Flagging Down the Double E’s is an email newsletter exploring Bob Dylan concerts throughout history. Some installments are free, some are for paid subscribers only. Sign up here:
Today, Bob Dylan releases the biggest box set of his career, the whopping 39-disc The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1976 Live Recordings (it tops the 36-disc 1966 box set for the honors). That’s a lot of music to get through. I’m here to help.
Just as I did for the 1974 box set two years ago (a measly 27 discs), I have put together a detailed guide to every single tape of every single show. I’ve had the set for months now, and have listened to every single song on every single CD. It’s a lot to wade through, but joyful wading indeed. It turns out, “Idiot Wind” doesn’t get old even on your 17th time through.
Note that this listening guide is different than the Rolling Thunder ’76 Day-By-Day zine I recently published (copies still available!). That tells the stories behind the shows: Offstage shenanigans (an alligator cookout in the bayou! pissing off Tom Waits! subpoenaing Willie Nelson!), contemporary newspaper reports, interviews with band and crew members, etc. Today’s guide focuses exclusively on the music you will hear on these tapes.
Like gator tail and Mezcal, this listening guide and the physical zine are two great tastes that taste great together. It’s close to sold out, but there are about 150 copies left. Grab it while you still can!
Okay, back to the box set. 22 shows, 39 discs, 381 songs. It’s one day, seven hours, and 18 minutes of music (but who’s counting?). It includes nearly every Rolling Thunder 1976 show in soundboard quality. It’s missing far fewer shows than the 1974 box set was. However, one of the missing shows here is a big one: the grand finale in Salt Lake City. The Dylan Archives has said for years they don’t have it, and an audience tape has never surfaced. A few other shows here are missing or incomplete too, but, overall, this box contains pretty close to the full tour.
Or, rather, it contains pretty close to the full Bob Dylan sets on the tour. One aspect of Rolling Thunder you don’t get here is there were two additional hours of music every night without Dylan! Nightly sets by Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn, Kinky Friedman, many of the various band members. Joni Mitchell and Willie Nelson performed short sets at a show or two. (We do get tastes of all these names in the joyfully rambunctious “Gotta Travel On” show-closing sing-alongs at least.) The omission of the non-Bob sets is understandable. In addition to being a licensing nightmare, it would probably make this set 60+ CDs, padded with material fewer people care about (do you need 22 different versions of Bobby Neuwirth singing “Cowboys and Indians”?). But it’s worth tracking down at least one complete tape of a Rolling Thunder show—not just the Bob bits— to hear everything else that went on each night. Or grab my compilation of the non-Bob performers here.
No more focusing on what’s missing though, because so much is here. Rolling Thunder 1976 has sometimes been viewed as the ugly-duckling cousin to Rolling Thunder 1975. There are no Martin Scorsese movies about the second Rolling Thunder tour. It didn’t sell very well, shows got cancelled, the offstage vibe soured, Bob sulked around in a terrible mood. But the music—well, just wait ’til you hear it all.
Think this is FINALLY my last word on Rolling Thunder 1976? Think again. I’ve got five brand-new interviews coming with participants both onstage and off. They will run one per week, starting next week, into December. Subscribe to get them all sent straight to your email inbox:
The 1976 Live Recordings: Disc By Disc
Note: I’ve marked the Must-Hear Shows with **, then at the very end there’s an assemble-it-yourself playlist of my favorite performances.
[UPDATE: Reader Ian Tatlock has turned this entire thing into a printable (A5 size) PDF. If you want it that way, it’s here. Thanks Ian!]
Disc 1: April 18, 1976 – Civic Center, Lakeland, FL
** Must-Hear Show **
Not to start this amazing set on a down note, but it’s a bummer that they only captured six-and-a-half songs from opening night. It’s missing the first-ever live “Shelter from the Storm,” “Mozambique,” “Seven Days,” “Going Going Gone,” and even “Idiot Wind”!
