Circus envy
How Bob and co fought back at arena rock malaise.
Bob Dylan ★★★★★ Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1975 Live Recordings COLUMBIA. CD/DL
1975 WAS giving way to ’76, and via the invention of punk, young musicians in London and New York were signalling their distaste for what mainstream music had turned into. Meanwhile, in one of musical history’s more overlooked bits of synchronicity, Bob Dylan was in the midst of something undertaken in a similar spirit: a drive to avenge the kind of arena rock he had skirted close to with The Band on their 1974 tour of North America, and reinvigorate his art by taking it back to the grass roots. If anyone needed reminding, the result – now spread over 14 CDs and re-examined in a new Martin Scorsese film – was some of the most thrilling art he ever created.
As a matter of instinct, his new ideas were perfectly timed. As the idea for the Rolling Thunder Revue took shape in Greenwich Village, he spent time with Patti Smith, who gave him tips on the art of stagecraft. By some strange happenstance, by the time his new ensemble entered their second phase in the spring of 1976, they were sounding strikingly punk-esque (for proof, listen to the version of Shelter From The Storm on Hard Rain, which suggests a weirdly prescient look ahead to The
Clash circa London Calling). What they were doing mixed raw music with a kind of downhome theatricality – in retrospect, proof that anarchy and ramalama were not the only route away from rock’s malaise.
As evidenced by versions of songs as diverse as Smokey Robinson’s The Tracks Of My Tears and Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land, one fundamental idea – which re-routed the mounting frenzies around the USA’s 1976 bicentennial – was to channel the most impassioned, deep American music. Another key element was the kind of traditional stuff that Dylan had explored on The Basement Tapes, showcased here in an absolutely breathtaking solo reading of the Irish standard Easy And Slow, recorded in rehearsal. Fused with some of the most essential parts of Dylan’s own repertoire, this creative core defined the space in which the Revue’s participants – Dylan, Joan Baez, Bobby Neuwirth, The Byrds’ Roger McGuinn, Mick Ronson et al – could then make music brimming not just with energy, but a glorious sense of joy.
The music collected here begins with hitherto unheard rehearsals in New York City. The action then shifts to the Sea Crest Motel in Falmouth, Massachusetts – where, on One More Cup Of Coffee and Just Like A Woman, there’s a powerful sense of Dylan and his ensemble knowing they have pushed themselves somewhere great. Music from the tour’s first shows, in Plymouth, has long been bootlegged, but we then jump ahead to the first gig recorded on a mobile studio: the tour’s thirteenth stop-off, in Worcester, MA, by which time everything had clearly bloomed. Songs from subsequent performances in Cambridge, Boston and Montreal were included on 2002’s Bootleg Series Volume 5, but here, you get the Dylan stuff from those places in full, which allows a real sense of how each show worked.
The song that stood as the most consummate distillation of the Rolling Thunder spirit was Isis. It begins as a slow, contemplative piece, only to shape-shift into something taut, edgy, and full of space. Then, in the version from Montreal presented here but first released on the Biograph box in 1985, the song explodes, into a demonstration of power, eloquence and control that’s among Dylan’s greatest live achievements. As with much of the Desire material, it leaves the studio version a thousand miles behind; remarkable, as the album wasn’t yet released.
There are plenty of other breathtaking moments, many collected onto a final disc of “rare performances”, whose highlight comes at the start: Dylan duetting with Baez on One Too Many Mornings at Gerde’s Folk City, the New York venue where he reputedly played his first ever professional show. Here, in microcosm, is the whole Rolling Thunder vision: Dylan and his friends pushing way beyond their own generation’s creative impasse, into something so full of life that its magic still blazes, four decades on.