I love this music and lyrics. But i dont have a clue of its meaning!Help!!

"There must be some kind of way out of here,"
said the joker to the thief,
"There's too much confusion,
I can't get no relief.
Businessmen they drink my wine,
plowmen dig my earth
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth"

"No reason to get excited,"
the thief, he kindly spoke
"There are many here among us
who feel that life is but a joke
But you and I, we've been through that
and this is not our fate
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late"

All along the watchtower
Princes kept the view
While all the women came and went
Barefoot servants, too

Outside in the cold distance
A wildcat did growl
Two riders were approaching
And the wind began to howl

It's about the 'Nam war dude.

Thanks!

PS: This was written by Bob Dylan.

You're in for a long reading when it comes to a Dylan song:

"There must be some way out of here," said the joker to the thief,
"There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief."

Who has not reacted to life at some point or other with this same desperate cry which the joker wails to the thief? Dylan, the artist, invites his audience inward to ponder these questions, for the full meaning of this song cannot be comprehended until these two are identified.

The joker's lament continues in the next two lines, suggesting the basic injustice of the situation:

"Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth.
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth."

In the next stanza, the thief responds by recognizing, more or less, the truth of the joker's observation. To this he immediately adds by way of a challenge the reminder that they have moved beyond perceiving life as a joke. Nor would the thief have the joker forget that time is running out:

No reason to get excited," the thief he kindly spoke, There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke.

"But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate
"So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.

Either you feel that life is but a joke or you do not, the thief seems to suggest; and if you feel that life is not a joke, and you know that time is running out, then you know that you must seek the truth now. After this brief conversation between the joker and the thief, we are presented rather abruptly with two mysterious sets of poetic images which we will look at later.

If you meditate on this song, you will realize that this dialogue is of a very intimate nature. Indeed, this conversation between "the joker" and "the thief" is one which takes place in some form or other within the deep recesses of every man's being, in the conscience. With the joker side of the self we are prone to think that we do not really know what's going on in life and that life is somehow unfair. We are apt to complain and feel sorry for ourselves. The joker is the wild card; it can be anyone; It is the ordinary ego experiencing itself in isolation. The thief, on the other hand, is the darker, more mysterious side of the self. He is an outlaw in the Dylan sense of "to live outside the law you must be honest." And it is he who, as a still, small voice, speaks kindly, robbing the ego of its cherished illusion.

The joker is the ego of illusion. It does not penetrate to the spiritual depths where unity is experience. The joker, wanting to be the highest card in the deck, does not quite understand that it can only temporarily borrow that designation which the ace - mysteriously the highest and lowest at the same time - possesses as a primary quality. Before it were possible for the joker to be an "ace," however, the real Ace must exist. Nor can the joker become a "little ace" without assuming that uncanny unity of the lowest-within-the-highest.

The tendency of the joker, of course, is to take life as a joke and to play frivolously with its own great, though temporary, potential in the game of life. Most often he would be a knave or a deuce for the sake of simply winning a hand. Next time around he may be completely worthless.

But enough of this abstract punning. The point is that there are two sides to the self for which Dylan has found intriguingly appropriate names. The joker represents that aspect of the self which is intellectually conscious of itself in its separateness from all else. The thief on the other hand represents that aspect of self which is spiritually conscious of itself within the unity of the Great All. These two, the Joker and the Thief, are at odds with each other. The Joker as the ordinary worldly ego eats of the Tree of Knowledge and is therefore lousy with words. The Thief hiding out in the cave of the soul eats of the Tree of Life and knows that which can hardly be spoken because it is an element of the very Word itself. This Thief, in a sense, il like a little Christ within us. Like Christ who, as Dylan put it in a later song, "died a criminal's death," this Thief comes from a place beyond the letter of law, from the spirit; and he goes beyond the evidence of the senses to the substance of things unseen. It is within this "thief" side of our being that we know intuitively that life is not a joke and that we had better not kid ourselves, because death is coming.

The dialogue recorded in the first two stanzas of "All Along the Watchtower" is itself a picture of a primary conflict that persecutes every soul struggling with the question of its reality. This conflict is no small matter to be settled intellectually after a moment's thought. It surges in the subterranean reaches of the soul and calls for a commitment of our whole being. The fine balance of this inner agon is accurately portrayed by Dylan when he cites a certain validity to the ego's point of view:

Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth,
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth.

It is true that we are all victimized and sold short by the ways of the world. Yet, we also sell ourselves short, and others as well, until we come to realize the crucial fact that life is not a joke - that by reason of the faculty by which we know it, the Thief, our source of reality, extends beyond what the Joker can understand. Our conscience is our lifeline, so to speak, connecting us with that vast dark region which is the unknown depths of being. Hiding away in those depths is the Thief, our conscience, seeking to rob us of our illusory and egocentric "possessions," our capital.

Dylan first gives us the picture of this conflict raging in the soul. Then, in the last two stanzas, he throws light on it from two different angles: The third stanza gives us the picture as it is seen from the spiritual heights while the final stanza shows the inner experience of the soul down below:

All along the watchtower, princes kept the view
While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too.
Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl,
Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.

In Dylan's poetic language, 'women' and the female gender symbolize the soul, while the male gender symbolizes the ego. This symbology, it may be noted, has a long history in lyric poetry, reaching back at least as far as the troubadours of medieval times and the Sufi poets who were their predecessors.

The 'princes' who keep the view are egos who have been crowned with spiritual vision. Looking down upon the world from their ethereal and eternal vantage point, they watch the souls coming and going, even those without shoes - that is, those without anything to cushion the shocks of their walk upon the path, those who must meet the rude earth with their naked soles. Down below, the inner reality experienced by the soul whose ego has not yet been crowned is that outside, somewhere, a beast is growling and inside the wind (the spirit) is howling. All the while, two riders relentlessly approach.

This is our situation: Caught between the certain confusion which torments the uncrowned ego and the dark uncertainties of the soul, we see the two riders advancing on us. To go with the ego, the Joker, is to reduce life to a joke. But to go with the Thief means opening up to the unknown - a realm which, being beyond the capacity of the ordinary ego, requires faith. The choice is ours, but the moment of decision is a difficult one amid the growling of the beast and the howling of the wind.

Quite possibly the best cover of all time.

That's VERY in depth. Interesting explanation.

and that doesn't come from me either but from a study of Dylan's songs.

I think that the idea of being just a vietnam war song come to the fact that the Hendrix cover has been used a lot in viet movies and docs... especially because of the first line...

I like Neil Young's cover of it better than Hendrix's.

Neil Young covered it?

*pops in The Essential Bob Dylan*

This thread made me play 'Bringing it all Back Home' in its entirety for the first time ever.

..... the recent one he did w/ PJ or has he done it another time?