It’s a shame, but it’s also understandable. The sound team was recording these shows onto cassette at the board, and recording was not their primary job—making the music sound good in the room was. Sound man David Hendel told me, “A lot of times, I was mixing the sound and wasn’t really paying attention to the tape, so sometimes the tape would run out at the middle of the song, and I wouldn’t notice it till that song was over: ‘Oops, I forgot to flip the tape.’” Opening night probably kept them extra busy—Dylan even complains about the sound at one point (“Sounds better out there than it does up here”)—so remembering to swap out cassettes all night was probably not top of mind.
The good news: There’s a perfectly listenable audience tape of the entire show, so it’s not like this music is lost to history like certain other missing shows this tour.
The other good news is that they did capture the most unique part of this show. Every night, Dylan would open his sets with two solo-acoustic songs. Usually that was “Mr. Tambourine Man” and one other oldie. For the only time ever, though, on opening night he kicked things off with the powerful two-pack of “Visions of Johanna” (one of the only times it’s opened a show ever, and with a wonderfully extended harmonica solo here) and the dramatically rewritten “If You See Her Say Hello” (one of only two performances this tour—all that work writing new lyrics and then he barely ever sang them!). Having listened to every show for my series earlier this year, it’s perhaps the single most powerful opening acoustic set we’ll get. I’m so glad it’s here.
That two-pack is followed by two more firsts, the duets between the Bobs—as in, Dylan and Neuwirth. They kick off with “Vincent Van Gogh,” a song supposedly written by Neuwirth’s art teacher which will become a show staple (Dylan muffs the lyrics on opening night; Neuwirth covers for him) and Dylan’s only-ever version of the Hank Williams song “Weary Blues from Waitin’.” It sounds fairly sloppy, but it could have been polished with future attempts. A shame they didn’t stick with it.
The second-ever “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” (after the Isle of Wight in 1969) leads into the first iconic 1976 song: “Maggie’s Farm.” That famous Hard Rain arrangement is already in place, and it sounds tough as hell from the jump. Ditto for “One Too Many Mornings,” with wonderfully pained, strangled vocals. It’s violinist Scarlet Rivera’s first big moment in the show, and it’s a shame when the track abruptly cuts off. Luckily, we will hear many more versions.
Other listening notes:
“Visions of Johanna” coming on the 10th anniversary of the 1966 tour, where it was such a distinctive showpiece every night, feels poignant.
It’s crazy he didn’t play “If You See Her Say Hello” more this tour. I’ll write more about the new lyrics in Tallahassee, but it sets such a key template for the entire tour: Blood on the Tracks songs reworked to be much angrier. See also “Idiot Wind,” etc.
It’s cool that this box set, which is a whopping 381 songs long, both opens and closes with unique, one-time-only performances.
Read more about the Lakeland show:
Discs 2 & 3: April 20, 1976 – Bayfront Civic Center Auditorium, St. Petersburg, FL
If Lakeland’s six-and-a-half-song tape was the appetizer, here’s the start of the main course: The first complete Bob Dylan soundboard from Rolling Thunder 1976. (Well, close enough; many of these shows are missing the start or end of a couple songs due to Hendel’s required tape flips.) As I noted in my show writeup, this show swung back towards the 1975 setlist some:
After an opening night where only three songs of the 22 had been played on Rolling Thunder ’75, Dylan swaps in five different songs, all of which were reprises from the previous fall. That includes the solo opening duo “Mr. Tambourine Man” (which would remain the opening number most subsequent nights) and “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).” Later on in the set, he added a three-pack of ’75 staples: “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You,” “Just Like a Woman,” “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry.” All three seem to retain their 1975 arrangements.
“Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You” is a good comparison point with 1975 actually. Again, the same basic arrangement, but the way he sings it now sounds particularly aggressive. It sounds more like a threat than a come-on. Even the songs that are basically the “same” as the previous fall don’t feel the same.
