In mid-May of 2017, Bob Dylan was in Ireland filming a never-seen performance film for the Nobel Committee. (I recently interviewed the director, and there’s another interview related to that project coming next). Only a few weeks after that secret taping, he was back in America and back on the road. The Summer 2017 tour kicked off nine years ago today in Port Chester, NY, at the recently-reopened Capitol Theatre.

Amazingly enough, almost 10 years later, a soundboard just dropped! This marks the only complete-show soundboard between 2009 and the various ones from 2025. It came as part of a massive soundboard drop of dozens of never-heard tapes from Capitol Theatre shows, which appeared mysteriously on a music message board a couple months ago. For some equally mysterious reason, the one Dylan tape in the bunch was the only link that didn’t work. But then, a while later, it belatedly appeared. Huge thanks to the mystery leaker for liberating this.

I actually attended this show—I lived in New York at the time, and The Cap was just a short train ride north—but barely remember it. So I thought this new soundboard (downloadable below or in FLAC here) would be a good opportunity to look back.

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Last night, Bob Dylan kicked off what is officially called—according to a t-shirt on sale in the merch booth at least—the Long Hot Summer Tour. He played alongside openers Lucinda Williams and John Doe (who I interviewed last year) in an outdoor venue in Troutdale, Oregon, near Portland. The setlist featured a number of songs returning from last summer’s setlist as well as, for the first time, a few Rough and Rowdy Ways songs played at a non-“Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour” show.

The big news though was the debut of an extremely deep Basement Tapes cut: “Baby Won’t You Be My Baby.” I crunched the numbers and this is the longest gap ever between Dylan recording a song and playing it live. 59 years! That easily tops the previous record-holder, “Outlaw Blues” at 42 years (I did a whole list if you wanna see more).

Dave Depper was on hand to report in for us. Depper is a member of the iconic indie-rock band Death Cab for Cutie, who have a new album out today, I Built You a Tower. (I also highly recommend his solo album covering the entirety of Air’s landmark electronic record Moon Safari.) Since he had a million other things on his album release day to-do list, Depper called me on the phone a couple hours ago, and I pulled his remarks together into this piece.

(This will be the first of many show reviews from this summer’s tour, including a few by me when the tour heads east. Most go out only to paid subscribers. Sign up here if you want to get them all.)

I’ve seen Dylan twice before. I saw the Time Out of Mind tour in ’98 when I was 17 in Eugene. The setlist that night, I had no idea how lucky I was. Then I saw the Love & Theft tour in Bend. It was the first tour where he started playing keyboards a lot. I have not seen him since then. Part of the blessing and curse of being a touring musician myself is that pretty much any time that all these acts are on the road and coming to my town, I’m not home to see them. Because I would have seen Dylan like 15 times otherwise.

I have been checking in with those set lists, and I’ve dipped in here and there to listen to some bootleg recordings, so I had a sense of what I was in for. But like everybody, I didn’t know what he would do in the context of this no longer being the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour. That was really my only regret about last night. I did not get to catch a Rough and Rowdy show. I adore that record, and I adore the live versions of the songs I’ve heard from that, and we only got two Rough and Rowdy Ways songs last night. I was a bit sad about that.

The all-acoustic band really flatters what he’s trying to do right now. You can hear every single note everyone’s playing, and it really centers his voice and his keyboard playing in a powerful way. His keys led everything. I remembered the last time I’d seen him feeling like he was just kind of diddling around on the keys, coming in and out, and some of it was more amateurish. But he was completely leading the way on every song last night. And his voice was just pristine. It was like the Shadows in the Night croon, just really loud and cutting through the mix. My last experience with him, he wasn’t in quite as in command of his voice as he is now. He’s done so much work around his vocal instrument, and his piano playing has come so far since then, that I was just stunned.

Edgefield is the classic summer outdoor shed in Portland, about a 20-minute drive from town. It’s just like a nice green grassy venue sort of near the Columbia River. It’s run by a local promotion company, so there’s a local non-corporate flavor to it. I’ve played there with Death Cab several times. It’s where you see someone of Dylan’s size or our size. It’s an amazing place to see a show because, if you just have a little bit of motivation, you can get extremely close to the stage. With Dylan last night, there were reserved seats that were quite expensive, like a little half moon of them in front of the stage, but we just had GA lawn seats and got very close without much effort. He had the hood up, but you could see his face. Nothing in front of the piano.

The Dylan crowd was heavily boomer, hippie folks. I saw a lot of very interesting hippie haircuts and people wearing their best Oregon country-fair garb. It felt very much like a Dylan crowd, but maybe a Dylan crowd that was expecting “all your favorite hits of the 1960s.” I think a lot of people were confused.

One of the high points was “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” that Cuban arrangement. When he started doing it, my girlfriend said, “Is he playing ‘Putting on the Ritz’?” I was like, “I think he might be?” Then I heard, “Well, the streets of Rome…” We were just cracking up. It was the kind of crowd that I bet only half the people even know the song at all, and they certainly don’t know the Calypso version that he’s doing. But I loved it.

I’m embarrassed to say I did not realize at the moment that I was experiencing the live debut of “Baby Won’t You Be My Baby.” I mean, I’m a Basement Tapes fanatic. That box set is my favorite of the bootleg releases. But there had already been several covers at that point of songs I didn’t recognize. I just figured it was another one. I was like, “Alright, here’s another old-time bluesy song. His voice sounds great. I’m on board.” I had written in my notes “I looked East, I looked West,” because I figured I’d look up what the song was later. I was like, “I know I’ve heard that somewhere. Is it like a Chuck Berry song?” For a second I also wondered if he was previewing new material.

I was completely stunned to see that it was a bootleg Basement Tapes song from 59 years ago. I mean, even by the standard of Basement Tapes tracks, it’s sort of a throwaway song, in the best way. It’s about the band cooking and him being ridiculous. It’s just another great lost Basement Tapes song, and that’s why it just sounded like another lost interesting cover. He looked like he was having a good time.

No real lowlights. I would say that in a 16-song set, four covers feels a little ungenerous in terms of throwing the fans a bone. I personally am very invested in the “modern day Bob can do whatever he wants, I’m grateful to just be in his presence” mindset, but I heard one guy walking out afterwards say, “I’ve seen the crappiest indie bands in the smallest venues and I had a better time than at this show.” But in terms of the material itself, and the performances, there was nothing to fault. I would have loved to hear a couple more Rough and Rowdy songs just because I’ve never had a chance to hear any of them, but beyond that, I don’t know what I would have changed.

Actually, one lowlight. They didn’t have the Yondr bags, but security had clearly all been instructed to berate anyone that had their phone out, which led to a lot of hearing security guards yelling “Put your phone away!” and people arguing back at them. There were all these mini-situations of people arguing with security guards that were constant and distracting. I would have rather had the inconvenience of just putting my phone in a bag.

I took my dad for his birthday. Dylan is his favorite artist of all time. He’s the reason that I love Bob, so it was this very kind of full circle moment for us. Plus, the opener at that Eugene show on the Time Out of Mind tour was Lucinda Williams, and she was the opener last night as well.

My dad’s a Dylan fanatic, but Dylan ends for him after Desire. He just checked out at that point. It’s been fun to be a Jokermen-mindset kind of son to him. “You should listen to Infidels or Oh Mercy.” When I gave him the tickets a couple weeks ago, we had a long talk about expectations. I said, “Your homework assignment is to listen to nothing but Rough and Rowdy Ways for a couple of weeks.” He loved it.

That felt very special to go with him. I was just feeling overwhelmingly grateful to see this guy at 85 years old doing this thing and being clearly so passionate and committed to doing it. And also just being fearless about not catering to anyone’s expectations of what his show should be. When he walked off after “Crossing the Rubicon” at the end and people were yelling for an encore, I was laughing my head off. “This dude’s not coming back. And that is the song he’s leaving you with, guys. Get over it.”

Thanks Dave! Check out Death Cab’s new album ‘I Built You a Tower’ wherever you get music. Here’s them playing a song from it on Jimmy Kimmel a few nights back (that’s Dave on the right).

PS. No tape yet beyond the one song in the video I embedded above. Paid subscribers, keep an eye on our Discord for when the full tape drops.

The Rolling Thunder Revue lurched to a somewhat ignominious end at a half-empty arena in Utah. The show was a last-minute addition, only announced only four days in advance. You can pull off that tight timeline playing tiny theaters in New England; you can’t when you’re trying to sell 17,000 tickets in Salt Lake City. They’re lucky they sold even half that. Fort Collins feels like the spiritual finale. This is just a weird little postscript.

