It’s clear now that the signal song of [1968], the song with which Bob Dylan has for years, to this day, closed his concerts, was “All Along the Watchtower” - a song which ended with words that, in any traditional ballad, would have opened it: “Two riders were approaching/ The wind began to howl.” …
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… It would be 25 years before Neil Young took the song and made it clear, rewrote it, through an arrangement that made its apocalypse not a whisper but a desperate shout, a shout that made desperation thrilling, a new way of singing the song so undeniable that, as Young played, it rewrote the past and wrote the future in advance. Young taught the song to Dylan as he taught it to everyone else: from that night in 1993 when Young sang and played as if as an artist he had emerged from the song rather than addressed himself to it, Dylan himself has never played it any other way.
- the video clip is of Neil Young, performing “All Along The Watchtower”