As various bandmembers noted to me, rehearsals for this tour barely happened. Or rather, the band rehearsed, but often Dylan didn’t show up. You can hear the sloppiness throughout this tape. Two of the three Joan Baez duets feature botched vocals—surprisingly more from Joan than Bob—though they get it together for “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which they’d done many times the year before (he introduces her as “the great Joan Baez” by the end).
For the first time of many on this box, we hear Dylan play on this instrument he never played before or since this tour: Slide guitar. He played it on that crazy-looking white National guitar shaped like the United States (as seen on the below 1978 Rolling Stone cover). Dylan’s slide guitar on “Shelter from the Storm” and “I Threw It All Away” sounds unhinged and out of tune.
Even Dylan himself acknowledges the roughness a few times. Before “Seven Days,” he quips, “This is a new song. We only played this one once before. We didn’t do too bad. We’ll try to do it better this time.” Then later, after that angry “Tonight,” he laughs, “We’re gonna do this one a little better.” The “Just Like a Woman” that follows is still fairly unhinged. A few weird tape glitches early on—speed fluctuations and dropouts during “It’s Alright Ma,” a slight buzz during “One Too Many Mornings”—add to the rocky vibes.
“Idiot Wind,” however, is already hot as hell even in this early incarnation, as is “Lay Lady Lay,” the first time we’re hearing those iconic Hard Rain tracks on this box set. In this mix, Rivera’s violin really shines during “Lay Lady Lay”—already fully realized with its wild new arrangement and aggressive new lyrics firmly in place—and you can hear Rob Stoner’s joint “Mozambique” vocals well. Dylan’s amazing “Mr Tambourine Man” harmonica solos are also a highlight.
Other listening notes:
One new bit of BobTalk, he says early on, “I wanna say hello to all our friends from Little Rock tonight.” Why were a bunch of people from Arkansas in St. Petersburg, Florida for the show?
For whatever reason, Dylan skips “I Pity the Poor Immigrant” at this show and the next. It’ll come back in force soon enough.
Bob shouts out someone named Stephanie (I think that might be his slackline instructor) from the stage: “I wanna thank Stephanie for letting me use her socks tonight.”
On the raw tape, after “Lay Lady Lay,” Dylan tells the crowd, “T Bone’s gonna sing a new song called Shashiko.” He says this a lot, but it’s cut from the box set—understandable, because the song itself is also cut. The song he’s referring to is “Silver Mantis,” on which Dylan remained onstage and played guitar. They played it just about every night, but it’s cut from this set, probably because Dylan doesn’t sing it. David Mansfield, who recorded it with T Bone Burnett on the Alpha Band record, talks about it in a new interview I’ve got with him running next week.
The raw tape includes the last minute and a half of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” but the box set producers apparently cut it. It’s just some instrumental bits and the final chorus.
We also get the first “Gotta Travel On,” which has become one of my favorite songs, in part because many of the band members improvise new verses every night. Also they add new guest singers along the way (Joni! Willie! Ginsberg!) and throw solos to different people every night. On this first one, we get, from Roger McGuinn, “I came out on Rolling Thunder just to have some fun / And it looks like it’s gonna be a real good one!”
Read more about the St. Petersburg show:
Disc 4: April 21, 1976 – Curtis Hixon Hall, Tampa, FL
Wow, does this show open with “Seven Days”? That would be wild…but no. We’re just missing the first half of the show on this tape. It’s the opposite problem of opening night, which only had the first half. This tape’s a bit hissy and muddy too.
This is their final warmup show before the first big TV taping and, honestly, it sounds like they could have used more rehearsal time. “Shelter from the Storm” sounds especially shaky—Bob’s slide guitar playing has somehow gotten even worse!—and several other songs drag. “Blowin’ in the Wind” veers close to a trainwreck, with botched lyrics and a lifeless delivery.