The tight timeline plays into one of the most well-known things about this show: There’s no tape of it. It’s often called the Holy Grail of live Bob Dylan tapes. Dylan’s sound team had recorded every other show onto cassette at the soundboard. But, because this show was a last-minute addition, they’d already sent all their equipment home. They borrowed other gear for Salt Lake City, and it didn’t have the same recording setup. So Dylan’s people don’t have it sitting in the vaults somewhere. When the rumored 1976 box set gets announced (very soon, I hear), don’t expect to see Salt Lake City on it.

As far as anyone knows, no fan taped it either. Maybe the bootleggers following the tour had already made their plans to head home after Fort Collins. Great efforts have been made to dig one up, including a big campaign a couple years ago that got covered widely in the Salt Lake City press—maybe some local had one in the back of their closet they’d forgotten about?—but no luck. At this point I feel fairly confident saying that no tape exists.

Why does this matter? There are many other Rolling Thunder concert tapes. And there are a few other Rolling Thunder shows with no tapes. What makes this particular one the Holy Grail? Three main reasons:

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Five years ago, I compiled an oral history of one of Bob Dylan’s most famous concerts ever: May 23, 1976 in Fort Collins, Colorado. This giant outdoor show, held in the pouring rain at the tail end of the Rolling Thunder tour, was televised as Hard Rain and used for half of the live album of the same name (the other half came from Fort Worth). It was in many ways the culmination of the entire Rolling Thunder Revue.

In the five years since that piece ran, I’ve interviewed many more of the key participants, both the musicians onstage and the people making the show happen behind the scenes. So, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of this historic show—and the penultimate entry in our Rolling Thunder 1976 show-by-show series—I am dramatically expanding that oral history with a whole bunch more quotes from interviews I’ve done subsequently.

Note: All the newly-added quotes come from original interviews I’ve conducted myself, but some of the quotes in the original version did not. I’ve linked to the original sources, whether that’s me or someone else, at the end of every quote.

An Oral History of Hard Rain

1. They first try (and fail) to tape a TV special early in the tour

Gerry Bakal, stage manager: “We were rehearsing at the Bellevue Biltmore Hotel [in Clearwater, Florida]. It’s an old, beautiful wooden structure. We pull into the parking lot, and there is a barefoot tuxedo-wearing purple-glasses Roger McGuinn telling people where to park. Rumor has it there was LSD involved.” (via forthcoming interview)

Gary Burke, percussion: “One day we were told, instead of going to where we’re rehearsing, go to this old-school ballroom they had. We were going to shoot a show for Burt Sugarman, the man behind Midnight Special. Bob was the MC; he would introduce different segments of the show. He was obviously very uncomfortable doing that. I remember one time he put his glasses on to read the lyrics, because there were so many verses he couldn’t remember them all. Someone handed him a book of Bob Dylan songs to read from, which I thought was really funny.” (via)

Howie Wyeth, drums: “The rehearsals sucked. Then we did the concerts and they were filming it and it happened. That was the first day that the music started feeling right again. Bob did a really hip version of ‘Like A Rolling Stone’. He did some tunes that he hadn’t done at all.” (via)

T Bone Burnett, guitar: “They built these rafters all around and there were all these kids sitting in them, with their legs dangling down. The backdrop was all these dangling legs and we just took one look at it and thought, ‘[surely] this isn’t what we’re doing.’” (via)

David Mansfield, multi-instrumentalist: “I don’t want to put words in [Bob’s] mouth, but I imagine it seemed too sort of staged and pedestrian in terms of approach. It was right after rehearsals and things hadn’t quite gelled yet.” (via)

Paul Goldsmith, cameraman: “It could have been John Denver on that stage, because the visual style overcame Bob’s qualities. Which is hard to do, but if you put enough filters on the camera and you film wide, it’s possible.” (via)

Howie Wyeth: “Bob got into a fight with [one of] the guys that were doing [the Clearwater special]. He got into a big argument with the guy over the dinner table one night after we’d already done half of it. And then he said, ‘No! We’re not going to do it. Fuck it!’ So he decided that wasn’t the way we were going to do it, and then they decided to record it at the end [of the tour].” (via)

Rob Stoner, bassist and bandleader: “I think the deal was that Bob had the right of refusal if he didn’t like the videotape, but the terms were that he had to make good on it, at his expense, by doing his own thing to deliver to NBC.” (via)

Gary Burke: “It wasn’t exactly his cup of tea. It felt a little showbiz-y. The word came back the next day that he canned it. I heard he bought it back from Burt Sugarman for a million bucks, never to be shown.” (via)

Scarlet Rivera, violin: “The first attempt to capture it live for whatever reason didn’t work. I’m really not privy to know what those reasons were. They were technical reasons, from sound equipment [which] had to be brought in. Maybe they had problems with feedback. That whole effort was never released. It forced us to do one final try to capture Hard Rain, which was the Colorado show.” (via)

2. The second Rolling Thunder tour continues through the South, winding towards Colorado

Bob Neuwirth, guitar: “When we did the second edition of it down south, we approached it slightly wrong and it wasn’t as fresh. The New England magic wasn’t there.” (via)

Gerry Bakal: “The winter tour, we’d go into town and just rent a hall, start selling tickets. In the Northeast, in a college town in the mid-70s, you think Bob Dylan and Joan Baez can sell tickets? You couldn’t print them fast enough. Well, they tried the same thing in the South in the spring, and everybody down there is like, ‘Bob who?’” (via forthcoming interview)

Mike Evans, advance man: “The attitude was to go bigger in the South. Quite frankly, at that point in time, it’s not the new South we have now. It was the old South. The whole concept of Rolling Thunder Revue didn’t mean as much as it did up north.” (via)

Chris O’Dell, co-tour manager: “It shouldn’t have happened, honestly. A good thing happened and then they tried to recreate it in a different space and it didn’t work. It just wasn’t the same. Nobody felt the same way about it. They should have stopped and just left it at the one.” (via)

Scarlet Rivera: “There was a magic to the first leg of the tour. There was a great sense of harmony amongst all the players. Although the music was as good on the second leg, I think it was a little bit less harmonious. Some element of tension wove itself in that wasn’t there in the first one. Perhaps it was because Bob was going through his divorce. I don’t know. There was a little bit less of that magic fairydust glow on the second one for me.” (via)

Roger McGuinn, singer: “There was less camaraderie. First part, we were all hanging out and loving each other, and it was like a big family. The second half was more like a commercial tour.” (via)

Claudia Levy, tour director Jacques Levy’s partner: “The first part of the tour, there were no drugs. People weren’t doing coke or anything like that. The second part of the tour—there was a different color to things, if you will.” (via)

Gary Burke: “I got the feeling that things had changed from the fall. You’re trading stories with people, and they would tell you about what they did on the first tour. I’m thinking to myself, that’s a lot different than what we’re going through.” (via)

Rob Stoner: “All of that mood stuff in the band is always set by the main guy. The train follows the locomotive. And the locomotive was dragging, discouraged.” (via)

David Mansfield: “Bob kind of had a black cloud over his head during that [1976] tour and that infected everything.” (via)

Mike Evans: “We sat around talking about finances much more [in ‘76]. I don’t know in the first leg if anyone ever said, ‘Oh, what does that cost?’ You can sell out Plymouth Auditorium twice in a night and you’re not going to pay your catering bill. The attitude was just, do it. On the second leg it was, ‘What’s it going to cost, and how much do we need to do it?’ That pretty much tells you everything.” (via)

Louie Kemp, Rolling Thunder producer: “It was a totally different atmosphere, but the shows were great.” (via)

Kinky Friedman, singer: “Those shows went very well. The crowds particularly liked [my songs] ‘Proud to be an Asshole from El Paso,’ ‘They Ain’t Making Jews Like Jesus Anymore,’ and ‘Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed.’ Sometimes a light hand on the tiller works really well. I thought for a moment that I was going to lose my job because they were laughing so hard. I think Bob had not expected that.” (via)

3. The tour arrives in Colorado to prep for the big show

David Hill, attendee: “Dylan and company spent a few days at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park rehearsing. The Stanley is a famous old hotel in the mountains where Stephen King came up with the idea for The Shining. It was perhaps a bit run down in 1976—it’s since been spiffed up. There’s a small auditorium, which is likely where the Rolling Thunder Revue rehearsed.” (via email)

Patricia Maher, local resident: “Estes Park was a very conservative town, and while some of its citizens knew who Bob was, many didn’t - or didn’t care. It was a very small mountain community, which is why Dylan came up there to rehearse in the first place. They knew there wouldn’t be tons of fans hanging out. They’d have been swamped if they rehearsed in Fort Collins.” (via)

