Almost exactly 50 years ago, Bob Dylan embarked on the first leg of his now-famous Rolling Thunder Revue tour. What commenced was perhaps the most thrilling live collection of songs Dylan would ever produce. The autumn leg of this tour, spanning the northeastern United States and Canada, became forever immortalized through the live album released in 2002, which featured 22 performances from the first leg of the tour. The album serves as a testament to Dylan’s decades-long commitment to reinventing himself and his material and stands alone as a pinnacle of both Dylan’s career and rock music at large.
Each song Dylan chooses to perform on this album becomes a firecracker: exploding in energy and revealing details that weren’t there before. Dylan’s previous live performances had a tendency to be hollow and almost levitate in the air. Take his famous 1966 performance in Manchester, where Dylan seems to dance around each song he performs, dissecting them and then stretching them out until he has exhausted any possible material the song has left. The contrast between the two albums is clear in each performance of the 1965 classic, “Mr Tambourine Man.” The 1966 version is haunting, drawn out to nearly nine minutes, unraveling in inconsistent vocal phrasings and elongated harmonica solos. The Rolling Thunder Revue version, however, is direct — with Dylan’s steady and punctuated vocal performance backed by a consistent pattern of upstrokes on his guitar. This is true for a large part of Dylan’s solo, acoustic performances on this album: the standouts being “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” and “Simple Twist of Fate.” The latter, in my opinion, is his finest rendition of the 1965 song — delivering each verse sharply and resting on each word as long as necessary.
That being said, it is with the electric songs that this collection of songs sets itself apart from the rest of Dylan’s live catalog. This is immediately apparent in the first song on the record. A reformulation of 1969’s “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You,” it can be best summed up by a lyric in the song; it comes “down on me like rolling thunder.” The song slaps you in the head, as if to shame you for ever believing that you can have expectations for what a Bob Dylan song ‘should’ be like. Dylan’s voice isn’t the shrill voice of the ’60s or the grumble of his later years, but instead a growl. Similarly, 1964 acoustic songs “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” and “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” get completely transformed and electrified. Both songs’ choruses become triumphant, carnival-ending affairs. Even Dylan’s new material got completely rejuvenated on the album. Songs from his 1976 album “Desire” never sounded better. For example, the performance of “Isis” takes the piano-led studio version and sends it through an electric guitar at 100 mph. Each verse ends with a Dylan yell and an explosion of distortion: It’s bliss.
I could go on forever about the individual performances on the record. The duets with Joan Baez are wonderful, and the renditions of his 1965 “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry,” and 1963 “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” are among my most listened to Dylan songs ever.
However, the collection from this tour is special to me for a larger reason. What I, and so many people, value so much in Bob Dylan can be perfectly distilled in this album: an unpredictability and refusal to be pinned down.