Did Bob and Joan get in a fight backstage or something? The night before, Dylan had enthusiastically introduced her as “The great Joan Baez!” In Tampa, he sullenly mutters simply: “Joan Baez.” (Joan, never one to take a jab without sending one back, counters with an even more sullenly-delivered “Bob Dylan.”) Their “Wild Mountain Thyme” is the one high point of their joint set, and of this entire half-show tape.
There are a few other high points. Rivera sounds great on “Going Going Gone” (though the tempo drags a little), and she and David Mansfield’s pedal steel elevate “Lay Lady Lay.” Also this is one of only three “Romance in Durango”s we will get—a 1975 staple that only sporadically appeared the next year. It’s always nice to hear.
Other listening notes:
In “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” Roger McGuinn debuts a new verse he will sing more than once: “Mama do you hear that rock and roll / I can feel it shaking like thunder through the floor / It’s just like playing in the Super Bowl / I feel like knocking on heaven’s door.” For what it’s worth, the Super Bowl was in Florida that year, in Miami in January.
It sounds like there are cuts between some tracks? Not sure why.
Bobby Neuwirth delivers a memorable (if odd) new verse in “Gotta Travel On”: “I walk up to your table to buy a scrap of meat / And all I smell is dirty feet.”
Read more about the Tampa show:
Disc 5: April 22, 1976 – Unaired TV Show (The Midnight Special), Starlight Ballroom, Belleview-Biltmore Hotel, Belleair, FL
** Must-Hear Show **
In the opening seconds of the Clearwater tape, you hear a sound that’s been in short supply thus far: Applause! It’s not that audiences at the earlier shows were less enthusiastic; it’s that they weren’t mic’d. The soundboard tapes, in most cases on this set, are cassette recordings from the soundboard of the exact same audio that was being blasted out into the crowd. You don’t send the audience noise back at them, so, at a typical show, you don’t mic them. These 1976 soundboards generally capture more audience noise than many others (compare them to the Outlaw ones last year, say), but still, the people in the room now sound clearer and more present here.
For the same reason, this sound is a clear step up from the earlier discs. Which sounded just fine to me, but, when you hear a properly multitracked recording, the sort an artist would do for a live album or TV show, it’s at another level. This sounds great. This is the first show where they have multitracks (16-track, it appears from the file names), rather than just audio cassettes.
That’s the plus. The minus is…where’s the rest of it? For whatever reason, this box set only contains the 10 songs planned for the broadcast. Dylan played 28 different songs during the two TV tapings, including the tour’s only “Girl From The North Country,” “Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright,” and “I Shall Be Released.” Why aren’t the full performances on here? Due to them not being regular shows, they have two of the most unusual setlists of the entire run—the first show mostly acoustic, the second show mostly electric.
But let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth (at least, not too much). What there is sounds fantastic. Bob is like the Master of Ceremonies, introducing all the players.
Before “Blowin’ in the Wind”: “I wanna bring out a real special friend of mine, who’s been a friend of mine throughout the years. Miss Joan Baez, and she is great. We wanna dedicate this to all the people in Hibbing in Minnesota. Duluth, Minnesota.”
Before “When I Paint My Masterpiece”: “This is a good friend of mine now, we’ve known each other for about twelve hundred years. Mr. Bobby Neuwirth from Canton, Ohio. This is a good friend of mine from Paris, just flew in. Bobby Neuwirth.” (Reminds me of the bullshit band intros he gave during the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour).
Before “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”: “Tonight we have a very special guest with us. We go back a long way. Roger McGuinn.” (McGuinn reverts to the “proper” lyrics—no lines about the Super Bowl.)
Best of all is the banter before the tour’s only “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine,” and the song’s last performance until 1986. Bob jokingly says, “Joan has a habit of changing. You never know what she’s gonna do next.” I think it’s pretty clear he’s really talking about himself, as he starts playing a song they haven’t rehearsed. Joan replies, “Yeah. I remember rehearsing this back in 1965 once.” Okay, they actually played it in 1975, but it had been a while. It’s maybe the high point of the show too.
