There's another connection between two secret sharers: Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson both convince you they just did whatever they did off the top of their heads. That's why Nelson's two big statements of the Nineties — 1993's Don Was-produced Across the Borderline and 1998's Daniel Lanois-produced Teatro — lack the magic of the austere Spirit, the instrumental Night and Day or even the casual remakes on last year's unnoticed Me and the Drummer. And it's why this half-assed half-kiddie album hits harder than last year's concept-controlled Milk Cow Blues. Named after and leading with a Kermit the Frog favorite, it tosses off many other gems this great lover of American song never got around to telling us about before, as it works its way to Mickey Newbury's funereal "The Thirty-third of August." But for all the charms of "I'm My Own Grandpa" and "Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)," each delivered with a canny guilelessness that cuts through the silly and the pretentious with equal ease, the summation is one Willie wrote himself last year: "If we're backin' up, it's just to get a runnin' start/'Cause everything we do we do with all our hearts/And it don't really matter what they say/We wouldn't have it any other way."

“All Along the Watchtower”

Jimi Hendrix got hold of Bob Dylan's early John Wesley Harding tapes and in late 1967 recorded a version of "All Along the Watchtower" with the Experience in London. Dissatisfied with that first development, Hendrix brought those tapes with him to New York in early 1968 when he began work on Electric Ladyland. Eddie Kramer, Hendrix's engineer at the time, told Rolling Stone that Hendrix "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." Hendrix's successful take on Dylan's work has long been recognized by the songwriter. "I liked Jimi Hendrix's record of this and ever since he died I've been doing it that way," Dylan wrote in the liner notes to his Biograph box set. "Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it's a tribute to him in some kind of way."