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.