Gerry Bakal: “They went out of their way to be super, super nice to us. They just opened their arms and gave us a big old hug. The laundry room was open 24-7, the bar was open, room service was open. Shopkeepers would come in from town and say, “I own the jewelry store down the street. You guys want to go shopping? I’ll open the store.’” (via forthcoming interview)

Howie Wyeth: “All of a sudden they said we got four days off before we do Fort Collins and the record. They said, ‘You’re gonna love this. We got you in this dude ranch up in the mountains.’ And it was raining so you couldn’t go riding and it was up in the mountains so you couldn’t breathe. There was nothing to do. And we were all stuck up there... It was dreary.” (via)

Mike Evans: “We were staying at this…hotel up in the mountains that is real famous, with the old clawfoot bathtubs and stuff. I remember sitting in the bathtubs drinking brandy and things just trying to get warm.” (via)

Rob Stoner: “Bob was really hitting the bottle. That was a terrible fuckin’ weekend.” (via)

Gary Burke: “At the last minute we heard, ‘Bob wants to rehearse. Get down to the ballroom.’ They were scrambling to get gear set up. I remember all we did was we played ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ for about two hours!” (via)

Patricia Maher: “The night before the show, we all went up to the Stanley to listen to them rehearse in the concert room and music hall. We were able to watch them, because it was almost impossible to close off a public room in the Stanley. They were so loud, they literally shook the place.” (via)

4. Bob’s wife Sara shows up

Joan Baez, singer: “Sara showed up late in the tour, wafting in from a plane looking like a mad woman, carrying baskets of wrinkled clothes, her hair wild and dark rings around her eyes... Bob was ignoring her, and had picked up a curly headed Mopsy who perched on the piano during his rehearsals in a ballroom off the main hotel lobby. Sara appeared airily at the front door dressed in deerskin, wearing her emerald green necklace and some oppressively strong and sweet oils. She greeted me with a reserved hello and talked distantly about nothing in particular, all the while eyeing the closed door to the ballroom. I had the impression that she had her magic powers set upon that room, and that whatever plans Bob had would soon be foiled. The door to the room opened and Mopsy tumbled out. ‘Who’s that?’ said Sara, looking at the girl sideways with her big, lazy, suspicious eyes. ‘Some groupie. No one likes her,’ I answered. It was true. We liked the tightrope walker, who vanished quietly when Sara was around.” (via)

Mike Evans: “She was Bob's slack wire instructor. We’d have to set it up every stop.” (via)

Gary Burke: “Where I was set up [at the back of the stage playing percussion], I would turn around and there was Sara, his wife, who showed up the night before. She’s sitting there in a chair, very regal, with her sons around her. She had on this tiara and just sat there very stone-faced the whole show. I thought, what is going on? So I asked Bob, and he said, ‘She’s just reminding everybody who the matriarch is.’ I guess even Bob! Yeah, things were a little rough at that point.” (via)

Rob Stoner: “I don’t know what the fuck came over him... It was a big void in his life. The marriage was falling apart and this thing which had seemed so exciting and promising—Rolling Thunder—that wasn’t [working] and he couldn’t figure out why, I don’t think... It was like a mid-life crisis. He was confused and he was searching. He tried a lot of chicks; he tried one chick; he tried [every] kind of chick.” (via)

Dave Sharrett, local resident: “My wife Vicki worked as a cocktail waitress at the Stanley Hotel. One of the hotel managers came to Vicki and told her she wasn’t allowed to be in the kitchen after hours. Someone had apparently seen her going through a refrigerator looking for food. She told him she had never gone into the kitchen, and that she must have been mistaken for someone else… The evening of the show, after having finished her shift, she was getting ready to go back to her room when someone tapped her on the shoulder. She turned around and there was Bob Dylan. He looked at her and said, ‘Oops, wrong woman!’ and quickly made an exit. The episode with the manager about the kitchen then made sense. As it turned out, Dylan had a mistress who looked very similar to Vick.” (via email)

Joan Baez: “That night we had a disjointed party for him complete with a cake, but he got drunk and looked dead tired. I decided to walk him to his room. He started flirting ever so slightly, and I told him to wait right where he was and dashed off to find Sara and delivered her to Bob. They both laughed sheepishly and looked mildly pleased, and I said ‘Happy Birthday,’ and went back to my room quite proud of myself.” (via)

Joel Bernstein, guitar tech and photographer: “Sara and the kids came to the Fort Collins show—I seem to recall that even she had a turban on.” (via)

5. The stories (plural) behind the turbans

Joel Bernstein: “When he first showed up at rehearsals he was wearing a yarmulka [sic]. It wasn’t part of a look, it definitely wasn’t wardrobe, it was a religious thing. It wasn’t a bandana, it was a yarmulka.” (via)

T Bone Burnett, guitar: “Just before Dylan left on the second leg of the tour, he was putting a brick wall round his house and all the bricklayers had those rags ‘round their heads to stop them getting concrete and various bits of plaster or whatever in their hair. Dylan went out there to help the guys and out of that we got the babushka headdress, or whatever [the] hell it’s called, and then he just kept it on for the road.” (via)

Arthur Rosato: “It was a personal thing he never talked about it. And then pretty soon all of the musicians were wearing them.” (via)

Gary Burke: “Bob’s headgear for the tour had been that white durag he wore. It was like a prison durag with a sort of Arab twist to it. By the end of the tour, there were a number of wives and girlfriends around. These women cajoled us into wearing them, a goof on Bob and his headgear. Much to our chagrin, at first, but everybody got into it after a while. That concert was [the day before] Bob’s birthday. It was a combination of party hats and giving it to the boss a little bit.” (via)

Joan Baez: “Everybody was wandering around with bandanas and torn sheets tied around their heads. I didn’t succumb until the end of the tour, and then only with an eight-foot-long red silk scarf from Spain, wrapped into a turban and adorned with a gaudy brooch over the center of my forehead, the spot where rajahs stuck their royal jewels.” (via)

T Bone Burnett: “The story goes that when [the Hard Rain footage] finally was sent to New York City, for the network to look at, the head of the company saw the footage and said, ‘I can tell you one thing: he is no Cary Grant.’ There, on some executive’s TV screen, was this guy with a rag tied ‘round his head! By that time, the ’76 tour had become Rag Rock.” (via)

6. A hard rain falls

Rob Stoner: “We were supposed to do the gig [on] two or three consecutive days—each time the rain date was supposed to be the next day—but it was pouring for days and days and, meanwhile, it’s costing Bob a lot of bread. Everybody’s holed up in this little hotel up in the mountains in the middle of nowhere, with nothing to do except get drunk… The boss is getting in a progressively shittier mood… Eventually they just decided to go and do it in the rain.” (via)

Paul Goldsmith: “They were thinking about canceling the performance. It was raining, and there had been a show in Canada a week earlier where a guitarist had been electrocuted and died because of the electricity going to his guitar. So there was concern that this could be dangerous to perform in the rain. And everybody was exhausted and it could easily have been canceled. But it wasn’t.” (via)

Louie Kemp: “It had been a pretty miserable morning. We had a big film crew from NBC there to tape the concert, but the rain just would not let up. I paced around, nervous that the whole thing would be a washout. But when I looked out at the crowd forming in front of the stage, I could see that everyone was having a blast! They were sliding around in the mud and dancing in the rain. By the time Bobby took the stage, the rain had slowed to a drizzle and the energy was electric.” (via)

Patricia Maher: “The concert started at 1:00 PM and it poured rain for the next eight hours. After much dismay, we just gave up and let the rain roll down our faces. Hour after hour, you’d think, ‘This is insane. Go out to the van. This is crazy.’ But the fascination with Bob and his band was just incredible. There was no way in heck that you were going to leave.” (via)

David Mansfield: “Bob was in a pretty awful state of mind, and on top of it all, the physical conditions of the concert were grueling. Because it wasn’t just raining, it was also freezing… I remember playing steel guitar and it was so cold that my foot was shaking on the volume pedal and I couldn’t get a smooth tone.” (via)

Roger McGuinn: “It wasn’t my favorite show. It was cold and rainy and 5,000 feet and we couldn’t breathe.” (via)

Gary Burke: “I remember looking out, and people were dropping. Usually, it’s from heat exhaustion, but in this case, it was exposure. I remember one time looking up and they’re carrying this guy in a stretcher.” (via)

David Hendel, soundman: “We had a speaker blow over and get impaled by a piece of scaffolding.” (via)

