Bob Dylan’s legendary Rolling Thunder Revue tour has been released in a 39-disc boxset of greatest performances.
But fans of the veteran songwriter were less than impressed by the quality of the recordings heard on the box set. Dylan‘s 1976 tour would see his all-time great songs revamped with a heavier rock and roll style, with his backing band featuring the likes of Mick Ronson and T Bone Burnett. The tour has since been profiled by filmmaker Martin Scorsese and has a high profile in the Dylan community as one of the best tours of his career. But the recently released 1976 Recordings box set has come under fire from fans who believe that most of the recordings featured are of low quality.
Fans took to the r/BobDylan subreddit to share their grievances with the new box set. One listener fumed: “So anyone who has the box set, is it just me, or does every single show pretty much sound poor except Fort Hughes and Fort Worth? Austin sounds alright… but the rest sound pretty crap to me.”
Listeners have since weighed in on why most of the shows seem to be a lower quality listen than other selections. One fan wrote: “There are only three shows that were remixed from the original tapes. The others are just straight transfers. It’s one of the reasons why it’s so cheap. This is essentially a copyright dump.”
Another added: “They are the only shows that had multitracks to remix. The rest were straight soundboard feeds and can’t be remixed.” But not everyone was disappointed with the box set, with some noting it’s a higher quality than previous copyright releases.
One listener shared: “Listening to some samples on iTunes and they are definitely higher quality than we’ve received in the past. The Midnight Special sounds incredible, for example. Yes, they are lower quality than Fort Worth and Fort Collins, but those have always been the professionally recorded and most remarkable recordings from the tour.”
Despite the average sound quality reported by some listeners, praise for the two shows recorded to make live album Hard Rain, as well as a cancelled television appearance in Florida, was seen in the forum. One person wrote: “They taped a couple of shows in Florida at a hotel, I think just for TV, but Dylan decided he didn’t like it as much as the eventually released one.
“It was in a hotel ballroom with a cheesy set of bleachers installed, so it looked kind of fake. I read about it last night in the [Ray] Padgett book about the tour, but I can’t remember if it was St Pete or Clearwater or Lochloosa. Probably a bootleg copy of the video is findable, but I haven’t looked.”
Also praised was the 3-LP remastering of the Fort Worth show. The original poster wrote: “You won’t be disappointed the 3 LP sounds fantastic. I’ve bought the whole set on Apple Music, so I’ve been streaming it all day. Hughes, Fort Worth and the cancelled TV show sound great; the rest is pretty average.”
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