Charts Watch: Ice Cube, 'Cars,' Pussycat Dolls

• Ice Cube's Laugh Now Cry Later, the first album by the former NWA member in over six years, debuted at Number Four with 144,490 sales.

• The soundtrack to Pixar's Cars, featuring a bevy of new and old car-related tunes by Sheryl Crow, John Mayer, Chuck Berry and Rascal Flatts, entered the charts in the Top 10 with 68,387 sales its first week out.

• Gnarls Barkley's Star Wars-inspired performance of their hit "Crazy" at the MTV Movie Awards earned them a 32 percent jump in sales for a grand total of 216,466 sales over five weeks.

• Thirty-nine weeks after its release, everyone's favorite former burlesque act, the Pussycat Dolls, remained high on the charts thanks to their latest single "Buttons," a duet with Snoop Dogg. Their debut PCD has sold a total of 1,617,909 copies.

• Scottish singer-songwriter K.T. Tunstall has been making a slow steady rise up the charts since releasing her debut Eye To The Telescope 18 weeks ago, selling 391,838 units total.

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  MUSIC 100 Greatest Debut Albums
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  MOVIES 'Great Gatsby' Is a Crushing Disappointment
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  TV Why You Should Watch 'Happy Endings'
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  POLITICS No Price Big Banks Can't Fix

Song Stories

“All Along the Watchtower”

The Jimi Hendrix Experience | 1968

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."

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