The day Dylan rolled into Coliseum

Did I dream it? Did I really see Bob Dylan, his face painted white, wearing a widebrimmed hat with a peacock feather tucked into its band, at the New Haven Coliseum with Joan Baez and other friends on a surreal afternoon in November 1975 during a tour called the Rolling Thunder Revue?

Yes, it did happen; it wasn’t a dream at all, although it was so bizarre, it felt like one. Dylan and company actually did two shows here, a matinee and an evening performance, on Nov. 13 of that year.

I remember driving down from Wallingford, where I was living and working for the old Morning Record. Because I was on the night shift, I was able to go to the afternoon show of that eccentric, fabled tour.

Rich Hanley was there, too. He is now an associate professor of journalism at Quinnipiac University, but, at that time, he was a sophomore at the University of New Haven.

“A friend of mine said he had an extra ticket,” Hanley told me during a phone interview last week. “He said, ‘Do you want to go?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ I didn’t have any afternoon classes.”

I confessed to Hanley I remember very little of that show. One thing I do recall is sitting in the McDonald’s on Church Street before the show, killing a little time and talking briefly with a businessman in a suit who was envious of me because I was going to see Bob Dylan. I remember feeling very lucky.

Hanley’s memory of the show is far better. “There was the sheer weirdness of going into that building for a daytime concert and getting out when it was still light.”

He said “the whole vibe of the show” was different from other rock concerts. “There was something mystical about it, something in the air. It was not just the marijuana smoke. There was that Dylan atmosphere, disorderly. Nobody knew what to expect. I think for everyone who attended, everybody took something personal from it.”

Hanley, who made the documentary “Last Days of the Coliseum,” said the Rolling Thunder Revue “fit that moment. It was an eclectic period of American history.”

Hanley noted Dylan on that fall tour performed for the first time songs from his soon to be released album “Desire.” These included “One More Cup of Coffee,” “Isis” and “Hurricane,” protesting the triple murder conviction of the boxer Rubin (Hurricane) Carter, who was freed 10 years later.

You can go online now and see song lists for all the shows on that tour. According to one such list, Dylan finished the Coliseum matinee by singing Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.” I told Hanley I’m almost sure Roger McGuinn, formerly of the Byrds, sang his song “Chestnut Mare” that afternoon in New Haven, although it’s not on the list. Hanley noted such lists are unreliable.

Reflecting the weirdness of the time and that tour, the song list I saw for that show included some “Bob talk.” Before singing “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” he purportedly said, “This song is dedicated to DaVinci.” And he supposedly dedicated “Oh, Sister” to “Brigham Young” and “Romance in Durango” to filmmaker Sam Peckinpah.

Scarlet Rivera was along on the tour and her evocative violin enhanced many of the songs. Now that, I do remember.

Hanley told me Joni Mitchell attended the evening show and performed two songs. In the audience that night, having driven up from New Jersey, was Bruce Springsteen, who was just starting to hit it big. “The Boss” met Dylan for the first time backstage at the Coliseum. Imagine that.

This tour, conceived by Dylan originally as an informal series of spontaneous shows at small venues across New England, has been revisited in a new documentary called “Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese.” You can see it on Netflix. And a 14CD boxed set of the shows and rehearsals was recently released.

The documentary is almost as odd as the shows. The cameras followed Dylan around, capturing his edgy banter with his exgirlfriend Baez at a bar; Dylan with beat poet Allen Ginsberg at the grave of writer Jack Kerouac in Lowell, Mass.; and Dylan’s passionate, furious rendition of “Hurricane.” I watched the documentary with great interest, hoping to see footage of the New Haven shows. But Scorsese didn’t bother to tell viewers where the performances were happening.

In the film, Ginsberg describes the tour as being like a “con man, carny, medicine show of old.” The playwright Sam Shepard, enlisted by Dylan to join the tour in order to write a screenplay for the Dylan film “Renaldo and Clara,” said it had “a circus atmosphere, a dog and pony show.”

“I was just kind of there for the ride,” Shepard said, “trying to make sense of something.” He described New England at that time as “desolate, in difficult economic times. People were suffering. Rock ‘n’ roll was like a medicine. ... There was a feeling of exhilaration, of being alive. That sounds corny but it’s true.” Shepard went on to write “Rolling Thunder Logbook,” which I came across recently. This is another odd artifact. In his page about New Haven, Shepard called

“There was something mystical about it, something in the air.” Rich Hanley, a Quinnipiac journalism professor who, along with Randall Beach and thousands others, attended the concert in 1975