Bob Dylan’s problem with U2’s cover of ‘All Along The Watchtower’
U2 followed up on the wild success of 1987’s The Joshua Tree with Rattle & Hum, a record containing live versions of their hits and new tracks recorded in the studio. U2 had been touring the United States extensively, and they famously covered Bob Dylan’s ‘All Along The Watchtower’ outdoors in San Francisco.
Interestingly, Dylan seemed to be not too keen on U2’s cover version. At a 1991 concert in Evanston, Illinois, he asked the crowd, “Anybody here ever heard a group called U2?” He then went on, “Well, don’t matter… Anyway, they recorded this song, but they recorded it with the wrong words. Here are the correct words…”
These comments are rather odd from Dylan, who is known to constantly change the words to his own songs, so to hear him get irate about Bono using his creative license to give ‘All Along The Watchtower’ a fresh lease of life is particularly jarring.
Bono’s lyrics divert from Dylan’s when he sings, “All I got is a red guitar, three chords and the truth. All I got is a red guitar, the rest is up to you”. Whether Bono forgot the lyrics and used his spontaneity to create his own on the spot hasn’t been confirmed, but the new lyrics are certainly a decent effort.
After all, the Rattle and Hum film shows U2 learning the song just moments before heading out to play it at the Embarcadero Centre in San Francisco. Perhaps Dylan’s comments at the 1991 concert were just Dylan being grumpy old Dylan, perhaps a bit pissed off that U2 were far bigger than he was around that time.
The comments are all the more interesting when we consider the fact that Bono and Dylan had sung ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ together at Slane Castle in 1984, and when Bono didn’t know all the words, he made up his own on the spot. So Dylan certainly shouldn’t have been surprised to hear Bono once again provide his own spin on the original words. And at least he got most of them right that time.
Dylan has also helped Bono to write Rattle & Hum’s ‘Love Rescue Me’, one of the best efforts on the record. Bono had apparently dreamt the song, and when he woke up, he thought it was already one of Dylan’s. To confirm this, he sought out Dylan at his home in Malibu, and finding it wasn’t a Dylan original, the two musicians finished writing it together.
So whether something happened between Rattle & Hum and Dylan’s concert in 1991 remains to be seen. Dylan certainly didn’t appear impressed by U2’s cover version, although perhaps he made the comments to the crowd to essentially say, “I’ll always be bigger than U2, even if they’ve taken the spotlight for the past ten years or so”. And some thirty years later, we see he was right.
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