Bob Dylan – Best of The Rolling Thunder Revue (Pt. 4) Review

Four volumes in and still the hits keep coming. Such is the quality of The Rolling Thunder Revue. It’s an incredible time on the road for Bob Dylan, even if the wheels were coming off towards the end. Best of The Rolling Thunder Revue (Pt. 4) is a continuation of strong sounds from the post-Desire release days. Rocked adaptations of his early folk hits and a shift in tone for the most recent songs of Blood on the Tracks. Each moment a mesmerising one, such is the strength of this Joan Baez-featuring tour. Bootleggers who promise to feature the best versions of each song from a year-long tour are often right. They do have the opportunity to feature some of the very best renditions. This is the case for Best of The Rolling Thunder Revue, an outstanding compilation. All-time great songs featured on an extraordinary tour. It’s hardly a risk compiling these songs, but the care taken to do so is welcome.  

Opening song Rita May and follow-up You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go is a brilliant contrast. It highlights the rage and laid-back tones which feature across the Rolling Thunder Revue. You can never be too sure which you are getting until the song has found its instrumental drive. The latter track is a light touch for the Blood on the Tracks heartbreaker, while the Desire B-side is given a shot of rage. That anger would be long-lasting for this tour, highlighted best of all on Hard Rain, but a considerable force on compilations of these performances. But what of the middleground? Those moments where Dylan is neither enraged nor overjoyed, but details the hard-hitting, emotional volatility of Blood on the Tracks. I Want You is right there. Look no further than it for a wistful and truthful performance. It’s quite the contrast to the tonal changes found elsewhere. 

An upbeat instrumental paired with a vocal range that can push for more, but is stuck in a shellshocked, monotone-sounding delivery. It’s a stark performance, an emotionally naked adaptation of his best works. The same happens for I Threw It All Away and Lay Lady Lay, with those Nashville Skyline numbers a classic of the official live release from this tour. Pair it with the rocked-out tone of Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again and you have a big chunk of those essentials from the Rolling Thunder Revue. Each is performed with a quality that has rarely been touched on for these songs again. Idiot Wind, particularly, is brought to life with such a shockwave of raw emotion that it’s hard to listen to any other version than this or the Hard Rain rendition. Further proof of live works giving Dylan a new and unexpected layer to his music.  

But the double bill of A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall and Gotta Travel On is as impactful a gut punch as anything else featured on this tour, let alone the compilation. Nothing short of staggering performances on a tour Dylan says is not particularly special. He has a fascinating way of being wrong about his legacy. The Rolling Thunder Revue is filled with golden moments, shining examples of how large a range Dylan has as an instrumentalist. His willingness to change the form of folk classics and even contemporary releases from Blood on the Tracks, is magnificent. You can hear an hour of it across this fourth bootleg part. It’s just a drop in the ocean of Rolling Thunder Revue materials. But what a drop it is. A fantastic set of performances where the consistencies of Dylan, Baez, and the rest of the band mean this bootleg sounds like a lost stage show, rather than a collection of other performances.