberate. Two acoustic guitars, bass, and steel guitar. Dylan’s voice moving through the three verses with a storyteller’s economy. Critics praised it, fans absorbed it. It became, in the way that the best Dylan songs became things, part of the furniture of the culture. And then Jimi Hendrix heard it.

The precise moment when Jimmy first encountered All Along the Watchtower is not documented with the kind of specificity that makes for clean history. What is known is that by early 1968, he had heard the album, and that the song had landed on him the way certain songs land on certain musicians, not as something to be admired from a distance, but as something to be inhabited, taken apart, and rebuilt from the inside.

 He recorded his version in January 1968 at Olympic Studios in London, working with Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell, and the session was by all accounts intense and focused in a way that even Jimmy’s sessions, which were rarely casual, stood apart. He recorded multiple takes. He layered guitars. He approached the song’s structure with the combination of instinct and precision that characterized his best work, knowing exactly when to follow the architecture of the original and exactly when to blow the walls out. The result was something

that occupied the same emotional space as Dylan’s version, but arrived there by an entirely different route. Where Dylan had been spare, Jimmy was full. Where Dylan had been still, Jimmy was in constant motion. Where Dylan’s arrangement had left space around every word, Jimmy’s guitars filled every corner of the room and then kept going, pushing past the edges of the song into territory that the song had not previously known it contained.

 It was released as a single in September 1968 and reached number five on the UK charts. In America, it performed more modestly, as Jimmy’s singles often did in a market that never quite knew how to categorize him. But among musicians, among the people who paid attention to what was actually happening in the music rather than what the charts reported, the response was immediate and unanimous.

 Something had been done to that song, something permanent and irreversible. Dylan heard it the way most people heard it, on the radio, without warning, in the middle of whatever he was doing. He has described the moment in several different ways over the years, and the details shift slightly with each telling, but the core of it remains consistent.

 He heard the opening notes and recognized the song and then kept listening with increasing attention as Jimmy took it somewhere Dylan had not known it could go. By the time the guitar solo arrived, that eruption in the middle of the song that sounds less like playing and more like weather, Dylan had stopped doing whatever else he had been doing and was simply listening.

 When it ended, he sat with it for a while. What he felt in that moment was complicated in the way that only the most honest emotions are complicated. There was admiration, genuine and uncomplicated, the kind that one craftsman feels for another when the work is undeniably extraordinary. There was something that might have been called surprise, though Dylan was not easily surprised by music, having spent years in the company of people who played at the highest possible level.

And there was something else, something quieter and harder to name, which had to do with the specific experience of hearing your own creation returned to you, transformed. Dylan later said that hearing Jimmy’s version made him understand something about the song that he had not understood when he wrote it. He said the song had meaning in Jimmy’s hands that it did not have in his.

 He was careful to say this without self-deprecation. He was not saying his version was lesser, he was saying something more precise than that. He was saying that Jimmy had found something inside the song that Dylan had put there without knowing he was putting it there. And that once he had heard it found, he could not unhear it.

 This is the experience that every songwriter fears and secretly hopes for. The fear is of being eclipsed, of having your work taken from you and made into something you can no longer recognize as yours. The secret hope is of being truly heard, of having someone understand your work so completely that they can tell you what it means.

 Dylan got both at once in a single radio transmission on an ordinary day in 1968. He did not stop performing All Along the Watchtower immediately. The withdrawal was gradual, the way most significant changes in a person’s behavior are gradual, more adrift than a decision, a slow gravitational pull away from something that had shifted in his relationship to it.

 By the early 1970s, the song had largely disappeared from his live sets. It would surface occasionally, briefly, and then recede again. When journalists asked him about the absence, Dylan was rarely forthcoming in the early years. He deflected with the practiced ease of a man who has spent decades managing the distance between his public self and his private understanding of things.

 He talked about other songs, other periods, other concerns. The real explanation, the one about Jimmy, the one about the song no longer belonging to him, did not fully emerge until years later, long after Jimmy was gone, when Dylan had reached the age and the perspective from which certain truths become easier to say out loud.

 In interviews from the 1980s and 1990s, the explanation came in pieces. Dylan would mention Jimmy in the context of All Along the Watchtower with increasing directness, each mention a little more unguarded than the last, as if he was practicing saying the whole thing and getting closer each time. By the time he said it fully, that it was Jimmy’s song now, that he himself was performing a cover, he said it with the equanimity of someone who has spent a long time arriving at an acceptance and found on the other side of it that the acceptance [clears throat] was not a

loss, but a kind of freedom. Because here is what Dylan understood and what the story of All Along the Watchtower actually demonstrates about the nature of creative work. A song does not belong to the person who writes it. It belongs to the person who most fully realizes it. Writing is the beginning of the process, not the end.

 The writer finds the door. The interpreter walks through it and discovers what’s on the other side. Both acts are necessary. Neither is complete without the other. Dylan found the door in a house in Woodstock in 1967, in less than an hour, with an acoustic guitar and whatever was moving through him at that particular moment in his life.

