The box set reconstructs the second part of the tour with 381 tracks, of which 371 have never been released
After the 1974 tour with The Band, Bob Dylan returned to the American streets with a different idea of entertainment. The Rolling Thunder Revue, started in the fall of 1975, had the pace of a touring troupe: musicians and guests took turns around Dylan, in a more mobile and theatrical formula than the usual tour of a rock band. Joan Baez, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Roger McGuinn were among the names who participated in the Revue; the lineup changed and the concert left room for more voices, duets and forays into the folk repertoire.
The spring of 1976 was the second part of it. The run began on April 18 in Lakeland, Florida, and ended on May 25 in Salt Lake City, after twenty-seven dates. It is this section of the journey that he reconstructs The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1976 Live Recordingsout on Columbia Records and Legacy Recordings. The new box set joins the 2019 one, dedicated to the recordings of the first autumn segment.
At the center of the Revue was a band capable of keeping different accents together. Rob Stoner on bass, Howie Wyeth on drums and Scarlet Rivera on violin had already played in Desire; with them were Mick Ronson, guitarist of David Bowie’s Spiders from Mars, Steven Soles, David Mansfield and T Bone Burnett. The result was not a neutral framework for Dylan’s songs: Rivera’s violin, guitars and pedal steel moved the arrangements between folk and electric rock. Furthermore, the repertoire changed shape from one evening to another.
In this landscape Joan Baez also returnedwith whom Dylan resumed sharing the stage after years of separate paths. Among the duets collected are “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Railroad Boy”: moments in which the memory of the folk of the Sixties meets a more electric band and a Dylan with an increasingly tense voice. It’s not just a matter of finding two historical interpreters in the same scene, but of listening to how their understanding was measured with arrangements and rhythms different from those of the first performances together.
The set includes 39 CDs and 381 tracks, 371 of which have never been released. The criterion is that of professional recordings of the second part of the tour, obtained from the original tape sources. Almost all twenty-seven dates are represented, but the program does not correspond to twenty-seven complete concerts: alongside complete performances there are partial recordings. It is precisely the succession of the material that allows us to follow the different phases of the journey and the transformations of a repertoire that Dylan did not treat as an immutable whole.
One of the central passages is the Fort Collins concert on May 23rd, the penultimate date of the Revue, filmed for the television special Hard Rainthen broadcast on NBC. The collection returns the entire concert, from which also comes one of the interpretations of “Idiot Wind” remembered by the music journalist Mikal Gilmore in the liner notes. His essay accompanies the box set along with rare photographs.
For those who prefer to concentrate on a single evening, a triple LP will also be released on November 6 with the full concert on May 16 at the Tarrant County Convention Center in Fort Worth: 22 songs, 18 of which are unreleased, remixed from the original multitrack tapes. “Going, Going, Gone” is already available from that recording, offering a taste of the set.
The dimension of the operation is that of an archive, rather than an anthology: its interest lies in the possibility of listening to a tour as it unfolds, with the variations between one date and another and the meeting between Dylan, Baez and a band with a composite sound. The 1976 Rolling Thunder Revue thus emerges as a chapter in itself in the singer-songwriter’s live history, distinct from the first segment of the tour and so far told mainly through Hard Rain.
