Bob Dylan 50 Years Ago: A Pivotal Moment in Time

“Working with Dylan is not like working with anybody else. With Dylan, you’re continuing on this hunt for what he’s after, who he is, this continual mystery about his identity.”    –Sam Shepard

50 years ago, Bob Dylan pulled together The Rolling Thunder Revue; it was time for  Dylan to take stock.  He survived the 1960s and was midway through the 70s. He decided to surround himself with a bunch of musicians, journalists, and artists and go on tour.  Legend has it that he was paying back debts to folks like Joan Baez, who was extraordinarily generous to him in the early days; now Dylan was sharing the spotlight with her and many performers he met along his journey.

He was also trying to make a film, Renaldo And Clara, which haphazardly documented this tour.  The poorly received film was released and then shelved, but the music created has more than survived.  A double CD would be released decades later as Bootleg Vol. 5. Here are three glimpses of Dylan during this creative hunt, and how it unfolded on that tour.

“Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” – A celebratory beginning

The Rolling Thunder Revue started in 1975 and ran into 1976.  Those early shows are bristling with energy, and Dylan sounds quite joyful.  Unfortunately, as the tour continued, the bloom came off the rose, and things soured.  An album, Hard Rain, which focused on the second half of the tour, is a tough listen.  Dylan sounds not only bitter but in pain.

That’s not the case for “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You,” the first track on Bootleg Vol. 5.  On it, Dylan is ebullient and welcomes the crowd to join him.  He sounds thrilled to begin the night’s festivities.

This version is quite different from the slow ballad released on Nashville Skyline.  On that recording, Dylan croons a wistful ballad; here, he sounds like an ecstatic kid who just found out that the circus is in town and he has tickets.

“Never Let Me Go” – Dylan’s reverie for a Johnny Ace tune

One of the few pop covers that Dylan played during the 75-76 tour was Johnny Ace’s “Never Let Me Go.”  Similar to Paul Simon, who wrote the wonderful “The Late Great Johnny Ace,”  Dylan was enamored with the R&B singer.  On “NLMG,” Dylan gives the romantic song a hard edge, but the sweetness of the lyrics still comes through.

Throughout Dylan’s career, and aside from the post-2015 exploration of standards, he tended to cover old blues and folk blues songs. Here, he takes on a sentimental love song from 1954.  His admiration for the tune is clearly evident.  The song was written by Joseph Scott; it was also recorded by Luther Vandross.

“Mr. Tambourine Man” – A new take

A 1976 television special featuring Dylan never got released officially, but captured some of his Rolling Thunder performances.  Dylan’s solo “Mr. Tambourine Man” is mesmerizing.  It starts with a faraway shot of a white-hatted Dylan strumming in the spotlight.

As he sings, the camera keeps zooming in until 1:18, then it lands on Dylan singing with closed eyes.  He rhapsodically delivers each line, vigorously lifting his guitar up high.  This hard-strum version has a pulsating energy, quite different from the more poetic version Dylan often employed.

A description of this song by Michael Gray, author of Song and Dance Man, could easily apply to this performance.  He writes, “There is a self-reflexive motor here.  The song seems to celebrate inspiration by the sheer display of it.  It enjoys itself.  It is pleasurable irony that, as with “MTM”, a song that is partly about standing in need of the muse succeeds in possessing it.”

After the Rolling Thunder Revue, Dylan continued following his own muse, but this period was an important stopping point.  David Remnick of The New Yorker wrote about its impact on both the artist and the fans: “If you’re lucky, at some point in your life, you get to witness some flashing fraction of what music has to offer. Accidents of fate and the moment. I was too young to see Dylan’s early acoustic performances, his electric breakthrough at Newport, or the 1966 British tour with the Band… My lucky moment was the Rolling Thunder Revue at a college gym forty-five years ago in New England.”

-Vincent Maganzini

Photo: Bob Dylan (Xavier Badosa via Wikimedia Commons)