"I love Dylan. I only met him once, about three years ago, back at the Kettle of Fish [a folk-rock era hangout] on MacDougal Street. That was before I went to England. I think both of us were pretty drunk at the time, so he probably doesn’t remember it."
Jimi Hendrix, Rolling Stone magazine interview, November 15, 1969.

"We used to hang out with Linda Keith and talk about Bob Dylan. He (Jimi Hendrix) was a Dylan freak, and we talked about Dylan a lot, the symbolism and poetry of his lyrics and just how brilliant he was, Jimi was very self-conscious about his lack of education and his speech. That's one of the reasons he got into Dylan, because he was very literate rock 'n' roll."  Paul Caruso
 

Bob Dylan was probably the single most important influence on Hendrix' lyrically and stylistically. Hendrix recorded four Dylan compositions- Like A Rolling Stone, Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window, All Along the Watchtower and Drifters Escape the last two of which appear on Dylan's anti-psychedelic album, John Wesley Harding. After hearing All Along the Watchtower for the first time, Hendrix immediately set about recording his own version. 
 

Bob Dylan on Jimi Hendrix
“It’s always nice when another performer takes one of your songs and does it, usually someone has his own point of view on things and the lyrics correspond to what he’s thinking in some kind of way and the two meet up.
“My songs were not written with the idea that anybody else would sing them. They were written for me to play live and that is sort of the end of it.
“I knew Jimi slightly before he became a big star, never saw him much after that.  Naturally there was a strong connection because we came from the same time, similar environments and had more or less the same likes and dislikes, attitudes and experiences.
“When I first heard Jimi, he was basically a blues player but unlike everybody else outside of the old authentic guys, he was young and he was the real thing.

“My songs are different and I don’t expect others to make attempts to sing them because you have to get somewhat inside and behind them and it’s hard enough for me to do it sometimes and then obviously you have to be in the right frame of mind.
“But even then there would be a vague value to it because nobody breathes like me so they couldn’t be expected to portray the meaning of a certain phrase in the correct way without bumping into other phrases and altering the mood, changing the understanding and just giving up so that they then become only verses strung together for no apparent reason, patter for a
performer to kill time, take up space, giving a heartless rendition of what was it to begin with.
“Jimi knew my songs were not like that.  He sang them exactly the way they were intended to be sung and he played them the same way.  He did them the way I would’ve done them if I was him.
“Never thought too much about it at the time but now that years have gone by, I see that the message must have been his 
message through and through, not that I ever could articulate the message that well myself, but in hearing Jimi cover it, I realize he must’ve felt it pretty deeply inside and out and that somewhere back there his soul and my soul we’re on the
same desert.

“Jimi was a great artist.  I wish he would’ve lived but he got sucked under and that’s been the downfall of a lot of us.  I feel he had his time and his place a he paid a price he didn’t have to pay.  It’s not a wonder to me that he recorded my songs but rather that he recorded so few of them because they were all his.” 
 

Q: How did you feel when you first heard Jimi Hendrix’s version of “All Along the Watchtower.”?
A: It overwhelmed me, really.  He had such a talent, he cold find things inside a song and vigorously develop them.  He found things that other people wouldn’t think of finding in there.  He probably improved upon it by the spaces he was using.  I took license with the song from his version, actually, and continue to do it to this day.”- The Bob Dylan Companion, p. 228
 

Jimi Hendrix on Bob Dylan
"I love Dylan. I only met him once, about three years ago, back at the Kettle of Fish [a folk-rock era hangout] on MacDougal Street. That was before I went to England. I think both of us were pretty drunk at the time, so he probably doesn’t remember it." 
Jimi Hendrix, Rolling Stone magazine interview, November 15, 1969.

"Sometimes I do a Dylan song and it seems to fit me so right that I figure maybe I wrote it. Dylan didn’t always do it for me as a singer, not in the early days, but then I started listening to the lyrics. That sold me."
Jimi Hendrix, from Beat Instrumental magazine, 1969.