Rick Wurpel, local producer: “The roof came with the tour. The rigger had assured me that this roof stage cover was well-designed. Unfortunately, when he showed up with it, in this layman’s opinion, it was not structurally sound at all. There were welds that were breaking. It leaked like a sieve.” (via)

Rob Stoner: “Everybody’s soaked, the canopy’s leaking, the musicians are getting shocks from the water on the stage. The instruments are going out of tune because of the humidity. It was awful. So everybody is playing and singing for their lives, and that is the spirit that you hear on that record.” (via)

David Hill: “I was a senior in high school in Littleton, Colo., at the time. I drove up with my sister and two school friends… It was pouring rain when we got to the stadium, but as I recall, the skies cleared as we waited, and by the time the concert began, I think the rain had stopped… I was a photographer on my high school newspaper, so I took my camera and shot a bunch of color slides, mostly crowd shots.” (via email)

Joan Baez: “Ten thousand people sang [happy birthday] to him in a stadium in the rain. He stuck his face into his amplifier until the song was over, and then plowed into ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.’” (via)

Rob Stoner: “The rain cleared up on the last fuckin’ song—it was the first time that the sun had shone in a week.” (via)

7. Filming for the TV special

Scarlet Rivera: “There was a lot of pressure on that day to get that filmed [and recorded]… This was the last possible moment for this recording to be made, and it was under the worst circumstances.” (via)

Paul Goldsmith: “It must have been a decision on Bob’s part at the last minute that he wanted to record it, because I got a call three days before the concert.” (via)

Gerry Bakal: “Bob had painted these four-by-eight pieces of plywood that I had to hang every day behind the stage, which was challenging. We had them stacked upstage, waiting for the stage to get set up before I’d get some stagehands and hang them. I had to keep an eye on ‘em because I kept saying, ‘I know they’re still building parts of the stage, and they’re gonna be looking for plywood.’ And of course somebody came over and cut like a one foot by two foot section off of one of Bob’s pieces.” (via forthcoming interview)

Rick Wurpel: “He had painted these pictures of Christ on four-by-eight sheets of scrap plywood. My carpenter, under the pressure of the TV people, grabbed that scrap plywood and cut it up and made a table of it. Somebody ran up to me right before showtime, ‘Wurpel! Wurpel!’ ‘What?’ ‘Who the fuck cut up Bob Dylan’s paintings of Christ?’” (via)

Gerry Bakal: “We sent somebody out for some one-by-threes and some glue and screws. ‘You gotta put this back on!’” (via forthcoming interview)

Paul Goldsmith: “There was an intermission where Allen Ginsberg recited Howl. I wish I’d filmed that, but we were at that moment kind of regrouping, figuring out what we were going to do next. I would have loved to have had a camera shooting that. He came alone on the stage, shouting out Howl to 22,000 college kids in Colorado.” (via)

Allen Ginsberg, poet: “[Dylan] was dubious about my singing but he kept pushing me to recite poetry, till finally in Fort Collins, I did… I couldn’t figure what you could say to 27,000 people, what could engage the minds of that many people in the hysteria of a giant rock and roll thing. One day in Fort Collins as Dylan came off in the intermission, casually over the shoulder he said, ‘Why don’t you go out there and read a poem?’ So I went out there and read a very brief poem called ‘On Neal Cassidy’s Ashes’ because that’s Denver area… I wasn’t announced, I just went out and bellowed words out over a microphone and when I got off Roger McGuinn shouted my name and then the band went into their thing.” (via)

Joel Bernstein: “They wanted to have some shots of Bob from the video of Fort Collins for the [Hard Rain] LP sleeve and I had come up with this technique of photographing from video using still frame... I’d shot a lot from the front, but the background was very cluttered with all the scaffolding and the paintings... The shot from the back just happened to be the one that I stopped at. I never thought it would be used.” (via)

Gary Burke: “If you look at the footage, you’ll see that everybody is just laser-locked on him when they’re playing. He would expect you to go there and be with him. We did work off a set list, but they were more suggestions than locked in. Instead of the Ten Commandments, it was the Ten Suggestions.” (via)

Rick Wurpel: “He did play a little longer, because of the crowd being in the rain and having been there forever. My understanding was that he wanted to play a lot longer. It was a torn thing, because the band was also cold and wet because the roof leaked. And this was not the days of wireless everything. This was the days where you were wired. So there’s also, in the back of your mind, the knowledge that electricity and water does not mix.” (via)

Louie Kemp: “The footage from the Hard Rain concert in Colorado, I think is amazing footage, just amazing. The intensity of the singing and everything. I think that tour, the performances were in some cases more intense than they were relaxed.” (via)

Paul Goldsmith: “You’ve probably had the experience in your life where you’re not sure whether you want to do something or not, and then, when you decide to do it, you just go hell’s bells for it. As you can see in Hard Rain, they just rocked and rolled the whole show. You could just feel the energy. Everyone on the stage was obviously letting loose. There was no constraint. There was no sense of being careful.” (via)

Rob Stoner: “There was a lot of stuff that makes Hard Rain an extraordinary snapshot—like a punk record or something. It’s got such energy and such anger.” (via)

8. The morning after

Rick Wurpel, local producer: “I took the athletic department and the head coach and they saw the field. There was not a blade of grass left. There was nothing but mud. Not only is it thigh-deep mud, but there’s boots, there’s shoes, there’s garbage. I hate to use the term right now, but it looks like a war zone. The athletic director and the coach, they were both in tears. They were devastated. This is hallowed ground. It’s all about football here. They were like, ‘There will never be another concert in this building.’ I’m not sure there ever has been another one there.” (via)

1976-05-23, Hughes Stadium, Fort Collins, CO - concert minus officially-released tracks

Catch up on the full Rolling Thunder 1976 show-by-show series here! Only one more show to go…

The last Rolling Thunder show before Hard Rain began with fans camped outside in line to buy tickets for 34 hours!

Admittedly, the fans did not intend to camp out quite that long. Tickets were to go on sale at 9am Thursday, and fans started camping out at 11pm the night before. Ten hours to wait, they thought. …

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Today, the Rolling Thunder Revue leaves Texas and enters the home stretch. Only four more shows to go—including the biggest, followed by the most mysterious.

But today’s show is neither. The first show of the final four took place in Oklahoma City, Dylan’s first-ever show in the state that now houses his archives. This was a last…

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You’ve heard songs from this Fort Worth show even if you don’t know you have. Why? Because it’s one of the two shows used on the live album Hard Rain. Producer Don DeVito hired a mobile recording truck to record this show and Fort Collins. They used four tracks from this and five tracks from Fort Collins and, voila, Hard Rain. (Again, I’m referring to the live album; the TV special of the same name comes entirely from Fort Collins and features a different track list.)

Hard Rain does an exceptional job representing this tour. But it’s only nine songs long. So, for fun, I decided to create an alternate Hard Rain. A second live album, also nine songs and roughly 50 minutes long, using entirely different songs from these same two shows. If they had released a double-LP, this could have been the companion disc. Or just an alternate-universe Hard Rain. I’m not saying it’s better than Hard Rain, but it’s almost as good (“almost” because any 1976 live album without “Idiot Wind” will never quite match up).

Download the hypothetical companion album below. I’ve called it Headin’ South, in keeping with the Hard Rain tradition of naming your live album after a song that’s not actually on it (“Blowing down the backroads headin’ south…”). All these tracks come from the Fort Worth and Fort Collins soundboards, just as the songs on Hard Rain did. Listen along while you read my track-by-notes.

DOWNLOAD 'HEADIN' SOUTH'

Side One

1. A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall

Hard Rain begins with a radically rearranged classic—“Maggie’s Farm”—so I figured Headin’ South should too. A song that everyone will recognize from the ’60s, but then go, whoa, it didn’t use to sound like that.

2. Mozambique

As I’ve noted before, Rolling Thunder ’75 was the real Desire tour. The few Desire songs he retained in ’76 kinda felt like holdovers. The main exception was “Mozambique,” not played at all in 1975. I like the Hard Rain “Oh Sister” fine (and I prefer that song in general), but, in terms of accurately representing this tour, I’d argue they should have swapped it with “Mozambique.”

3. You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go

“Light” is not the first word that comes to mind when discussing 1976, but even a dark and angry album needs moments of levity. “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome” serves that function here, just as it did on Blood on the Tracks.

4. Rita May

The one “new” song of the tour, it’s surprising this wasn’t on the original Hard Rain. It was on the B-side of the “Stuck Inside of Mobile” Hard Rain promo single instead. Time to promote it!

5. Going Going Gone

You’d think “Going Going Gone” would have been a Tour ’74 staple, but Bob and The Band never played this Planet Waves song. Instead it got its debut in 1976, and became a staple then. Good way to close an album side.

