A wonderful tour with plenty of great performances. Do not believe Bob Dylan. He may not be able to remember the Rolling Thunder Revue, but the released works, documentaries and albums charting this tour, are worth their weight in gold. Hard Rain is an all-time great live album and the best of Dylan’s officially released live discography. Slim pickings, to say the least. For those wanting an extra slice of his musicianship around this time, look no further than the unofficial compilation, Rolling Thunder Rarities. Enough material to split into two bootlegs, what this compilation offers is a chance to hear the unusual pieces, the oddities which did not quite make their way into the live set. Efforts like The Water is Wide and The Ballad of Hollis Brown were never going to fit on the official releases, though they are worth a listen. Turn to the bootleggers once more for a great time on a great tour.
Rarities from the 1976 leg of the Rolling Thunder Revue reveals a tightness to the playing style Dylan and the band had, even after an extensive break from the stage. Quite unlike Dylan to take more than a few months off, Rolling Thunder Rarities, Part 2, feels like an exercise in dusting the cobwebs off with a few leftfield choices. Songs like Isis and I Threw It All Away are welcome inclusions, not least because they are some very best moments in the months after the release of Desire. Where the recording quality may range from brilliant to just about listenable, what is captured irrespective of sound is a feeling of urgency. Dylan is back on stage and, as was the case for his tour with The Band two years before this, he sounds relieved to be there. Always innovating, occasionally changing the very foundation of his music, the quieter audience letting the instruments breathe that little bit more.
All of it comes to a head on Rolling Thunder Rarities, Part 2. Seven Days is a tremendous inclusion, given it was never recorded in the studio. Another casualty of the ever-moving, ever-evolving songwriter. Those few live recordings which exist of the song are phenomenal, and here is one of the best sounding renditions. A phenomenal song, and all things considered, a real tragedy it was never recorded. Still, these are the rewards which come from hunting down the bootlegs, the oddities which never came to be are still intact. A groovy bass for I Threw It All Away is an excellent contrast to the wild-eyed and elongated performance heard on Hard Rain, and it highlights, more than anything, the range of options available to Dylan.
Latter parts of the compilation, like the Joan Baez-featuring Railroad Boy, call back to those folk fundamentals. It is a structure Dylan moved on from before it was past its prime, and in doing so, in bringing it back, he reminds audiences he is always one step ahead of them. These deep cuts from a fascinating tour are a reminder, still, of how far ahead Dylan can be when on the road. Rolling Thunder Rarities, Part 2, is a phenomenal collection of songs from a time when the unpredictable nature of Dylan, the personal stories woven in with Anton Chekov and instrumental strain, is in full swing. A tremendous continuation of the quality heard on the first Rolling Thunder Revue collection.
