Bob Dylan - The Bootleg Series Vol. 5: Bob Dylan Live 1975, The Rolling Thunder Revue (2002)

Bob Dylan - The Bootleg Series Vol. 5: Bob Dylan Live 1975, The Rolling Thunder Revue

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In 1975, a few months after Bob Dylan had released Blood on the Tracks, his third or fourth masterpiece and tribute to his estrangement from his wife Sara – Dylan wrote “Sara”, an actual tribute to his wife. After hearing “the song the couple would end up reconciling and Dylan invited her along on his next tour – The Rolling Thunder Revue. That tour was partly built around the improvisational film Renaldo and Clara that would feature as both a concert film and another tribute to his wife. The film and the tour were failures financially, but for Dylan they were a success, he loved the small theatres that he was able to play on the tour and he was able to convince Sara to stick around for another couple years. The press similarly praised the first leg of the tour, the one documented here, but on Dylan’s second leg in the spring of 1976, the tour was met with near universal derision. A couple performances on that leg would be compiled and sold as Hard Rain and paired with a television special that was also critically and commercially derided. By 1976, Dylan was worn out and not at the height he had been towards the beginning of the tour and because of those releases, The Rolling Thunder Revue has long held a negative connotation amongst fans. It wasn’t until 2002 that Legacy Records released the recordings from that first leg that fans were able to hear just how great things had been.

To be fair, at 102 minutes this compilation still doesn’t include everything, and it can be frustrating to watch Martin Scorsese’s new Rolling Thunder Revue documentary and not hear some of the non-Dylan musicians on this record. After all, it was a revue and in my opinion, Joni Mitchell, Allen Ginsberg, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott all play an integral role in what the experience was probably like in person. But maybe I’m asking for a different album, and I most definitely should not. The Bootleg Series Vol. 5 is a much-needed sampler of one of Dylan’s most eclectic tours and features some powerful performances of the more lackluster material off of Desire. Dylan would tour almost nonstop in the years following The Rolling Thunder Revue but he would never be this consistent or urgent again.

~9.5

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