Side Two

1. Deportee

The main thing Hard Rain is missing, in my book, is any Bob-Joan duets (there were some in the film version). So we have the pairing of “Deportee” and “I Pity the Poor Immigrant.” It kills me a bit to omit “Railroad Boy”—my favorite of them all—but it would kill me even more to break up this topical pairing. Timely then, and sadly just as timely now. The first is acoustic…

2. I Pity the Poor Immigrant

…and the second is electric.

3. Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door

The penultimate song of every show, and the penultimate song here. Plus a little showcase for Roger McGuinn.

4. Tangled Up in Blue

Hard Rain ends with “Idiot Wind,” so we need another epic closer. Unlike “Idiot Wind,” “Tangled” was not a tour staple—in fact, this was the only time the full band performed it. But it has the appropriate chaotic energy. I’m sure if they’d played it more they would have tightened it up, but I kinda like how shambolic it is.

BONUS COMPANION LP: Travel On

What all the official live releases—albums, Bootleg Series, box sets—omit is that there was so much more to a Rolling Thunder show than just Bob Dylan. Two hours of music without Bob onstage at all, every single night on both tours. So, for the true heads, I also made a Hard Rain companion album featuring some of the tour’s other musicians, known collectively as Guam. Although the main man makes a couple cameos too.

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Throughout this Rolling Thunder 1976 anniversary series, I’ve emphasized all the ways this iteration of the tour differs from Rolling Thunder 1975. And there are many. But today might be the day that feels the most in the spirit of Rolling Thunder 1975.

Just like he did near the end of the ’75 tour, near the end of ’76, Dylan and the band played at a prison. This time, though, the appearance has nothing to do with Rubin “Hurricane” Carter. It doesn’t have anything to do with anything that I could figure out. For reasons that remain murky, Dylan and co. set up shop at a juvenile detention facility, the Gatesville State School for delinquent boys.

The show was a last-minute affair. Two Dallas shows were originally on the printed itinerary, according to a couple participants. But those were cancelled. Then plans were made for a free show in Austin at legendary music hall Armadillo World Headquarters. But that got scrapped too, in favor of this shortened performance for 300 juvenile delinquents.

Professor William Bush, who wrote a book about the history of the Texas juvenile system—where this Gatesville facility was particularly notorious—explains that this show came about because of a new boss tasked with fixing things up:

Ron Jackson was the executive director of the Texas Youth Council, the state agency that oversaw all of the state’s ‘training schools’ for juvenile delinquents. He ascended into that role thanks to a major class-action civil rights lawsuit that concluded in 1973-74. Jackson was considered much more progressive than his predecessor, and he was younger and clearly open to hosting a show like that.

Stage manager Gerry Bakal remembers that certain kids there, the worst offenders, were not going to be invited to attend. When Dylan heard about that, though, he objected. “Bob insisted that everybody sees the show or nobody’s going to see a show.” So they were all invited.

Bandleader Rob Stoner recalls the performance:

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Too bad there’s no tape of Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder show in Austin.

That’s what I would have had to write a few years ago. But, in December 2023, one appeared! A never-heard soundboard straight from the sound guy, no less. Where did it appear? Why, right here in this newsletter!

(Ouch, I think I pulled something patting myself on the back so hard.)

Thou…

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Today we hit one of my favorite shows of Rolling Thunder 1976. It’s got an impassioned performance, a partial soundboard, and a bit of unique BobTalk. But I won’t bury the lede. The big news is the setlist. Three songs in particular, all not only new to the tour but also his first time played ever (at his own concerts, at least—we’ll get there).

First up…

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Today we hit a bummer milestone: The first newsletter with no tape. There have been two prior tapeless shows on this tour, but they both came from cities with two shows on the same day (Mobile and New Orleans), so we at least had a tape of one of the two that day (soundboards in both cases too!). Alas, there is no audio evidence whatsoever of what Bob g…

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The Rolling Thunder Revue had big plans for Texas. After a second show in Houston, the tour was scheduled to continue on to play, among others, Dallas, Lubbock, Abilene, and Amarillo.

Nope, nope, nope, and nope.

All of those shows, plus the planned second Houston show and a planned second Austin show, were canceled—in most cases after tickets had gone on sale. They were selling, but not enough people were buying. When I interviewed bandleader Rob Stoner, he remembered this as a low point. “[The cancellations were] kind of discouraging. You’re coming off this heady Rolling Thunder thing and suddenly…people aren’t showing up. That takes the wind out of your sails.”

Blame circulated throughout the local press. Remember how the tour started with so many shows in such a small area of Central Florida? They essentially tried to do the same in West Texas, packing too many shows in too small a region. Demand simply wasn’t there.

One newspaper writer concluded, “Even though it may have been the people holding his strings (and not Dylan himself) who were responsible, such total disregard for the thousands of area Texans who had shelled out $9 apiece to see The Man in person has caused ill feelings to the extent that one Lubbock writer says people are cursing her because the concert was canceled. Most, however, are cursing Dylan. Indeed, Dylan’s blood on the tracks has turned to bad blood in West Texas.”

Others quoted Dylan lines back to him:

Over in East Texas, though, one of the two planned Houston shows did go on—but just barely. Even for just that one, ticket sales were so slow that a ringer had to be brought in last-minute: Willie Nelson, riding in to save the day with his only Rolling Thunder appearance. Rolling Stone reported:

It was the Rolling Thunder Revue’s second stop here this year, just five months after the less-than-successful Rubin Carter Astrodome benefit, and Bob Dylan was taking no chances. To insure that this assault on Texas would start on a high note, he’d invited the Lone Star State’s favorite son, Willie Nelson, to share the stage May 8th at the Hofheinz Pavilion. But faced with competition from a pair of John Denver shows and a sold-out Johnny Winter/Weather Report concert, the revue managed to fill only three-quarters of the 10,700-seat arena.

Big of Willie to step up and help sell tickets, right? Well, sort of. His then-manager told Rolling Stone, that, when they first were asked to join the bill, “Dylan’s people offered only expenses. I passed. CBS [records] called up and offered in excess of $10,000 as payment to insure Bob Dylan sold the date. We played.”

A couple years ago, I unearthed a soundboard of most of Willie Nelson’s previously uncirculating set. He sounds great, less than a year after releasing his seminal Red Headed Stranger album. Even back then, he has so many hits he has to cram ‘em into medleys, like this one of “Funny How Time Slips Away,” “Crazy,” “Night Life” (a combination he still does today!):

A newspaper review notes Willie got bigger cheers than Dylan. Sounds like the Outlaw Tour!

It wasn’t all good news for Willie though. Backstage, before he took the stage, he got subpoenaed as part of a Dallas investigation into narcotics trafficking*. A news article about the incident notes, “The two plainsclothes [sic] U.S. marshals who served him stuck around for autographs.”

(* Any Hold Steady fans out there? The chorus to one of their most popular songs goes “Subpoenaed in Texas…”)

The next month, he had to appear before a grand jury in Fort Worth. Afterwards, a reporter asks him if he knows anything about drugs. “Nothing at all,” he replies. Then he turns and grins toward the camera.

Back in Houston, Willie stuck around for a surprise encore, singing “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” on a microphone with Dylan and Baez. Wouldn’t you know it, the circulating audience tape cuts off just before that. I guess it was a surprise to the taper too!

1976-05-08, Hofheinz Pavilion, Houston, TX
1976-05-08, Hofheinz Pavilion, Houston, TX [Willie Nelson set]

The Baton Rouge show featured no new songs, and the audience tape sounds like trash. So, while all reviews indicate another excellent show, I want to move straight on to what happened after the show.

After this show, the troupe planned to drive a couple hours west to Lake Charles. But the Lake Charles show was cancelled due to low ticket sales (the first Rolling Thunder ’76 show to suffer this fate, but sadly not the last). Which left Dylan and everyone with a few free days to kill in Louisiana.

What do you do with a few free days in Louisiana? Alligator cookout, of course!

This is maybe the anecdote I’ve heard the most from the second Rolling Thunder tour, a tour with generally fewer offstage shenanigans than the first. Practically every participant I interview brings it up.

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Today’s New Orleans tape—one of two that day—is perhaps the best-known concert we’ve hit so far, in large part due to the stellar soundboard. And we’ll get to that in a minute. But first, I want to talk about where Dylan and the entourage went the night before the show.

