#i had all along the watchtower on my little ipod shuffle thing and listened to that specific song so muhc | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

johnny-romero-and-the-family · 7 years

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Every day when I’m getting ready for work I hook my iPod up to my speakers, select one of the playlists I’ve made, and set it on shuffle. I was in the shower this morning when a very special song came on. I hadn’t listened to it in a while and as soon as I heard the first few bars, I knew what my next entry would be about.

It was the summer of 1998, right before my freshman year of high school. I’d been playing guitar for about two years. I was barely starting to understand the instrument and I was falling deeply in love with the music. My idols at that time were bands like Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, Nirvana, U2, and Fleetwood Mac, as well as guitarists like Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughan. I’d gotten my first chills from songs like “Stairway to Heaven,” “Layla,” and “Bohemian Rhapsody,” so I knew music could be powerful and moving. But even still, I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

My mom took me to a local music store one afternoon while she was running errands. I had a few extra bucks and I wanted some new music. I made a few selections and narrowed it down to either Achtung Baby by U2 or The Ultimate Experience, a Jimi Hendrix greatest hits album. I wanted the U2 album badly and I almost got it because I really wasn’t a Hendrix fan at that point. Naturally, I’d heard all the hype about him being the greatest guitarist ever, but when I listened to songs like “Foxy Lady” or “Hey Joe,” I thought (God, I can’t believe I’m about to write this), What’s the big deal?

In the end, I bought The Ultimate Experience because I already had some U2 and I figured I needed some Hendrix in my collection if I was going to be a guitarist.

My mom let me listen to the CD in the car on the way home. The first song was “All Along the Watchtower.” My mom wouldn’t let me turn the volume up to where I wanted it, but as soon as I heard that thunderous acoustic guitar progression that opens the song, the hair stood up on my skin.

What the hell? I thought. That has never happened so quickly.

We pulled into the garage about halfway through the song. I snatched the CD, ran straight to my room, put the CD in my stereo, and cranked the volume. Immediately, I was in a different world. The mood was frantic and there were two voices guiding me. One was a deep blues howl that shook my soul as it told a haunting story of a joker and a thief. The other was a guitar that sounded like some wild mythological beast unleashed into the night.

I don’t remember if my eyes were open or closed. It didn’t matter. At that point I existed in another dimension. A bomb could have detonated in my room and I wouldn’t have budged.

The chills stayed with me through the first two verses and guitar solos. Then, after the second guitar solo, something hit me that changed my life forever. I heard sounds that were unlike anything I would have thought possible.

This is a human being playing a guitar? I thought.

I became delirious. This was so much more than chills. This was a spiritual awakening; a metaphysical rebirth.

I found out later that that first crazy solo in the middle of the song was played on an electric 12-string guitar with a slide and an echo effect. With those tools, Jimi had created something perfect and he wasn’t finished.

The next part of the solo was played with a wah-wah pedal. It was an effect I was already very familiar with, but I’d never heard anyone use it this way. When other guitarists used it, they emphasized either the effect or the guitar. Jimi didn’t have to choose. He blended both so that they were perfectly cohesive.

Coming out of the big guitar solos, Jimi screamed, “ALL ALONG THE WATCHTOWER…” and with that, I was his forever. When I left the house with my mom that morning, I was a basketball player with a burgeoning interest in music and guitar. When I opened my eyes after hearing “All Along the Watchtower” for the first time, music was life and The Ultimate Experience was my Bible. “All Along the Watchtower” became my favorite song of all-time and nothing has replaced it to this day.

It has taken me until now to begin to understand how many things I have learned solely because of that song. I don’t know how it is for others, but I became a musician because I was chasing something. For years, I didn’t know what it was. I just had so much fun playing guitar that I didn’t stop to think why I was doing it. Now I can see that this whole time I’ve been trying to reach what Jimi found on “All Along the Watchtower.”

John Mayer once wrote a tribute column about Hendrix in Rolling Stone. In closing the column, he said, “Who I am as a guitarist is defined by my failure to become Jimi Hendrix. However far you stop on your climb to be like him, that’s who you are.” Hendrix spawned a legion of followers who have followed that exact path. From Eddie Hazel to Stevie Ray Vaughan to Kirk Hammet to Joe Satriani to John Frusciante to John Mayer, the Gospel According to Jimi has given life to countless guitarists over the past four decades. He created a fraternity that includes some of the greatest players to ever hold the instrument, and since hearing “All Along the Watchtower” for the first time I have fantasized constantly about joining that fraternity one day. Whatever other interests we have, we are all connected by our pursuit of the standard that Jimi set.

The catch, as John Mayer said, is that we’ll never get there. It is impossible. You can learn to play his songs. You can play faster than he did. You can improve on his technique. But no one will ever revolutionize the guitar the way he did. Even today, after all the great music and all the innovations we’ve seen in the past 40 years, his music is still miles and miles ahead of us. I’ve heard guitar solos that blew my mind and inspired me to practice for hours, but I still have yet to hear anything that can touch the solos in the middle of “All Along the Watchtower.”

Yet rather than viewing that as an insurmountable challenge, I see it as a blessing. With that song, Jimi gave me an identity. I was one of those kids who always struggled to fit in, for one reason or another. Once I opened my eyes in Jimi’s world, I stopped caring about any of that. None of it matters because I know what I am. I am an artist and a guitarist. Whether I am any good remains to be seen, but that much is certain. I know that not because of any measure of talent or ability. Talent is a subjective idea and ability is little more than practice and repetition. Those are not my gifts. My gift is the feeling I got when I heard “All Along the Watchtower” for the first time.

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