Greatest ever one hit wonder: The only Jimi Hendrix song to hit top 40 in the charts
If you could go back in time and experience the live performance of just one artist in history, I would be willing to bet that Jimi Hendrix‘s name would be high up on your shortlist. Whether it be watching him set the guitar alight in real time or sitting in the corner of his dingy yet iconic shows in London’s blues scene, seeing him perform was a moment in time, every single time.
He arrived in the 1960s music scene like a lightning bolt of innovation, changing the idea of what it meant to be a master instrumentalist. His name will forever be linked to the guitar and how it can be the central player in constructing experimental rock songs. Perennially innovative and soulful in his performative approach, he extended beyond the realms of a simple virtuoso and was instead viewed as a brilliant songwriter in his own right.
But in a bizarre twist of fate, it’s his cover of Bob Dylan’s iconic track that stands alone as Hendrix’s most well-known. His rendition of ‘All Along The Watchtower’ features perhaps his most iconic riff and vocal partnership, turning Dylan’s classic into something both psychedelic and soulful, to a point where it’s largely unrecognisable from the original.
It was so good, and so original, that even the famously hard to please Dylan was impressed, “It overwhelmed me, really. He had such talent, he could find things inside a song and vigorously develop them. He found things that other people wouldn’t think of finding in there. He probably improved upon it by the spaces he was using. I took license with the song from his version, actually, and continue to do it to this day.”
Hendrix was acutely aware of what it took to deliver a good cover. Not to baselessly follow the lines carved out by the originator but to breathe its structure with new life. Inside the bending guitar lines and hushed vocals stood an artist who could interpret the song his own way, while feeling the sentiment of its every word, which came from a long-standing admiration of Dylan’s work.
“All those people who don’t like Bob Dylan’s songs should read his lyrics. They are filled with the joys and sadness of life,” Hendrix said when talking about his cover. “None of us can sing normally. Sometimes, I play Dylan’s songs, and they are so much like me that it seems to me that I wrote them. I have the feeling that ‘Watchtower’ is a song I could have come up with, but I’m sure I would never have finished it.”
It’s unsurprising that this song was a hit, given how Hendrix approached it. But it is wholly surprising that it acts as the only song in his entire discography to reach the top 40 on the American charts. Hitting number 20 in 1968, it beat his own tracks ‘Purple Haze’, which peaked at 65 and ‘Foxy Lady’, which peaked at 67.
Statistically speaking, it made Hendrix a one-hit wonder, with a hit that wasn’t even his.
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