Answer: A Tom Waits concert! This syndicated news item ran in the New Orleans Times-Picayune:

Singer-songwriter Tom Waits had some special company during a recent show at Ballinjax Electric Bistro in New Orleans. After his first set, the Rolling Thunder Revue troupe—82 members and hangers-on-strong—strolled in, fresh from a party aboard the steamboat Natchez. All the principals were there—Bob Dylan (attired in turban, shades, black leather jacket and smoking a pipe). Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn and Kinky Friedman—and the latter three commandeered the stage for a stretch. First up was McGuinn, who did 30 minutes’ worth of tunes. Friedman followed with a four-song set, and then Baez—dressed in a two-piece white suit—stepped up to sing a cappella a new tune that she said would be the title song on her next album. A line in the tune drew the biggest cheer of the night: “Women are not equal to men—but you can never tell it by me.” Dylan didn’t budge from his front-row center seat, and he left shortly after Waits finally was able to see his way clear to the stage.

Waits apparently was not amused. He nicknamed them the “Rolling Blunder Revue” and complained to Rolling Stone a few months later, “They got up there for an hour just before I was supposed to begin my set. Nobody even asked me; before I knew it, fuckin’ Roger McGuinn was up there playing guitar and singing and Joan Baez and Kinky were singing. By the time I got onstage the audience was stoked. They were all lookin’ around the room and shit. I don’t need this crap—it was my show. I was drinkin’ too much on top of everything else.”

I guess Tom wished he wasn’t in New Orleans that night!

When I interview Rolling Thunder 1976 participants, the New Orleans shows come up a lot. Maybe more than any other 1976 show outside Fort Collins (which became Hard Rain). People mention them for a fairly wide variety of reasons too.

Soundman David Hendel recalled some special fast food:

One of the shows, in New Orleans, we were at The Warehouse [a famous music venue once located on Tchoupitoulas Street] setting up, and Joan Baez went out and bought lunch for the crew. She personally went out and came back with bags of McDonald’s, just for the setup crew. We were fairly well into the tour by then. It just impressed me that she actually cared about us.

Bassist-bandleader Rob Stoner remembered a special guest showing up for the show:

[Dennis Hopper] just showed up for that show. Probably because he wanted to go to New Orleans since it’s such a great party town. All kinds of movie stars and celebrities would periodically drop in for a gig or two. Hopper was hip enough to know that New Orleans was the one to show up for.

Jacques Levy’s widow Claudia Levy recalled these two shows for more chaotic reasons (which were partly Hopper’s fault):

Jacques hated when you would go to a rock and roll show and you’d have to wait for them to set up [between acts]. That never happened on Rolling Thunder. When the curtain opened on the band, it was like a theatrical opening of the show and they started playing right away. You didn’t want people plugging in and setting up. Only once did that happen, in New Orleans on the second tour, which was really scary. They were playing an old place where they used to do cattle auctions. It was a big round wooden structure with a high ceiling and something happened with the sound system. It wasn’t working right. So they were delayed, a lot. People were getting very restless. And, you know, the North is Bob’s territory. The South, not as much. They weren’t as patient with having to wait. They were stamping and shouting.

Dennis Hopper was there. And Dennis thought the world of himself. He decided that he was going to read a poem and calm everybody down. Jacques was trying to dissuade him from doing that, but Dennis insisted that it was going to change the whole temperature of the place. And he did it. By the time he was done, we were really scared. The place was shaking. Really literally shaking.

Jacques didn’t ruffle. He was not a man who lost his temper or raised his voice. He could figure out how to deal with whatever issues there might be. And he knew that if you had to counter any kind of restiveness, you send out Roger, ‘cause he could do it. So Jacques said to McGuinn, “Okay, Roger, hit the beaches.” And Roger went out and started playing “Eight Miles High.” That did the trick.

Last year I brought up that story to McGuinn himself. He said, “I don’t remember that specifically, but Jacques was very calm. I miss him.”

Advance man and sometimes security guard Mike Evans remembers a different sort of drama: A food fight at the hotel:

The tables are turned over. Pitchers of orange juice are being sent like mortar shells over the top. Neuwirth is leading one charge. Food is flying around. I can’t say Bob was involved because I don’t think he went up, but everybody else was there in the food fight. Baez was there. Animal House hadn’t come out yet. I hate this word: I was triggered when I saw Animal House. That was what it looked like. Just this over-the-top food fight.

So these would be memorable shows even if we didn’t happen to have one of the best tapes of the tour from it. You can even hear Dennis Hopper up there reciting his audience-enraging poem, Rudyard Kipling’s “If”:

None of those people, however, mentioned what stands out most on this tape to me: The live debut of “Rita May”! Actually, the debut of “Rita May” period. The song wouldn’t get released until that fall, as the b-side to the Hard Rain version of “Stuck Inside of Mobile.” So no one would have known it on this, its debut outing. This was the only time he ever played it live too.

One other song stood out to me on this tape, but it’s not during Dylan’s set. It was the solo song by Donna Weiss, who had joined the 1976 tour to serve loosely as Ronee Blakley’s vocal replacement (minus the acting part, since they weren’t filming a movie this time). She sings a song labeled on this tape as “Sweet Amarillo, Tears On My Pillow.”

I really liked the song, so I decided to look it up. What I didn’t realize is that “Sweet Amarillo” is sort of a Bob Dylan song.

It originated in the Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid soundtrack sessions. You can hear a minute-long outtake on the 1973 copyright collection:

It sounds very unfinished, but has the bones of that chorus. The two backing singers you hear very prominently in that tape are Weiss and a woman named Brenda Patterson. When Dylan didn’t release the song himself, he apparently gave it to them. Weiss finished writing it, and Patterson released it on her own album the next year (with Dylan not credited as a writer for some reason, just Weiss).

(That same year, 1974, another singer, Jackie DeShannon, recorded another Donna Weiss composition: “Bette Davis Eyes.” The song wouldn’t make much impact though until Kim Carnes covered it in 1981, turning it into a number one hit and Donna Weiss’s biggest claim to fame).

Now, three years after Pat Garrett, here Weiss is singing “Sweet Amarillo” at a Dylan show.

That 1974 Patterson version made no dent, Weiss never recorded it, and Dylan never released it beyond that obscure copyright dump. So that was the end of the story for “Sweet Amarillo” right? Wrong!

Fast-forward almost 50 years…

In 2004, the Americana band Old Crow Medicine Show takes a half-baked Pat Garrett outtake titled “Rock Me Mama” and turns it into “Wagon Wheel.” The song is an enormous hit, certified three times platinum (meaning it sold three million copies). It becomes the band’s biggest song by far. Then in 2013, Darius Rucker, the Hootie and the Blowfish frontman gone country, covers it and makes it an even bigger hit. Forget three times platinum; this new version goes diamond: 10 million copies sold.

Dylan’s people were stoked. This forgotten Pat Garrett outtake is suddenly one of the biggest songs he ever (partially) wrote. It has over one billion streams between the Rucker and Old Crow versions. That’s far more than any actual Dylan recording does. (Adele’s cover of “Make You Feel My Love” still tops it, barely.) After Rucker’s version went to number one, Old Crow Medicine Show frontman Ketch Secor told CMT, “We got an email from Bob Dylan’s manager saying congratulations… It’s not every day that country music recognizes this great pioneer and huge influence, Bob Dylan. Bob doesn’t have many No. 1 songs in any genres. So it was a big deal to get one.”

Could lightning strike twice? Worth finding out. So Dylan and his people promptly dug up another half-finished Pat Garrett outtake to give Old Crow Medicine Show. It was, yes, “Sweet Amarillo.” Weiss and Patterson’s finished version was clearly forgotten. Old Crow finished Dylan’s demo a different way, Dylan himself apparently gave them notes (he wanted Secor to play fiddle instead of harmonica and suggested the chorus come in at the eighth bar, not the 16th), and Old Crow released it in 2014, ten years after “Wagon Wheel.”

Alas, Old Crow’s second completed Pat Garrett song hasn’t yet had a fraction of the success of the first. Maybe Darius Rucker needs to cover it. Though, to be honest, I still prefer the Donna Weiss version she sings at today’s Rolling Thunder show.

1976-05-03, The Warehouse, New Orleans, LA [late show]

Last night, Bob Dylan finally ended the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour. Or did he? That’s the question fans have been debating in group chats and message boards for weeks now.

The case in favor: For the first time since it began, Dylan is heading out on his own headlining tour this summer with no Rough and Rowdy Ways branding—they even removed the skeleton logo from the website tour page (which they never did during the two Outlaw tours). The case against: We’ve been fooled before (ahem), and Dylan didn’t do anything last night to indicate it was anything other than one more show. No, he didn’t finally play “Murder Most Foul.”

