You have likely heard more about Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue than you have heard from it. You may have heard how, in his mid-30s in the mid-’70s, the mercurial songwriter reconnected with old cronies in Greenwich Village and found new collaborators while simply walking down the street. How, revolting from the exhausting excess of his nervy but brilliant 1974 tour with the Band, he lassoed said pals into a roving road show with few definite plans beyond piling into some buses and RVs and playing through the Northeast. How Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith, at the precipice of becoming generational voices themselves, turned down his invitation to join the madness. Dylan had often sung of independence and created with a concomitant restlessness. This was him—sans manager and inching toward divorce with Sara Lownds, the mother of his first five children—acting on his own advice, gathering his friends and just getting onstage, high and electrified and focused and free. It is one of the essential myth-building moments in a career framed by forward motion, a fable worth knowing no matter what you have or haven’t heard.
At least until the last decade, public documents of Rolling Thunder’s two five-week spurts in 1975 and 1976 have been paltry and unsatisfying. A few months after it all ended in 1976, Dylan released Hard Rain, a nine-song set stitched together from two shows that May. It satisfied mostly no one: Lester Bangs decried its “musical wretchedness” and wrote in NME that it “amounts to an insult,” while Rolling Stone wrote “to say then that Hard Rain is Dylan’s least accessible, most chaotic and contemptuous album since Self Portrait is not enough.” Unless you were willing to spelunk in the infinite caverns of Dylan bootlegs, though, that was all you had ever heard of the tour’s second half. An official and excellent Dylan collection eventually compiled 22 tracks from the 1975 run, while a quasi-documentary by Martin Scorsese and an accompanying box set also pulled from that storied year, when Dylan glowered behind sweat-streaked white face paint and Sam Shepard came along to keep a diary and ostensibly write a screenplay. Those 1976 shows, however, remained some also-ran afterthought—no makeup, no benefits for boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, no fanfare of the unexpected, no document.
No score yet, be the first to add.
A new 39-disc box set—or, for the less masochism-minded, two full concerts, released as separate sets—corrects that record. As the name suggests, The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1976 Live Recordings collects every inch of professionally rendered tape that sound engineer David Hendel captured between April , when the band began an 11-day stint in Florida, and May, when it ended in a long-since-demolished arena called the Salt Palace. That finale is missing, as are big chunks of several shows. These gigs were old-fashioned revues, too, with Joan Baez or Joni Mitchell or Roger McGuinn or a largely unknown T Bone Burnett taking lead turns of their own; this set, though, collects only the Dylan-led numbers, whether solo or in loose duets with Baez or backed by the band that came to call itself Guam.
Still, these 381 tracks dispel any idea that the 1976 tour is a footnote. At points, it is actually more electrifying and endearing than its 1975 counterpart. For the extreme Dylan devotee, there are rare delights aplenty: an astoundingly beautiful and ragged rendition of “Dink’s Song” with Baez, a shit-kicking early take on the tense and overlooked “Seven Days,” Dylan navigating a bomb scare in Florida, full shows for which bootlegs barely existed. But more importantly, it shows Dylan—edging toward divorce in a time of American political uncertainty—wrestling with notions of what he wanted his music to become, of how he could use his past and present as tools to become something new. On these tapes, he is funny, mean, sad, sentimental, hilariously sloppy, and unnervingly sharp. He is real, the mask of 1975 washed away by the effort of just being, replaced now by a bandana for soaking up the sweat.
Hard Rain was culled from two shows near the end of that spring 1976 run—Fort Worth, on May 16, and Fort Collins, a week later. Those concerts have now been reissued in full, too, both alongside many other complete shows in the box and as standalone releases. Hearing them explains away the initial frustration of Hard Rain; that set was like being told your favorite basketball player has had the best season of their life, then only being shown grainy highlights out of order and with no context, not knowing about the victories they helped create. These two tapes, though, are like watching a full playoff game, the early-season jitters and mishaps gone.
The 1976 tour had been a struggle. Back in 1975, the band had been on familiar turf, never going west of Toronto or south of New York as they popped up unexpectedly in modest venues. But after scant rehearsals, they were grinding in Florida in 1976, trying twice in a hotel ballroom to tape a TV special that never aired before playing an Orlando arena the next day. Out of practice and endurance, Dylan’s voice is fraying and weak. They canceled a Louisiana show because of slow sales and paid Willie Nelson to join them in Houston, a move that still left a quarter of Hofheinz Pavilion empty. (U.S. Marshals subpoenaed Nelson in a narcotics case backstage, then asked for autographs anyway, as modern Dylan chronicler Ray Padgett chronicles in his excellent new guide to the 1976 tour.)
Rather than take another loss in Dallas, they played an audibly uncomfortable show two hours south at Gatesville State School for Boys, a youth correction center notorious for using dogs to track escapees while treating kids like dogs themselves. “The gentleman who put together this pack of maniacs is gonna come up onstage and sing a little bit,” Baez tells the children to very little audible applause. “I hope you had a good time.” Mitchell danced with the kids, but Dylan awkwardly bludgeoned “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” for the inmates soon before leaving, before moving on to his next rock show, this one in Fort Worth. It was no Folsom Prison masterstroke.
