It’s an understatement to call the Rolling Thunder Revue a legendary tour. There are all-time great versions of Bob Dylan‘s best works found within the bootlegs and fan recordings. Hard Rain stands as a testament to live album material, capturing both the mood and future of an artist whose return to the stage just two years prior had served as a staggering career revival. One of many, for Dylan. The Rolling Thunder Revue: Fort Worth 1976 will be well-known to dedicated fans who wore the grooves of Hard Rain out, and the complimentary pairing of the Fort Collins show released earlier in the week is a tremendous listen. More shows have been released from this tour for those with the budget for a bumper book of CDs, but for those who want just a taste of how Dylan sounded during the mid-1970s, then this Fort Worth concert, with all the extra trimmings, is the place to head.
Much of what you may like about the Fort Collins release can be found here, what with the identical setlist. But it’s the little bits of nuance that change from show to show, it’s why people see the same artist multiple times on the same tour. The promise of a slight difference, a bit of magic that has rubbed off somewhere else because of an experience before said show. Mr. Tambourine Man here, for instance, sounds much stronger than the Fort Collins version. Not just because the tape quality is vastly superior, but those harmonica thrills come through a touch louder, a bit stronger than they did on the other show. This is by no means a like-for-like comparison, every live show has a different occasion, a separate spectacle from night to night, and you can feel that rushing through this remastered Fort Worth live album. Chris Shaw and Steve Addabbo have done a sensational job here, a truly skilled overhaul of these worthwhile tapes. This is Dylan’s best tour, or at the very least, the best tour that’s currently commercially available.
You can get your hands on almost any show Dylan performed, but as far as tightly made packages where the crisp, emotional highs of It Ain’t Me, Babe can be heard echoing through Forth Worth, this is a first. These versions of Maggie’s Farm and One Too Many Mornings are the very best versions of the songs available, studio originals included. It’s that burnt out rock and roll style of the times, the one Eric Clapton and The Band were developing in the early 1970s and then affected everyone else with, that works so well for Dylan. He enlists some outstanding musicians too, with T Bone Burnett and Mick Ronson outstanding here, backing Dylan’s lead guitar incredibly well. The Rolling Thunder Revue may feel like a time of debauchery but the slick musicianship and chemistry between a band unafraid to riff away on timeless material is, still, extremely striking. Just listen to the wail of that electric guitar towards the end of Maggie’s Farm.
What filters through clearest of all is how strong Dylan’s at-the-time contemporary material is. Mozambique and Isis are essentials here. The Desire tracks, likely because of their newness, have such a rich instrumental feel, an experimental flair coming from a trusted backing band. Ronson is the key here. Scarlet Rivera, too, is essential in bringing these songs to that next level Dylan had been searching for on his return to the stage. It’s easy to get lost in the mystery and magic of The Rolling Thunder Revue, and even Dylan, who spoke to filmmaker Martin Scorsese about the tour, doesn’t understand why that’s the case. But listen in and you can hear, with or without the context of what this tour meant at the time for Dylan’s career and persona life, the strength of his performance and the impact it’d have on his on-stage sound for years to come.
You can stick around for the hits here, but note the massive changes in tone and style from this and Fort Collins, and you get as complete a listening experience as you could hope for with an archival live release. Post-I Pity the Poor Immigrant is a setlist filled with all-time greats, delivered in that rocked-out style. Shelter from the Storm is a touch inferior here to the Hard Rain version, even though it follows that same, loose rock feeling. It doesn’t make it any less of a listening experience. I Threw It All Away is still a gutting listen, heartbreak of the times still lingering fifty years later. An extraordinary tour captured in a near-two-hour remaster. It’s as good as it gets for Dylan as a live artist. You’d have to head into the late 1990s and early 2000s to hear him as energised, as enthralled by his own work, as he is here with a backing band of real talent.
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