The Bootleg Series Vol. 5:
Bob Dylan Live 1975: The Rolling Thunder
Revue
Hear audio clips at
BN.com Music
(Columbia/Legacy)
For all his talk about being more at home on stage
than in the impersonal environment of a recording
studio, few of Bob Dylan's live albums lend
credence to his claim. Before the Flood with the
Band from 1974 and 1978's often castigated At
Budokan caught lightning in a bottle, but his other
officially released concert recordings - 7 in all -
were more flash than fire.
Live 1975: The Rolling Thunder Revue, volume 5
in the Columbia/Legacy Bootleg Series, captures the
voice of a generation at one of his most articulate
moments, as the ringleader of a band of musical
gypsies.
It was the fall of 1975. Earlier in the year, the
intimate Blood On the Tracks proved that Dylan was
more than a ghost from the Sixties. His voice
still mattered in an era in which the glam rock of
Elton John and David Bowie emphasized theatrics
over music. Now, accompanied by a cast of
characters that included ex-flame Joan Baez, poet
Allan Ginsberg, violinist Scarlet Rivera, and even
Bowie's former guitarist Mick Ronson, Dylan turned
his back on the corporate behemoth that
contemporary music had become and, ignoring the
stadiums in which "concerts" were now staged, hit a
string of small theaters in the American Northeast
with little publicity other than word of
mouth.
The Rolling Thunder
Revue, as it was called, culminated with a
concert at the kind of venue it had avoided,
New York's Madison Square Garden, where a
benefit was staged to publicize the cause of
Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, the boxer imprisoned,
as Dylan's song asserted, "for something that
he never done."
The success of the striking Desire album in
January 1976 led to a revival of the revue but with
all the hoopla Dylan initially rejected. There was
even a network television special that put Dylan on
the cover of TV Guide. By then, much of the magic
had dissipated with the performances becoming more
formulaic.
Fortunately, the tapes were rolling earlier when
the inspiration was still fresh. For this release,
twenty-two Dylan performances from concerts in
Massachusetts and Montreal have been compiled on
two discs accompanied by a 56 page booklet of
photos and an essay by Larry "Ratso" Sloman who
chronicled the tour in a book, On the Road With Bob
Dylan.
Dylan rarely takes the stage to merely sing his
songs. He reinvents them, and does so here, turning
"A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" into a rousing rocker,
and infusing "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll"
with more venom than sorrow. He performs a
rewritten "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" as a duet
with Roger McGuinn, and, with Baez, dusts the
cobwebs off of "Blowin' In the Wind," offers his
finest recorded version of "I Shall Be Released,"
and takes a stab at the traditional "The Water Is
Wide" for what may be the album's best track. The
then unreleased Desire album gets quite a workout
with six of the songs featured here, including a
powerful "Sara," written for his soon to be
ex-wife.
Dylan sounds great. His voice is raspy but clear,
and he sings with a commitment and focus that would
become rare in the next decade. Here you know he
still believes that the words matter and that he
wants them heard above the music.
Some Dylanologists will quibble, complaining that
their favorite performance from a scratchy, crude
bootleg didn't make the cut, and I agree it would
have been nice to get the all ensemble sing-a-long
of Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land," but
Columbia's decision to limit the selections to
performances captured by a professional sound
truck, thereby assuring the best sound quality, is
hard to argue with.
Brian W. Fairbanks
Entertainment Editor
Entertainment...