With a mix this good, you pick up moments you might otherwise miss. In “Masterpiece,” the moment where the band drops out and the two Bobs extend “Coca-Cola” to such a length that one of them starts laughing. Or the powerful singing on the bridge of “Just Like a Woman,” starting with “It was raining for the first.” The band cuts in and out while his vocals grow increasingly anguished.
I still wish we had more, but what we do get is great.
Other listening notes:
“Mr. Tambourine Man” is rarely the highlight of these shows—always good, but always the same—but it sounds phenomenal here, with his voice so upfront.
“Like a Rolling Stone” was only performed twice on Rolling Thunder. The first time, in 1975, came at an untaped show. So this is the only Rolling Thunder “Rolling Stone” we can hear. It’s raw and scrappy in a good way, with various band members (sounds like Rob Stoner and Donna Weiss) singing along. Maybe Mick Ronson too. Not generally a singer, but he’s sharing a microphone with Donna in one photo from this taping.
The first of many “Isis” performances we will hear on this set. It first sounded out of place in 1976 to me—I so associate it with 1975—but it does sound good. He doesn’t shout the “If you want me too…yes!” part as loudly anymore though.
“Just Like a Woman” drags in a good way. Slow, languid, resigned. Not generally my favorite song, but an unexpected high point here. Listen to how he sings the bridge lines, “your longtime a-curse a-hurts…” (3:10). Great stuff.
Read more about the Clearwater TV tapings:
Discs 6 & 7: April 23, 1976 – Sports Stadium, Orlando, FL
I jinxed it. All that talk about applause last time and now the applause is so loud it’s drowning out the music! At first I even wondered if this was an audience tape. It’s not, but for the first few songs, the audience is roaring at an insane volume after every single verse. Dylan’s singing “Mr. Tambourine Man” to what sounds like a Jerry Springer crowd. (Is that a dated reference? Oh well, I’m a child of the ’90s.) His voice seems too low in the mix too. When the other musicians join him, things improve, but the crowd remains boisterous throughout.
Not boisterous: Bob Dylan and the band. They needed a day off after their double TV taping day, but they didn’t get it. Dylan seems to be losing his voice as the show goes on (he’s especially hoarse on an otherwise gorgeous “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”). They botch a couple song starts, and Dylan tells the crowd, “I think I been up longer than anybody on this stage.” Did he pull an all-nighter after the TV tapings? He and Baez screw up the start of “Blowin’ in the Wind” too.
The apparent exhaustion actually helps on one song: A slow and resigned “I Threw It All Away,” the easy high point of this tape. Rather than ripping through it, he stretches it out, adding notes and giving himself more room to play with the melody. His slide guitar sounds great too, especially early on when he’s just dragging it out before the band comes in. Not the best show or the best tape overall, but this is as good as it gets.
These supposed Little Rock attendees get another shoutout here, by the way. “I wanna say hello to Maggie and Dick from Little Rock.” Are these real people? Why does he keep shouting out Little Rock, Arkansas, in Florida?
Other listening notes:
Bob also botches some lyrics in “Mr. Tambourine Man,” though it kind of works: “Take me disappearing…on your magic swirling ship.”
“Now don’t laugh,” says Bob Neuwirth before “Vincent Van Gogh.” Then they screw up the start, and he immediately laughs.
“Isis” is extra wild. It might be a tape highlight if it didn’t get cut off.
Bob sounds pretty hoarse on “I Pity the Poor Immigrant” and “Seven Days” too.
This is this only time he plays “I Threw It All Away” without “Shelter from the Storm.” Usually that is his slide-guitar duo.
Neuwirth sings his “Gotta Travel On” verse about how hot it is: “All the way down in Florida to feel how hot you are…If it get any hotter I’m gonna die.” Maybe that was another problem sending the energy and focus down. The one newspaper review I can find doesn’t mention the heat, though it does bemoan the “poor sound quality.” No kidding!
