The Rolling Thunder Revue was a 1975–76 concert tour by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan with numerous musicians and collaborators. The purpose of the tour was to allow Dylan, who was a major recording artist and concert performer, to play in smaller auditoriums in less populated cities where he could be more intimate with his audiences.Photo of typical tour venue
Some of the performers on the tour were Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn, Joni Mitchell, Ronee Blakely and Ramblin' Jack Elliott. Bob Neuwirth assembled backing musicians from the recording sessions for Dylan's Desire album, including violinist Scarlet Rivera, bassist Rob Stoner, and drummer Howie Wyeth, plus Mick Ronson on guitar. The tour included 57 concerts in two legs: the first in the American northeast and Canada in the fall of 1975, and the second in the American South and southwest in the spring of 1976.
Many of the songs performed in the first leg were drawn from Desire, which was released in January 1976, between the two legs of the tour. The tour was thoroughly documented through film, sound recording, and in print.Notable items include two books, two albums, a TV Special and a movie: Larry "Ratso" Sloman, On the Road with Bob Dylan. Helter Skelter Publishing, 2005, 466 pages. Sam Shepard, Rolling Thunder Logbook. New York: Penguin Books, 1978, (pbk) Hard Rain 1976 The Bootleg Series Vol. 5: Bob Dylan Live 1975, The Rolling Thunder Revue (2002) Hard Rain, TV Special Renaldo and Clara see also: Michael Gray, The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, New York:Continuum books, 2006 A documentary about the tour, directed by Martin Scorsese, titled Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese, was released by Netflix and in select theaters in June 2019."Bob Dylan Details 14-Disc Rolling Thunder Revue Box Set", Rolling Stone, April 30, 2019
Origins The idea behind the tour, Dylan said, was to "play for the people", the people who never get good seats at his larger concerts due to higher ticket cost and inconvenient locations. Dylan chose to play in smaller auditoriums because, he said, "the atmosphere in small halls is more conducive to what we do". His New York musician friend David Blue felt that Dylan clearly wanted to get back to being closer to his audience after becoming a major music star, saying, "Bob's just an ordinary [...] guy, a great songwriter who got swept up in this whole fame thing and was smart enough to know how to control it, who rode with it and was shrewd, damn shrewd. And now he's just paying everyone back with this tour. It's like a family scene."
Dylan named the tour after hearing the continuous sounds of thunder one day. He conceived the tour in the summer of 1975 while he was living in Greenwich Village, and began co-writing with his friend, Jacques Levy, with whom he wrote various songs, including "Hurricane".
In October 1975, shortly before completing Desire, Dylan held rehearsals for his second tour in two years (following an eight-year hiatus) at New York City's midtown Studio Instrument Rentals space. Bassist Rob Stoner, drummer/pianist Howie Wyeth and violinist Scarlet Rivera were retained from the Desire sessions for the rehearsals. Joining them were T-Bone Burnett (electric guitar, piano), Steven Soles (acoustic guitar, electric guitar, backing vocals) and David Mansfield (dobro, mandolin, violin, pedal steel guitar). Although the trio had been dismissed during the Desire sessions in an attempt to focus the overall production, Dylan yielded to his original instincts and decided to rehire them for the tour. Luther Rix (drums, percussion) was also added at an indeterminate point.
When rehearsals began, many of the musicians were apparently uninformed about plans for an upcoming tour. At the same time, Dylan was casually inviting others to join in with the band. According to Stoner, the group rehearsed "for like a day or two – it [was] not really so much a rehearsal as like a jam, tryin' to sort it out. Meanwhile, all these people who eventually became the Rolling Thunder Revue started dropping in. Joan Baez was showing up. Roger McGuinn was there. They were all there. We had no idea what the purpose for these jams was, except we were being invited to jam."Heylin 2011, p. 407
According to Lou Kemp, a friend of Dylan's who eventually organized the tour, the Rolling Thunder Revue "would go out at night and run into people, and we'd just invite them to come with us. We started out with a relatively small group of musicians and support people, and we ended up with a caravan."Heylin 2011, p. 408 Uninterested in performing in a country/folk milieu, Patti Smith amicably declined Dylan's invitation. Bruce Springsteen also turned down an invitation "because he had plenty of touring commitments of his own and was on a roll" after the breakthrough success of Born to Run, released that August.Boss: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band - the Illustrated History , Voyageur Press (2016) p. 56Photo of Bruce Springsteen visiting Bob Dylan backstage during a Rolling Thunder show Dylan did add one surprising element to the Rolling Thunder Revue: Mick Ronson, the lead guitarist and arranger in David Bowie's former backing band, The Spiders from Mars.