Reporting in from that maybe/maybe-not final show last night in Abilene, Texas—his first show there, after a botched attempt 50 years earlier—is Erin C. Callahan. Callahan is the host of the excellent Dylan podcast Infinity Goes Up on Trial, where once a month she interviews a Dylan expert or fan (here’s my ep about Rolling Thunder). She’s the co-editor of The Politics and Power of Bob Dylan’s Live Performances: Play a Song for Me and a forthcoming book about Dylan in the ’80s, where I wrote a chapter about the Tom Petty tours.

Here’s Erin on Dylan in Abilene last night (bonus: we’ve already got a tape too):

Last week, Bob Dylan went to sleep in Shreveport and, after a brief stop in Tyler, woke up in Abilene for the last show on this leg of the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour. Abilene seems like a strange place for Dylan to end the tour. This is also the first time he’s played Abilene. The question stands, why single out Abilene as the last stop on the tour, whether it’s the end of the Spring 2026 leg or of the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour in general?

When you research the history, Abilene seems like an appropriate choice. The town of Abilene grew almost instantly in 1881 as a result of it being an essential stock shipping point on the Texas and Pacific Railway. Not only did the train line develop the economic backbone of Abilene, but the migrant workers and traveling musicians helped shape the cultural landscape of the region through an infusion of blues, country, and folk music. The train trope is one of the key symbols in Dylan’s canon from “Freight Train Blues” to “Slow Train” to “Duquesne Whistle.” It seems fitting that a town that was shaped by trains would serve as the final stop in this chapter of Dylan’s touring career.

Since Dylan released the dates and new artwork for his summer tour, much of the conversation has centered on the possibility that Abilene would mark the final show of the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour. That idea seemed to be on everyone’s mind and central to most conversations last night. Speculation that this would be the last gig of the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour brought Dylan fans to Abilene from overseas and all over the United States. Three younger fans seated in front of me talked about traveling to Abilene specifically because they believed it would be the final show, speculating about what the new artwork and circulating rumors of a forthcoming album might signal should a fall tour be announced.

What is certain is that Dylan’s own version of the Outlaw Tour will begin in Troutville, Oregon, on June 4 and end in Nashville on August 1. Beyond that, the Dylan faithful remain suspended in anticipation of whether there will be a new album and tour, a continuation of the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour, or another iteration of live performance that Dylan decides on.

All that speculative energy quickly shifted when the snap of Anton Fig’s snare opened the show with a shot reminiscent of the opening drum beat in “Like A Rolling Stone.” Before that sound, there was no introduction, no lead-in music, nothing, just the ambient murmurs of the audience finding their seats and chatting with each other. That drumbeat was a call to attention—or a call to worship for the most devout. Each member of the band emerged, picking up their instruments and filling in Fig’s rhythm with the melody of “To Be Alone with You.” When Dylan took the stage, the audience erupted, rising to their feet.

The charged energy reflected the sense that this was the final stop of the tour. The crowd was fully engaged, responding at key moments throughout, dancing and whooping it up. There was a technical issue with Dylan’s microphone on the opener, which made me nervous that the sound would be an issue throughout, but it was resolved quickly. Once it was, Dylan started the song from the beginning as if he were resetting himself and the band. It was generous and set the tone for the rest of the show.

For me, the show largely functioned as a theater piece guiding audience members through a broad range of emotions—longing, loss, sadness, resolve, redemption—largely through Dylan’s vocal performance. The clearest example of this arc, and the highlight of this performance, emerges in the final three songs. The sequence begins with “Soon After Midnight.” Here, Dylan’s voice is marked by vulnerability. Its sincerity evokes the tenderness of late-night longing in which desire is tempered with quiet resolve. This is abruptly unsettled in the following song, Eddie Cochran’s “Nervous Breakdown.” In this song, Dylan shifts both timbre and tone, adopting a raw rockabilly urgency that embodies the panic and swagger of early rock and roll’s energy. In that moment, I could picture teenage Bob Dylan on stage at Hibbing High School banging out notes on the piano, howling out the lyrics until the principal brings the curtain down on him. Dylan’s vocal energy and performance shift once again for the final song of the set and, perhaps, the tour. In “Every Grain of Sand,” Dylan’s delivery softens and carries the wisdom and clarity of hard-earned experience. Every lyric unfolds with the stillness of meditation, culminating in Dylan playing the harmonica. The effect is immediate and communal, bringing everyone to their feet.

Thus, the show and, possibly, the tour end with Dylan standing in front of the audience, hand on hip, for a final bow. As a seemingly appreciative nod to the audience, Dylan claps for us before putting his hands over his heart. And then he was gone. What happens next is anyone’s guess.

When the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour started, we were still living under the cloud of the Covid-19 pandemic. As Roberta Rakove notes in her essay about Dylan and the pandemic, when Dylan returned to the road, it was a signal that things would return to normal. While that’s true, venues still maintained many Covid-era protocols that signaled the threat still lingered. At my first concert in December 2021, I waited in a long line to show proof of vaccination so I could be cleared to enter the venue. Inside, most of the audience were masked. It was definitely a sign of the times.

Over the last five years, the setlist and arrangements have changed. So, too, have the protocols. We are no longer distanced or masked, though the anxiety of the pandemic remains an undercurrent that affects our lives. If this truly is the final show of the tour, it may suggest that Dylan is signaling it’s time to move on. The arrangements featured on this leg might represent the culmination of his Rough and Rowdy Ways project, and that he’s satisfied with the place this collection of performances occupies within his broader canon. If he carries on with it, we can look forward to his continued work on the project. However, I can’t imagine anywhere better for Dylan to end the tour than in a town that was built on the movement of the railroad, carrying people and their stories across the American landscape in the same way he has done throughout his career.

Thanks Erin! Listen to ‘Infinity Goes Up on Trial’ wherever you get podcasts, or watch the video versions at Substack.

2026-05-01, Abilene Auditorium, Abilene, TX

Catch up on all the spring tour reports here! Thanks again to all our guest reporters this leg: Matt Simonsen, Bob Keyes, Michael Glover Smith, Rob Mitchum, Adam Selzer, Caryn Rose, Rebecca Slaman, Anne Margaret Daniel, and Erin C. Callahan.

He played “Stuck Inside of Mobile” in Mobile. Would he play “Hattie Carroll” in Hattiesburg??

No, he would not. Though that titular connection’s admittedly more of a stretch.

But who needs “Hattie Carroll”? A much bigger live debut happened at this Hattiesburg, Mississippi show: The first-ever “You’re a Big Girl Now.” Th…

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Today is the first concert of Rolling Thunder 1976 where they performed two shows—an early show at 5 PM, a late show at 10 PM. There’s no tape of the early show, or even much setlist info, but there is a soundboard of the late show. Not to pat myself on the back too hard, but it’s one I uncovered myself a couple yea…

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For the second song of today’s set in Pensacola, the final of nine consecutive performances in Florida (!), Dylan played “Just Like a Woman.”

Why does this matter? He’d played the song twice already this tour. But both those times—St. Petersburg, Clearwater—he performed it with the band, in an arrangement similar to how they did it in 1975. At today’s Pensacola show, however, he performed it solo, just like he had every night back in 1966. It was the only time he did so on this tour.

That got me thinking about one of the most interesting parts of Rolling Thunder 1976 setlists, and one big thing that differentiates the tour from 1975. Every night, he would open with two solo-acoustic songs. In ’75, he played a few solo tunes in the middle of the show, but now he started off his set with them. The song choices also varied more than they did in ’75—particularly in the second slot.

The number-one song, the first of the concert (well, of the Dylan portion; “Guam” had already been up there rocking for an hour) most nights was “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Here’s tonight’s rendition:

There were only two exceptions, two times he opened a regular concert with anything other than “Tambourine” (with the usual caveat there are a few setlists we don’t know, plus I’m not counting the TV tapings). The first exception came opening night. The very first song of Rolling Thunder ’76 was not “Mr. Tambourine Man.” It was “Visions of Johanna.” Here’s what I wrote about it in my song-by-song look at opening night:

Opening a show with “Visions of Johanna” - hell, opening an entire tour with it - is a bold move. He’s only ever opened one other concert with “Visions” that I can find, a random one-off in 1989. I was hoping for a killer full-band arrangement like Rolling Thunder II offers for so many other ’60s songs, but it’s solo acoustic. Too bad; a scorching ’76-band version of “Visions” would be a hell of a thing. Still, Bob making his unusual entrance with a seven-minute “Visions” must have been pretty amazing to see. Especially after an hour-plus of mostly-loud sets from the Guam backing band.

This was the only time “Visions” was performed at a regular concert the whole tour, though he did also play it at one of the Clearwater TV tapings.

