BOB DYLAN

The Rolling Thunder Revue The 1975 Live Recordings This 14-CD 148-track collection accompanies the recent Martin Scorsese Netflix film purporting to document the first three months of Dylan’s never-ending tour, which began in 1975 as a concept inspired by commedia dell’arte, Dylan’s travelling troupe of dozens delivering shows up to four hours in length, but losing money everywhere they travelled through an insistence on using only smaller venues. Or did they? This is no simple documentary, much of its content quickly revealed to aficionados as classic Dylan subterfuge, with hints strewn through the subtext. The supposed original filmmaker, to whom Scorsese doffs his cap surprisingly low, is a fake, as is the tale that Dylan picked up a 19-year-old Sharon Stone en route (more’s the pity). The promoter who moans about the losses is Paramount Pictures’ Jim Gianopulos, who had nothing whatsoever to do with the tour. Least likely of all is the horror story that Allen Ginsberg’s poetry became so increasingly unpopular during the tour that the iconic beat poet ended up working as a humble roadie. No wonder Scorsese subtitles the film ‘a Bob Dylan story’. The fictions so entirely entangle the facts that you can’t be certain which of the stellar cast were genuinely present, though historically-confirmed contributors included Joan Baez, T Bone Burnett, Mick Ronson, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and late arrival Joni Mitchell. The inspirational scenes with then-unrecorded Patti Smith are surely too extensive to be concocted… and yet with a Netflix budget in this new age of Deep Fakes, history can be all too easily rewritten, and the result here reverberates with the sniggers of Scorsese and throaty chuckles from a marginally-less-reluctant-than-usual Dylan.

We can only assume that the music discs, which focus solely on Dylan’s performances, are the genuine article, though the ‘Live Recordings’ part of the title is only partially accurate, since the first three discs cover the rehearsals at S.I.R. Studios in New York and in the Seacrest Hotel in Falmouth, Massachusetts. Then follow five ‘full Dylan sets’ recorded in Massachusetts at Worcester, Cambridge and Boston (matinee and evening sets both from Boston), one from Montreal in Canada, and a final disc of bits and pieces. As is often the way with Dylan tours, the set lists differ not a lot, nor did Dylan do much of his band-confusing on-the-spot reinterpretation, so that you’d be hard-pressed to much differentiate the five live versions of each of the regulars, though each set is a delight in itself as a performance. Scarlet Rivera’s violin work is inspiring throughout, with Isis a nightly highlight on disc, as it is in the film. Her work on the upcoming ‘Desire’ album was already in the can, Dylan having flagged her down while passing in his limousine (or, er, so the story goes.).

The set predictability does, however, makes the few variations all the more enthralling— The Times They Are A-Changin’ is relaxed in rehearsals, thrillingly faster in the afternoon Boston performance, inexplicably dropped for the evening gig, before getting its ultimate belting electric performance in Montreal. The traditional Wild Mountain Thyme, a duet with Baez, gets only one outing, and you can see why. Love Minus Zero/No Limits is another one-timer for Montreal as a solo performance, followed there by Tangled Up In Blue, which gets a regular spot elsewhere, though replaced by A Simple Twist of Fate in Cambridge, and entirely re-rhythmed for Montreal.

A final oddity—this release doesn’t seem part of the so-far 14-strong official ‘The Bootleg Series’, even though released on the same Columbia/Legacy label. Is that because it repeats what’s on Vol. 5 — or is this the start of a whole new series? Jez Ford