The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1975 Live Recordings

Great music start to finish

This is an awesome box set.The rehearsal CDs are great also.People who think Dylan didn't have a good singing voice, are totally wrong.His voice is cool as heck during this 1975 era.

Music in the '70s had lost some of it's edge that we heard in the late '60s. Dylan wanted to inject a bit of that excitement into what he wanted to do in the mid '70s, and the Rolling Thunder Revue was it. This fairly massive set has all the professionally recorded shows plus three discs of rehearsals, plus a disc of rare performances. The sound varies some but overall is good/very good. This set floats somewhere between four and five "stars" for the best performances here, but received five "stars" because Dylan had the nerve to put together this one-of-a-kind tour with so many other good singers/players when (if you were lucky enough to be around then) music in general needed an injection of excitement.This tour was put together with old friends (like Baez, McGuinn, Jack Elliott,and Neuwirth) plus a bunch of good musicians (Howie Wyeth, Rob Stoner, Mick Ronson, and a numerous others) and played some fairly wild shows into 1976. This box set focuses on the '75 shows which by most accounts were the best shows of the tour. Dylan, wearing hats, flowers, scarves, and sometimes white face approached his songs in a different light. The band became even better as the tour wound on. The results are some good/great but always fascinating performances of songs we all thought we knew. But Dylan was changing things around, from tempos to the actual songs themselves when he sang the lyrics, emphasizing different words and phrases for effect.The first three discs comprise rehearsals and are just that. There's a few pretty nice performances included on each disc, and it is interesting to hear the band before they got tighter on stage. But these tracks aren't essential to the real focus--the shows--included here. Discs four through thirteen hold the real music from this tour and every disc has quite a few gems that have been slightly re-imagined by Dylan. Even the multiple tracks of songs played at each show have something to offer, so there's no use picking favorites--everyone will hear their own. Some of these performances were cherry-picked for the Bootleg Series Vol. 5 of this tour released years ago. But hearing everything in it's place gives the music more energy and pacing. There's several performers who play and sing--Dylan didn't want this kind of tour to be just all about him, and the shows would end in a group singalong.The fourteenth disc collects a lot of fairly rare performances that will quicken the pulse of deep Dylan fans. There's good stuff like "One Too Many Mornings" from Gerdes Folk City, "Simple Twist Of Fate" from the Mahjong Parlor, "With God On Our Side" from the Civic Center, R.I., "The Ballad Of Ira Hays" from the Tuscarora Reservation, and many others.With 100 or so previously unreleased tracks, the professionally recorded complete shows, and a 52 page booklet with period photos, and some good information that helps put this tour in it's rightful place, if you're a Bob-fan this is worth checking out. While this box set may not have the gravitas of previous large Dylan sets, it's a true signpost of how Dylan was thinking about music and performance back when he felt that music needed an injection of energy he remembered from earlier years.

For what it’s worth, I’m not going to add much to the conversation here that others haven’t already pointed out. I just want to say I got this the day it came out in June and I’ve listened to it almost every day since. I think these shows are the very best that Dylan would ever sound live. I know that it’s completely subjective. I have the 1966 box set too, and I don’t think I’ve ever listened to a complete show from that. That set doesn’t capture my intrigue as much and find there to be less variety than is included in this one. They’re both great and if you like one more than other, more power to you.I think if you just like the way Dylan sounds on The Bootleg Series Vol. 5, this set will probably not feel much different from track to track. But if you love it, like me, there are some real treasures here, and it doesn’t take too long to notice it.Take for example, the way Dylan belts out the bridge of Just Like a Woman from 11/20/1975 in Cambridge, MA. The raw power and energy is just indescribable and unequaled, even amongst the other versions of the very same song in this very same box set. There’s a reason this version was included in Renaldo and Clara.Or maybe take the way Dylan and Baez both sustain the “heart” for exactly the same amount of time on Never Let Me Go from the next afternoon in Boston. Or how long Dylan holds the “mysteriously saved” just a few songs later in that show. It’s different from the Bootleg Series. Both are equally passionate but somehow one feels more intense than the other.I also want to say one more thing, the solo acoustic performances by Dylan this era are just raw and on fire. You can hear Dylan experimenting with melody and rhythm in real time. Example: You get Tangled Up in Blue three times. One of them we’re all familiar with. The other two are just as interesting or transcendent, and oftentimes both. On the one from Worcester, you can hear Dylan explore annunciations and guitar phrasing and singing more melodically. The one from Montreal could not be any more different. It sounds as if he were playing the rhythm for It’s All Over Now Baby Blue while singing the words for Tangled Up in Blue. Come on. That is fascinating, right? It doesn’t even work that well. It’s just straight up interesting. And I could probably listen to Dylan singing that version of I Don’t Believe You every day for the rest of the year. I swear, that version hits me that hard.Anyway, if you love this era of Dylan, this box set is truly fascinating. I haven’t even gotten into the rehearsals, which honestly sounds like them recording a soundtrack more than genuine rehearsals.Careful listening IS rewarded, if you’re really into the way Dylan sounded this tour.