 Jimi Hendrix walked through it in January 1968 in a London studio, and found on the other side a room that neither of them had known was there. 40 years is a long time to carry a story before telling it completely, but Dylan is a man who has always understood that some things take the time they take, and that the truth of a thing is not diminished by arriving late.

 If anything, the weight of 40 years behind the telling makes it land differently, makes it mean more. There were people in Dylan’s circle during those years who noticed the change in him when the subject of Jimmy came up. Not distress, exactly. Not envy. Something more specific than either of those things. His long-time producer, Bob Johnston, who had worked with Dylan on John Wesley Harding and several albums before it, said in a later interview that whenever the conversation turned to Jimmy’s version of the song, Dylan went quiet in

a particular way. Not the closed-off quiet of someone who doesn’t want to talk about something. The open quiet of someone who is still thinking about it, still turning it over, still finding new things inside it. Johnston said he had worked with dozens of artists over decades and had seen many of them encounter versions of their own work that unsettled them.

 Most of them, he said, reacted with some combination of defensiveness and dismissal, the instinct to protect the original, to assert its primacy, to find reasons why the new version was lesser, even when it clearly was not. Dylan did none of that. From the beginning, Johnston said, Dylan talked about Jimmy’s version the way you talk about something that has taught you something, with the specific gratitude of a student who did not expect to find a teacher in that particular place.

 What made this remarkable, Johnston said, was that Dylan was not a man who spoke easily about being taught anything by anyone. He was not arrogant in the conventional sense. He was too intelligent for simple arrogance, but he had a quality of self-containment that made vulnerability of that kind unusual. To hear him speak about Jimmy the way he did was to understand that something genuinely significant had happened to him.

 That the encounter with that recording had reached somewhere that most things did not reach. Years later, a journalist asked Dylan whether he wished he had written the song differently, whether knowing what Jimmy would do with it, he would have changed anything about the original. Dylan considered the question for a long moment.

 Then he said, “No, because if I had written it differently, Jimmy might not have found what he found in it. And what he found in it is the whole point.” The musicians who played with Dylan in the years immediately following 1968 noticed something else as well. When Dylan worked on new songs during that period, there was a quality of openness in his writing process that several of them described as new.

 A willingness to leave space in the architecture of a song, to not fill every corner, to write, as one of them put it, as if he was writing something that someone else might one day need to walk around inside. As if he had learned from what Jimmy had done, that the best songs are not the ones that say everything, but the ones that leave room for the right person to find what is still unsaid.

Whether Dylan would attribute this directly to Jimmy is something only he could say. But the timing is not coincidental. And the songs he wrote in the years after 1968 have a particular quality of spaciousness that his earlier work, extraordinary as it was, did not always have. The rooms in them are larger.

 The silences are more deliberate. There is more trust in the listener, more faith that what is not said will be heard as clearly as what is. The best rooms always have windows that the architect did not plan, that only become visible when the right light comes through at the right angle. Jimi Hendrix was, among everything else he was, a man who found those windows in Dylan’s song and in dozens of others.

 In music that thought it already knew what it was until he showed it what else it could be. There is a particular moment in Jimmy’s recording, about 2 minutes and 40 seconds in, just before the final verse, where the guitars briefly fall back and there is a half second of near silence before everything comes back in, that musicians who have studied the track closely describe as the emotional center of the performance.

 Not the solo, not the opening, but that half second of space. The moment where Jimmy seems to be standing at the edge of something and choosing deliberately to step forward into it. Dylan, when asked about his favorite moment in the recording, cited that exact half second without hesitation. He said, “That’s where he showed me what the song was about.

” Jimi Hendrix died on September 18th, 1970. He was 27 years old. All Along the Watchtower was one of the last songs he ever performed live. He played it at the Isle of Fehmarn Festival in Germany on September 6th, 1970, 12 days before he died in what would turn out to be his final concert.

 He played it the way he always played it, as if it were the most important thing happening in the world at that particular moment, which, for everyone who was listening, it was. Bob Dylan was informed of Jimmy’s death and did not make a public statement. He was not, in those years, a man who made public statements about private grief.

What he felt, he kept. What it meant to him to lose the person who had heard his song most clearly, who had taken the thing Dylan had made and shown him what it actually was, is something that Dylan has approached only in fragments, in sideways references, in the particular quality of silence that surrounds certain subjects when he is asked about them.

 He returned All Along the Watchtower to his live sets in the mid-1970s and has performed it regularly ever since. He performs it differently than he did before 1968, differently than the quiet, spare original. He performs it, as he has acknowledged, in the shadow of Jimmy’s version, informed by what Jimmy found in it, shaped by the knowledge of what the song contains that Dylan himself did not know was there until someone else showed him.

 Every time Dylan plays it now, he is playing two songs at once, the one he wrote in Woodstock in 1967 and the one Jimi Hendrix returned to him transformed in 1968, the version that is, by Dylan’s own reckoning, the definitive one. The version that belongs permanently and completely to a 25-year-old from Seattle who heard a door in a song and walked through it and never came back.