Riding the Train Around Europe with Bob Dylan

An interview with Summer 1978 crewmember Marshall Bissett

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Photo via NeedsSomeFun

In Summer 1978, Bob Dylan was in the middle of the busiest touring year of his career to date. He was traveling around Europe playing a bunch of wildly re-arranged hits, à la Budokan a few months before, but now mixed with new songs from the just-released Street-Legal. He played some of the largest shows of his career that summer, including one giant show in Blackbushe to upwards of a quarter million people (on today’s date in 1978) and another at Hitler’s old rally grounds in Nuremberg. He also had his largest band ever.

Such big shows with such a big band required a big touring crew. One of the guys handling the lighting and setup was Marshall Bissett. He’d toured with Queen, Neil Diamond, Jethro Tull, and many more. These days, he’s the Chairman of the Parnelli Awards for the live event industry. But we talked about life on the road—or on the rails—with Bob Dylan in 1978.

Marshall on tour with Dylan in 1978. Photo courtesy Marshall Bissett.

How did you get involved? Where were you at the time?

I was based in London, running a lighting company based in the States called TFA. We were doing the lighting production on the European tour. I was really close friends with Patrick Stansfield, who was Dylan's production manager. He did the Budokan shows and the whole American tour. I was his counterpart in Europe. I did a lot of the tour coordination on the technical side from our London office,

Patrick and I had done a lot of shows previously. In ‘77, we'd done the big Neil Diamond tour. What Patrick figured out on Neil Diamond was that the best way to travel, the crew and the band and the artist, was by train. So on Neil Diamond, for the first time ever, we hired our own train. Not the engine, but the carriages.

We did the same for Bob in '78. We started the tour in London at Earl's Court—he was fantastic, by the way, I think the second night at Earl's Court was probably one of the best shows I've ever seen—then went over to Paris and picked up a train. We had the French presidential car, which was like an observation car, all beautiful walnut paneling, appointed for the French president. That was Bob's quarters. Then there were two cars for the band, two cars for the crew, and a baggage car. We would basically park our carriages in a siding on all the different European stops, and the local train would pick us up.