Also, a local newspaper reported that a show in Corpus Christi opened with “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall.” This falls into the “Just Like a Woman” category of songs he played both solo-acoustic and electric with the band on this tour. In the latter incarnation, it gave the album and TV special its title: Hard Rain. (Another in the both-solo-and-band category this tour: “Tangled Up in Blue.” I wrote about the truly wild band arrangement here.)

The second slot of the two opening acoustic numbers varied a lot more. Here are all the songs he rotated through in that second slot:

• If You See Her, Say Hello

• It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)

• Tangled Up in Blue

• The Times They Are a-Changin’

• Simple Twist of Fate

• Just Like a Woman

• Love Minus Zero / No Limit

• It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue

• Spanish Is the Loving Tongue

• It Ain’t Me Babe

• Gates of Eden [reportedly]

Looking at that list, most of those songs feel unsurprising. It’s not like he busted out a solo-acoustic “Subterranean Homesick Blues” or anything. But I made a playlist of all the solo-acoustic performances, and what struck me listening to it is—they’re really good!

The solo acoustic numbers can feel like an afterthought this tour. There weren’t any included on Hard Rain, for instance, but they sound great. Take this “The Times They Are a-Changin.’” Nothing special on paper—an old warhorse he’s sung in this format hundreds of times—but I find this a very convincing version.

Ditto today’s “Just Like a Woman” in Pensacola. As I mentioned, it was the only time on the tour he performed it this way. He had a lot of other acoustic songs to get to.

One of my favorite performances of the entire tour also comes from one of these opening acoustic mini-sets. It’s also the only time he ever performed this song live at a regular concert. In San Antonio, he played “Spanish Is the Loving Tongue.” Presumably a nod to Texas border culture, in the home of the Alamo. Stunning.

If there’s one solo-acoustic song you know from this tour, though, it’s probably none of those. It’s a song he only played twice, and neither on a tape with particularly good sound quality. So why is this particular song well-known?

Well, it’s another Blood on the Tracks song that, like “Idiot Wind,” he wrote vengeful new lyrics for this tour. They flip the song’s meaning entirely from regret to rage. It’s “If You See Her Say Hello.” It used to go like that, but now it goes like this:

If you’re making love to her, watch it from the rear
You’ll never know when I’ll be back, or liable to appear
For it’s natural to dream of peace as it is for rules to break
And right now I’ve got not much to lose, so you’d better stay awake

1976-04-28, University of West Florida, Pensacola, FL

Catch up on all the entries so far here or by clicking the image below:

One big difference between Rolling Thunder ’75 and ’76 I’ve mentioned before: The size of the venues. In 1975, for the most part, Dylan played small theaters, and tickets were hard to come by. In 1976, Dylan mostly played giant arenas and stadiums. Tickets were easier to get, and in a few cases the shows sold so poorly they had to be canc…

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Bowling Green and Chattanooga were supposed to be it for me this tour, but, thanks to an invitation to speak to some journalism classes in Oxford a couple hours away—shoutout professor RJ Morgan and all the great Ole Miss students I met—I tacked on an extra show in Jackson, Mississippi. It was Dylan’s first visit here since 2016, and my first ever. (I teased Prof Morgan about inviting someone from northern Vermont to speak to a class titled “Bob Dylan and the South.” I mean, I’m pretty close to the south of Canada.)

Dylan has played Oxford exactly once, back in 1990. That show became famous as the only time he played “Oxford Town,” his song about the deadly campus riots when James Meredith became the first Black student to matriculate at Ole Miss. So, driving from Oxford to Jackson, it was not lost on me that Dylan also has an early song about this city’s most famous Civil Rights figure too. (Hint: I’m currently writing this from the Medgar Wiley Evers Airport.)

No, I did not really expect Dylan to bust out “Only a Pawn in Their Game” last night, but it wouldn’t surprise me one bit to learn that, on one of Bob’s trips here, he made one of his anonymous hood-up tourist visits to Medgar Evers’ house. It’s still there. The driveway you walk up is where Evers was gunned down by a Klansman who, as Dylan’s song controversially noted, was part of a bigger racist system. As I was leaving, I met a young man going door-to-door pitching AT&T service. He’d only vaguely heard of Evers, but seemed amazed to find this piece of history on a random side street in a fairly rundown neighborhood. He said he’d skip trying to sell them broadband service, but would come back later to take the tour.

Dylan did not perform “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” nor did he bust out a local cover. No attempt at Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam,” no duet on Johnny Cash’s “Jackson” (maybe Tony could take the June Carter part?). While those would be tall asks, I do wish he would go back to sharing local history facts, like he did early on in the Rough and Rowdy tour—shouting out King Records in Cincinnati, Rocky Balboa in Philadelphia, The Country Gentlemen in DC. The areas he’s playing now would be so ripe for that, and you know Dylan knows the history.

The history could use some celebrating too. Thalia Mara Hall, last night’s recently-reopened theater, is only a few blocks from Farish Street. Farish Street was a major hub of Black commerce in the first half of the 20th century, home to Trumpet Records, where musicians like Elmore James and Sonny Boy Williamson II made their first recordings. I drove down the street, but there’s no longer much to see, just block after block of boarded-up buildings. The Mississippi Blues Trail has put up a few signs, but I didn’t see anybody stop to look. I also wanted to find the Edwards Hotel, where the Mississippi Sheiks recorded (including “Sitting on Top of the World,” which Bob covered on Good As I Been to You). When I Google-Mapped the address, I was surprised to discover I was actually staying there—it’s now a fairly seedy Hilton. If there’s any acknowledgment of that building’s musical history, I didn’t see it.

Dylan did seem to appreciate Jackson in his own way, even applauding the crowd* back at the end. “I think he actually enjoyed himself,” the guy next to me said with a note of surprise.

(* Not that this will surprise anyone, but it must be said: After having spent the day exploring a city that is 82% Black, it was jarring to enter the theater and encounter a demographic that could not have been less representative of the surrounding area. A Dylan audience is diverse in some ways—age, gender—but not in others.)

From the balcony hung a banner reading “The City of Soul.” Dylan would have been looking at that all night, and the crowd certainly brought the enthusiasm, raising the show’s energy to near what I saw in Bowling Green. The biggest crowd-recognition response of the night went to two songs: “All Along the Watchtower” and, more surprisingly, “Love Sick.” Is that a greatest-hit now? Jackson certainly treated it like one, cheering with recognition applause after he sang the first line. Though maybe it just seems like an oldie coming after three consecutive Rough and Rowdy Ways tunes.

One of those, “Black Rider,” was a stunner last night, Dylan leaning into every line. These days it starts quiet, mostly just him and Doug Lancio’s guitar, and remains spooky even when the full band kicks in. “Man in the Long Black Coat” remains a treat to see, though I wish he’d move it later in the set when his voice has warmed up. And I discovered a downside to my beloved new staccato “Crossing the Rubicon” arrangement: At two of my three shows now, the audience tried to clap along. But it’s too slow to do so properly, so the result is scattered and awkward.

It struck me last night what a closed terrarium the stage setup is. The five musicians come onstage one at a time, surrounded by tall curtains that seem to reach the sky. From then on, no one enters or leaves. Many concerts at this level, crewmembers would be hustling on and off between songs, swapping guitars, fiddling with cables, adjusting microphones. There’s none of that. Lancio and Bob Britt retune their guitars—they both use the same ones all show—Tony Garnier switches between his three basses himself, Dylan fiddles endlessly with his two vocal mics. The only break in the illusion comes before the last song, where a crew guy walks on to remove Tony’s giant upright bass. I wondered why—it’s almost jarring seeing someone else suddenly materialize onstage—but I figured out it’s probably because Bob walks that way after “Every Grain of Sand” and they don’t want to risk him tripping en route to pose for his applause.

The single high point though was “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You.” When the song first came out on Rough and Rowdy Ways, I read someone offer an alternate lyrical interpretation: that it’s not a song to a romantic partner, but it’s Dylan addressing his fans. In the album context, that felt like a fun hypothetical, but in person, when the audience responds with the ardor they did last night, it seems like the only interpretation.

Dylan’s about to turn 85. This current tour is winding down, but he’s already announced two straight months of touring in the summer. I’ll be catching him next when the summer tour comes to New England in July. By that point, I wouldn’t be surprised if fall dates are already trickling out. He’s made up his mind to give himself to us.

The next-day tapes seem to have slowed in the second half of this tour, but I know the great taper nightly moth is on the road now, so hopefully one will appear soon.

PS. Catch up on any recent show reviews you may have missed here.