Bob Dylan
The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1976 Live Recordings
COLUMBIA/LEGACY
Old lovers, friends, and fellow folkies such as Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Allen Ginsberg, Roger McGuinn, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott joined the gang. Mick Ronson, Bob Neuwirth, David Mansfield, a young T Bone Burnett, and a mysterious newcomer, violinist Scarlet Rivera, were inventive backing musicians—maybe his best band ever. But the troubadour heart and soul of the Rolling Thunder Revue was all Bob Dylan. That’s the point of this 39-CD, 381-track box set, captured during the tour’s second leg, and including the long-famous, never re-ran May 23 Fort Collins concert which became an NBC special with its abbreviated 10-song soundtrack, Hard Rain. That’s right: This is 371 never-before released live Dylan songs. In current never-ending-tour speak, that’s like 20 vividly electrifying new Dylan concerts, all where you can make out all of the lyrics.
Is 39 CDs’ worth of one tour an excessive dive into Dylan’s sneering, scowling, mid-1970s concert aesthetic? Not when each torrid live take in another town sounds more rambunctiously desperate and manically driven—even clearly pissed off—than the gig before it. Other than his Before the Flood live album with The Band, this is the best commercial concert collection of Dylan’s ever. In the advance press leading up to this box set’s release, Burnett has been quoted as saying that the all-around Rolling Thunder Revue’s vibe and Dylan’s increasing ire-filled frenzy during each show made this “the first national punk rock tour,” an angsty artifice fueled by and in contention with 1976’s angry young likes of the Ramones and the Sex Pistols, the latter of whom didn’t even get to the US until after Dylan packed up his Revue amps and went home.
Rivera’s quiet-storming, Romani-toned violins are the very height of latter-day, stagey Desire songs such as “Oh, Sister” and “Mozambique” when Dylan & co. play them in Fort Worth and Oklahoma City, while her appropriation of Dylan’s restless romance ballad “Isis” during sets in Wichita and Fort Collins alone is worth the price of admission. The same thing can be said of the countless times that Dylan, Ronson, and their rough lot tackle the cocky, angular blues of “Maggie’s Farm” and “Railroad Boy” (the latter, repeatedly, with Joan Baez), as well as the rapid-firing ascension of “Shelter From the Storm.” Next to hearing Baez come alive—more so with Dylan than on her own recordings, if these multiple versions of “Blowing in the Wind” are any example—Rolling Thunder listeners can thrill to rare, amazing Dylan duets with Willie Nelson on “Gotta Travel On” and “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” from the tour’s Houston stop.
And it can’t be any surprise for me to say that hearing Dylan riff through “I Pity the Poor Immigrant” from 1967’s John Wesley Harding—on repeat throughout the box—was more than a little prescient 60 years ago, and beyond right-on-time now. You can’t really get from here to there, from 1976 to 2026, but these 39 CDs are a great third-place prize (second being video footage) to being part of Dylan’s rolling caravan.
