Santana's 1969 debut album followed close on the heels of the sextet's coming-out party at the Woodstock Festival, where the multiethnic, single-minded San Francisco band nearly stole the show from the likes of the Grateful Dead and Sly and the Family Stone. Santana was a nonstop thirty-seven-minute rhythmic onslaught: Hand percussionists Mike Carabello and Chepito Areas duked it out with the relentless Michael Shrieve on the drum kit, Gregg Rolie's churning Hammond runs kept the horns in his Leslie cabinet spinning wildly and Carlos Santana's lead guitar delivered both passion and improbable delicacy. Rolie aired out his pipes on the hit "Evil Ways," the LP's lone conventional piece; otherwise the song form was sucked into the undertow of jams such as "Jingo" and "Soul Sacrifice." The two-CD reissue is stocked with extras, most compellingly the band's entire Woodstock set. Live and in-studio, it all sounds as shit-hot as it did in the summer of '69.

“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."