The other half of a quietly brilliant performance from Bob Dylan can be heard on Live on TV 1976: Part Two. Where the Rolling Thunder Revue and official live album, Hard Rain, leaves a little to be desired, it still serves as a solid, all-encompassing look at a tour guided more by raging personal conflict than instrumental artistry. Where the Fort Collins set may be legendary, the release of it in its entirety is, still, unfulfilled. It may never be. Even a playlist appearing on the Bob Dylan YouTube channel, a place where music appears and disappears like stars forming around a black hole, is unfinished. The second half of the Rolling Thunder Revue performance, almost complete, is here. Live on TV 1976: Part Two is a strange release but at least it is an excuse to revisit a defiant performance from a tour which, by this point, had seemingly run out of steam.
Nonsense. From the acoustic drive of songs on the first half to here, the best-ever live performance of Idiot Wind. No hyperbole required, it just is. A song damning former flames and the protagonist too, a nine-minute crucifixion of the self. What a brutal achievement, and what a welcome listen it makes for after pieces like One Too Many Mornings and Mozambique. It may be frustrating to hear Live on TV 1976 split into two parts, it is not as though the entire material still available is all that wrong, but such is the choice of shadowy figures with the password to Dylan’s YouTube login. Boisterous works can be heard on the Fort Collins performance. Adaptations of his at-the-time controversial electric turn, like Maggie’s Farm, drag the song further into the gruff and roaring electricity Dylan dealt on stage at the time. It would be moved along further through the 80s and 90s, a comfortable but always exciting song Dylan and the band rely on.
Those live joys heard on Hard Rain are expanded on with Live on TV 1976: Part Two. One Too Many Mornings does well to calm a wild crowd. Their screams and cheers quieting to hear a wildly overhauled The Times They Are A-Changin’ rip. This version right here might be one of the best Dylan live performances. It sounds so assured of the changes and rips the folk classic well away from the calm acoustics and standard heroics. Had this happened at the time of Dylan going electric, there would have been harsher words than “Judas” hurled at him. What a performance it is, though. Staggering and electrifying in the best ways. Those long and winding guitar solos are beautiful, a sunny and venomous performance which can thankfully be found on Hard Rain.
It and Idiot Wind are the high points of a sincerely underrated live performance. Re-evaluations of Hard Rain are hard to come by, perhaps because it feels like a footnote in his live career, and also because there is such a range of bootlegs offering a far better listening experience than official releases. What we must not lose sight of on Live on TV 1976, however, is the intensity of the instrumentals and lyrical work. Live performance is in service of the studio work. What must be amplified on stage is up to the artist, and the ever-changing Dylan experience means there are enough performances of one song out there to shine a light on every instrument, all those smaller details. Hard Rain does this tremendously for songs like One Too Many Mornings, Idiot Wind and Live on TV 1976 once more, like its first part, muddies the waters, makes it harder to find out more on this Fort Collins performance. It works against Hard Rain, offers little extra, for no good reason. Incredible performances, but we must question these odd YouTube playlists again.
