Jimi Hendrix Released His Only Top 40 Song 57 Years Ago
When music nerds often ask, “Who is the greatest one-hit wonder of all time?” And you might be shocked by the answer: Jimi Hendrix.
What’s even more surprising: Hendrix’s “hit” wasn’t even a song he wrote!
Despite Hendrix being a rock and roll legend and guitar virtuoso (Rolling Stone named him their Greatest Guitarist of all Time), Jimi only had a single song reach the Top 20 of the Billboard Hot 100 in his short-lived career. And that song is his cover of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower,” which the Jimi Hendrix Experience released on September 2, 1968.
Dylan wrote and recorded the original “All Along the Watchtower” in 1967, as he was convalescing from the motorcycle accident that kept him from the public eye for nearly a decade. As the story goes, Hendrix got hold of Dylan’s early John Wesley Harding tapes, which included the aforementioned song. While working on Electric Ladyland in London, Hendrix decided to give it a try.
Eddie Kamer, Hendrix’s engineer at the time, told Rolling Stone that Jimi “was still looked upon by his basically white audience as the mammoth black guitar hero. There was a constant fight within him to expand himself.”
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Reprise Records released the song as a single, and it reached No. 20 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. It’s Hendrix’s highest-ranking American single and his only Top 40 hit. Jimi was much more successful in the U.K., with his singles “Hey Joe,” “Purple Haze,” and “The Wind Cries Mary” all cracking the Top 10.
So, how did Dylan react to Hendrix’s version of his song? It overwhelmed me, really,” Dylan told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in 1995. “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.”
Sadly, Jimi Hendrix died on Sept. 18, 1970, at age 27.
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