Read more about the Orlando show:
Discs 8 & 9: April 25, 1976 – University of Florida Field, Gainesville, FL
** Must-Hear Show **
Maybe my favorite tape so far. Excellent sound quality and the band is on fire. A huge step up from Orlando. This is an especially good one for any Scarlet Rivera fans (and how could you not be?). Her violin seems to be mixed just a little louder, and she steals the show on “One Too Many Mornings,” “One More Cup of Coffee,” and “Going Going Gone.” Great solo on the latter. It’s funny, in the first draft, I had a line in the opening entry about how Scarlet is generally less of a presence in 1976 than in 1975. Going back through editing now, I’ve deleted it. Turns out that is not true at all. Listening to these discs, you realize how vital she was whenever she was onstage (which she wasn’t for certain songs, but that was true in 1975 too).
She also shines on “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”—the only version on this set. It starts out a little shaky. They’d played it once before, on Easter in Lakeland (missing from the tape), but you wouldn’t know it at first. It comes together as it goes though. Afterwards, Bob yells “Hi Jeff!” Who’s Jeff? Why, that’s my recent interviewee Jeff Goldstein, the local promoter. Read his memories of the show here. Bob also shouts out “all our friends from Philadelphia.” Is he making these up? Philadelphia is a long way from Gainesville. At least it’s not Little Rock again.
Even the standbys are as good as they get. This is maybe the best “Maggie’s Farm” and “Isis” yet, and it’s nice to get another complete “Idiot Wind.” His “Shelter from the Storm” slide guitar has improved dramatically—it’s still chaotic, but now it’s chaotic good. And while I don’t know that I need 19 different versions of “Vincent Van Gogh,”* you can hear how much fun the two Bobs are having goofing around with each other. They break up laughing at one point.
*Note: Editing this back now having heard the whole set, it turns out I DID need 19 different versions of “Vincent Van Gogh.” That silly song never got old.
There are a few one-night-only lyric changes from Bob too. He sings “Maybe he’ll pick up on her again” in “Simple Twist of Fate” (also listen to how he grunts “hit him” like a boxer). That one’s pretty small. A bigger—and terrible—lyric change comes in “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight.” He sings, “Close the door, shut it quick / It’s gonna get thick.” Yuck. Bob Neuwirth even gets in on the lyric-change shenanigans, singing during his “Gotta Travel On” verse (and cramming in way too many syllables for the meter), “Playing an outdoor concert here is like doing it in the shade / Joanie, take a little time off darling, look like you could use a little Gatorade.”
The headline, though, if you’re scanning the tracklist is “Dink’s Song!” This has to be a contender for “most surprising song performed on the tour.” He hadn’t played this cover since the early ’60s, and he never would again. Notably, this version is done as a beautiful duet with Baez, much slower than those strummy ’60s performances. It’s a fair bet that Joan herself reminded him about this old traditional tune, sung by Pete Seeger among many others. It makes a beautiful pairing with “Railroad Boy.” The old folk-song covers they do together are a highlight of these shows—and we haven’t even gotten to the Woody Guthrie song yet.
Other listening notes:
Dylan tells the audience that Bob Neuwirth wrote “Vincent Van Gogh.” In fact, Neuwirth’s art teacher supposedly wrote it.
After “Dink’s Song,” you can hear some hushed Bob-Joan discussion. Dylan says, “Let’s do…let’s do the other one, ‘Railroad Boy.’” I’d guess maybe they had “Wild Mountain Thyme” on the planned setlist.
“One More Cup of Coffee,” making a rare appearance, gets a new one-time-only bridge:
Your sister sees the future
She was born to read my mind
She overstates her beauty
But then her words are not that kind
Read more about the Gainesville show:
This whole article is free, but you need to subscribe to the email list to read the whole thing. Though let’s be honest, if you’ve made it down to disc 10, you SHOULD be subscribing to a Bob Dylan newsletter.