Songfacts®:

• This is U2's cover of a Bob Dylan song made famous by Jimi Hendrix. Said Bono: "What other band in our position would learn the chords of 'All Along The Watchtower' five minutes before they went on-stage, play it live and record it? No one."
  
  The song was released on their 1988 album Rattle And Hum, which includes varios live performances along with studio tracks.
• U2 recorded the song live at the Embarcadero Center in San Francisco on November 11, 1987. It kicked off what Bono called the "Save The Yuppie" concert, in honor of the stock market crash the month before.
  
  The initially innocuous term "yuppie" stand for for "Young Urban Professional" or "Young Upwardly-mobile Professional" and became a term of mockery by the mid-'80s, sort of a way of calling someone a "soulless corporate sellout."
• The Edge's guitar intro was not recorded at the concert and had to be dubbed in later.
• While performing the song at the San Francisco concert, Bono saw a fan holding a sign reading "SF + U2," which was intended to mean "San Francisco plus U2." By strange coincidence, the Irish Republican Army political wing known as Sinn Fein had just set off a bomb that killed 11 people only days earlier. Bono thought the "SF" in the sign was referring to Sinn Fein, and was visibly angry. Other concertgoers shouted for Quinn to lower the sign.
  
  Bono kept performing but held on to his anger. To blow off some steam, he climbed a ladder and painted the words "Rock and Roll stops the traffic" on Vaillancourt Fountain. Earlier that year, San Francisco mayor Diane Feinstein had kicked off a city-wide crackdown on graffiti, and she elected to make an example of Bono by declaring him the 346th person cited for the crime. The charges were eventually dropped and U2 paid for repairs. Many city residents wrote letters to the editors of leading local newspapers, denouncing Bono's actions. Bono wrote a letter of apology but later appeared defiant in public with the fountain's creator, Armand Vaillancourt, who defended Bono's graffiti.
  
  A fan resurrected the slogan when he held up a sign reading "Rock and roll stops the traffic" during U2's filming of the "All Because Of You" video in 2005. The phrase popped up again in 2009, when Guardian journalist Sam Jones overheard a "cider-swilling blond mullet" shout out the words while U2 played on the BBC Radio studios' rooftop at Langham Palace.
• In U2's documentary movie Rattle And Hum, they are seen frantically rehearsing this song just before the show. The band had only played it live once before, and that was back in 1981. They included the song in their setlists for many of their 1989 shows.
• Bono added the line "All I got is a red guitar, three chords and the truth," which isn't in Dylan's original.