Another musician invited on the tour was introduced to Dylan on October 22, when Dylan went to see David Blue perform at The Other End. It was there that he met Ronee Blakley, the actress/singer who had recently starred in Robert Altman's celebrated film Nashville. At the end of Blue's show, Blakley joined Dylan on-stage for a few songs, joined by poet Allen Ginsberg; afterwards, Dylan extended her an invitation to join the Rolling Thunder Revue. She initially declined due to prior commitments but eventually changed her mind and appeared at rehearsals two days later.Ronee Blakely discusses the Rolling Thunder tour, 1978 interview with Patrick Carr She later recalled, "Oh I loved him, right away, just loved him. He was exactly what I thought he would be like. Funny and mysterious and shy and dear and vulnerable."Photo of Ronee Blakely and Bob Dylan during Rolling Thunder tour
However, the same day Blakley showed up for rehearsal, Dylan returned to the recording studio to re-record "Hurricane" (due to legal concerns involving the song's original lyrics).Sloman 2002, p. 35-28. Employing Blakley as a substitute for Emmylou Harris (who had prior engagements to attend to), Dylan quickly recut "Hurricane", the last recorded work done for Desire before its release in January 1976.
On October 23, 1975, owner Mike Porco's 61st birthday, Dylan and a group of friends took over Gerde's Folk City as the main show was ending. Dylan and Joan Baez sang "One Too Many Mornings", followed onstage by Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Eric Andersen, Patti Smith, Arlen Roth, Bette Midler, Buzzy Linhart, Phil Ochs and others. Dylan and his group brought in lights and cameras and filmed the session, which began well after midnight; a brief scene of Phil Ochs trying to tune Eric Andersen's guitar from open to regular tuning made it into Renaldo and Clara. A week later, on October 30, the Rolling Thunder Revue played its first concert.
Sometime in October, Dylan also contacted an old friend and filmmaker, Howard Alk. Dylan's ambitions apparently included a film of the tour, and Alk accepted Dylan's offer to shoot the film. When the tour rehearsals were still in progress, Alk reportedly began filming scenes in Greenwich Village for possible inclusion in the film.
Dylan contacted actor/playwright Sam Shepard, then considered to be a relatively obscure cult figure, to work as the film's screenwriter. He was closely associated with several figures in Dylan's circle, including Jacques Levy, who directed many of Shepard's 1960s Off-Off-Broadway plays; Patti Smith, who was Shepard's former lover and dramatic collaborator; and Allen Ginsberg, who had worked with Shepard on Robert Frank's Me and My Brother in 1969.Photo of Sam Shepard with Patti Smith Dylan asked Shepard if he had seen Marcel Carné's Les Enfants du Paradis or François Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player, and told him that those were the kinds of films he wanted to produce on the tour.Gray M, op.cit. 371
While Ginsberg accompanied the tour for most of its 1975 run, his planned recitations, as well as some performances by other Revue members, were cut before the opening date to keep the concerts at a manageable length.
1975 fall tour
On October 30, Dylan held the first Rolling Thunder Revue show at the War Memorial Auditorium in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Intended to contrast with the bombast of his 1974 tour with The Band, the first leg of the tour was small, spanning only thirty shows. The majority of the first Revue was booked at intimate venues, including smaller arenas, theaters and gymnasia; aside from two shows in Upstate New York, a four-show Canadian leg and the concluding concerts in the New York metropolitan area, the tour's itinerary was entirely confined to New England. However, the secrecy surrounding the Revue's intended destinations, the new material Dylan was premiering, and the inclusion of Joan Baez on the same bill as Dylan for the first time in a decade ensured prominent media coverage.
On November 2, 1975, the tour stopped at the University of Lowell. Dylan's inspiration for playing Lowell was Jack Kerouac, a pivotal influence on his oeuvre who was born and raised in the city. Dylan, Beat Generation colleague Ginsberg and various band members visited Kerouac's gravesite.
According to Larry Sloman, who documented the tour in On the Road with Bob Dylan (1978), "Onstage it was like a carnival. Bobby Neuwirth and the back-up band [dubbed 'Guam'] warmed up the audience. Next, Dylan ambled on to do about five songs. After intermission, the curtain rose to an incredible sight, Bob and Joan, together again after all these years."
Dylan and Baez often opened the second half of the show duetting in the dark on "Blowin' in the Wind".Riley 2010 Then Baez would take center stage with a dynamic six-song set, followed by a solo set from Dylan. He was joined by the band for a few numbers, until the finale song, Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land," featuring everyone on stage."Remembering Bob Dylan's 1975 Tour Stop At The University Of Vermont", Vermont Public Radio (VPR), October 21, 2016 The spirit was considered extremely warm, leading Joni Mitchell, who only intended to play one concert, to stay on for the remaining three nights of the tour.
The dramatic finale of the tour took place on December 8 in Madison Square Garden, where, to an audience of 14,000, Dylan performed a benefit concert for his latest cause, the imprisoned boxer Rubin Carter. The concert was titled "The Night of The Hurricane," in reference to Dylan's song, "Hurricane", which was released in November 1975."Hurricane", performed live by Bob Dylan in 1975 Among those appearing on stage were Muhammad Ali and Coretta Scott King, the widow of the slain civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr.