Jimi Hendrix -- "All Along the Watchtower"
I find myself suspicious of the big guitar players of the classic rock era. They generally boasted little in terms of subtlety, and the formulas they rode to stardom sometimes seem a little easy, despite their technical proficiency. Also, the edge wore off pretty quickly with a lot of them. Eric Clapton quickly became a lot less interesting without the psychedelic tendencies of Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker to urge him on.
There's something about Hendrix, though, that sets him apart. The funk and soul of his music are part of it. The leanness of the music, even with studio overdubs and effects, works much to its credit. Hendrix could write a good song, but here's a situation in which he was better off with someone else's. Of course, when that someone else is Bob Dylan, the stakes run pretty high. The ratio of bad Dylan covers to good Dylan covers is, overall, pretty dismal. This song is easy to cover -- three basic chords, and it's the Hendrix version people are covering, not Dylan's -- but it's hard to make it sound good. Maybe it's the heavy strings Hendrix used, or maybe it was the upside-down guitar, but whatever the case, there is a distinctive signature in everything Hendrix played. Here's a song with a kind of gravity to it, and Hendrix manages to channel its downward minor-key energy into something powerful, urgent, and profound, even though it's just about impossible to say what exactly the song is really about.
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