The Fort Worth and Fort Collins shows—the former the only 1976 show ever officially pressed to vinyl, the latter released to streaming services without notice a week before the box’s arrival—are instant classics of Dylan’s entire live oeuvre. Aside from a few shifts near the middle of each show, they share a setlist. Dylan opens solo, taking a step into his serious past with “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “It Ain’t Me Babe,” both heavy and breathless, as if he’s serving them up with a huff. The band arrives for the ragtag “Vincent van Gogh,” a pun-heavy tune about the painter’s lost ear written by Robert Freimark, the former art teacher of Rolling Thunder’s de facto emcee, Bob Neuwirth. It lets light into the room, lets Dylan relax in his chosen company. To wit, before they play it in Fort Collins, Neuwirth yells, “Fuck the rain, fuck the rain,” as it had been pouring for days. “That’s pretty hard to do,” Dylan quips, cracking himself up.
They charge through a few full-band cuts and take a break, only for Dylan and Baez to return for three duets: “Blowin’ in the Wind,” the traditional “Railroad Boy,” and “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos),” Woody Guthrie’s chronicle of Mexican farm workers killed while being shipped out of the United States. From the suicide of “Railroad Boy” to the existential inquest of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” these are songs about wanting what is just out of reach, be it justice or love or a future itself. That was the core of Dylan’s mood.
At that first spring show in Florida, long before the set was dialed, Dylan played “If You See Her, Say Hello,” a sad and sweet song about lost love from his 1975 masterpiece, Blood on the Tracks. This version, though, is brutal, his voice acerbic and his guitar serrated. “If you’re making love to her/Watch it from the rear/You never know when I’ll be back or liable to appear,” he sings, replacing a tender lyric about a kiss with a threat to break whoever is breaking up his life, to bust down the door and enact his vengeance.
That anger essentially becomes Dylan’s oxygen by the end of the run. “Shelter From the Storm” is music for sentimental TV commercials now, but these renditions are reminders that it is a song about an ending, or at the least the start of one. Dylan’s sneer and Mick Ronson’s guitar jab like fingers in some intense argument, trying to win the pyrrhic victory of a lovers’ quarrel. Steel guitar and violin underline his resignation and disappointment in “You’re a Big Girl Now” in Fort Worth. In Fort Collins, “Tangled Up in Blue” becomes a demented blues epic, Dylan and the band swapping the original’s senses of romance and adventure for one of intense if amused annoyance. When he shouts, “All the people we used to know/They’re an illusion to me now” near the end over pounding proto-punk drums, he seems delighted to be rid of the entirety of his past, to be cutting the cord to everything he’s ever known.
“Idiot Wind” doubles down on that feeling. The song is sometimes seen as the blunder of Blood on the Tracks, the moment where Dylan’s bitterness bests him, where he’s simply becoming a big baby. If that’s how you feel, skip these 1976 versions, which offer neither quarter nor apology; I find them, however, thrilling, a master shit-talker leaning all the way into this bloodsport. “Idiot Wind” inveighs against fame, logic, love, stupidity, smarts, and sex in eight brutal minutes, but Guam play it better than the studio band, a half-dozen guitars slicing the studio organ line’s softness open like offal. Dylan has often been described as ornery during the 1976 leg of Rolling Thunder; he funnels all that ire into these versions of “Idiot Wind.” It is death-metal mean, a romantic disavowal from which there was no return. After Fort Collins, he wouldn’t play “Idiot Wind” again until a string of shows in 1992, and he hasn’t played it at all in the subsequent 34 years. What the fuck else was there to say?
In 1975, Dylan and friends had ended their sets with a jubilant “This Land Is Your Land,” everyone singing along and trading verses as if they were gathered around the Washington Square Arch two decades earlier. But Nixon was newly out of office then, the United States freshly out of Vietnam. That song is a promissory note for a better tomorrow, something they could all perhaps picture in 1975.
But by the spring of 1976, it was still unclear who would challenge Gerald Ford for the presidency, let alone that the country would soon get its first rock’n’roll president. The band dropped the alternate American anthem, then, and closed most nights with “Gotta Travel On,” an old American tune that had become a hit amid the folk revival. It was a functional farewell, since everyone onstage knew the lyrics about leaving, but it was also a wonderful Dylan troll, since he’d included it on the album that cost him one of the great win streaks in music history, Self Portrait. Here he was with Mitchell and Nelson and Kinky Friedman and even Allen Ginsberg, improvising lyrics for it every night. With friends like that, who cares about critics?
After they turn the song into a goofy party in Fort Collins, Neuwirth tells the crowd goodbye, that they’ve played all they have to offer. But then, to Neuwirth’s own astonishment, they come back out for the tour’s lone encore. Given the weather, and despite the fact they’d only played it once on this leg, it’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.”
I am always struck by how far ahead of the band and Baez Dylan leans, his voice pitched toward the future, toward a way out of here, too. In many ways, this was the end of Dylan’s own rock’n’roll era, the start of his slide into Christian rock and dangly earrings and folk covers and a consensus that his vital work was now permanently behind him. When he stepped offstage in Fort Collins in May 1976, he stepped into two decades of uncertainty and inconsistency that ultimately delivered him into the most profound renaissance any American songwriter has ever had. That long path began with the end of Rolling Thunder, finally heard here not as some lackluster denouement but as the proper exclamation point it was.
