An Alternate Version of 'Hard Rain'

1976-05-16, Tarrant County Convention Center, Fort Worth, TX

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.

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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.

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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.