Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue is getting the archival treatment its legend demands. Columbia Records and Legacy Recordings will release The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1976 Live Recordings on Nov. 6, a 39-CD collection capturing 381 tracks from the tour’s second leg — including 371 that have never been released.
The set revisits one of the most unruly and electrifying chapters of Dylan’s performing life. As SPIN noted in its 2019 coverage of Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story and the original archival boxed set, the tour was “ill-organized, wildly ambitious” and packed with creative ideas Dylan would never quite return to: freeform collaboration, theatrical staging and a uniquely unhinged performance energy. Onstage, the music fused druggy ’70s rock, outlaw country and gypsy jazz, with Dylan’s already-shifting arrangements pushed into even more volatile territory.
The newly announced collection documents the 27-date spring 1976 run, which began April 18 in Lakeland, Fl., and concluded May 25 in Salt Lake City. Nearly every show is represented, allowing listeners to trace how Dylan’s increasingly furious performances developed across the tour before culminating in the complete May 23 Fort Collins, Co., recording — the source of Hard Rain, the live special broadcast only once that year.
The boxed set’s ensemble includes members of the Desire band — bassist Rob Stoner, violinist Scarlet Rivera and drummer Howie Wyeth — alongside guitarists Mick Ronson, Steven Soles, David Mansfield and T Bone Burnett. Joan Baez also reunited with Dylan for a series of emotionally charged duets, including “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Railroad Boy.”
Burnett, looking back on the tour in the set’s materials, calls it “the first national punk rock tour,” arguing that its energy helped open a door to the furious explosion of music that followed, from the Clash and Elvis Costello to the Ramones and the Sex Pistols.
The 39-CD Deluxe Edition includes rare photographs and an essay by writer and music journalist Mikal Gilmore. A separate three-LP release offers the complete May 16, 1976, Fort Worth, Tx., performance, remixed from the original multitrack tapes. The 22-track set is previewed by a newly released live version of “Going, Going, Gone.”
In his liner notes, Gilmore describes the surviving recordings as the remains of a Rolling Thunder movie that never materialized as planned: “Play the music, close your eyes and watch the story.”