Dylan Rolling Thunder

Bob Dylan and the RTR played two shows at the Warehouse in New Orleans on May 3rd, 1976. The evening show is sourced from an excellent quality soundboard recording. The sound quality on this is a considerable improvement over all previous release and can be considered definitive.

If Blood on the Tracks was an unapologetically intimate affair, Desire is unwieldy and messy, the deliberate work of a collective.

With the 20/20 vision of hindsight, it is easy to see that Bob Dylan's decision to mount a second version of The Rolling Thunder Review in 1976 was a miscalculation, but at the one concert that really mattered, Dylan and Guam (as the band was now named) gave a triumphant and extremely well received performance. Dylan prowled the stage like a caged lion, snarling into the microphone and glaring at his audience with what Joan Baez called his "…viper eyes." "Hard Rain" (the film) was broadcast on NBC on September 10th 1976, to a generally poor response. Among the words used to describe it were "…artless," "…an anti-special," and "…a mess." This is a pity, because viewed almost thirty years later, this is a truly compelling piece of film - it may be ragged in places, but there is more passion and intensity than you will witness in any slick, polished, ultimately false musical extravaganza in today's famous for fifteen minutes world.

Hard Rain , Dylan’s 19th album and his second live one, once seemed a generally poor selection from two concerts that were far from his best. After Dylan and the 1967 Greatest Hits collection, this seemed, at the time, Dylan’s least essential album. Hindsight shows that this album introduces the ragged, postmodern Bob Dylan, right from the grungy instrumental ground-pawing ahead of the start of the first number. It represents, too, the late phase of the historic Rolling Thunder Revue tour and captures the distinctive, bare-wired sound of Dylan’s existential gypsy band.

“Per aver creato nuove espressioni poetiche nella grande tradizione della canzone americana”. Con questa motivazione, il 13 ottobre 2016, l’Accademia svedese ha assegnato a Bob Dylan il Premio Nobel per la Letteratura, l’ultimo e forse il più importante dei tanti riconoscimenti a lui tributati. Figura tra le più importanti del panorama musicale planetario, Bob Dylan - come disse Allen Ginsberg - ha portato “la poesia nei jukebox”, raccontando l’America, proseguendone la tradizione musicale e diventandone lui stesso parte integrante..

In the fall of 1975, Bob Dylan embarked on his "Rolling Thunder Revue" tour. It began modestly in New England, with Dylan, Joan Baez, Bob Neuwirth, Rambin' Jack Elliot and their bands hitting small halls in the northeast with only a day or two notice given to the public. Along the way it gathered outstanding critical acclaim and picked up the likes of Joni Mitchell and Roger McGuinn to fill out the bill. By the time it reached Toronto for shows on December 1st and 2nd ’75, the revue had gathered tremendous momentum and now was filling large arenas on a nightly basis. In Toronto they were booked into Maple Leaf Gardens. The shows were running between 4 and 5 hours and despite the impressive roster of performers, this was Bob Dylan's show and his 3 sets were the bedrock of the program.