Rolling Thunder Reaches Its Abrupt and Mysterious End in Salt Lake City

1976-05-25, Salt Palace Arena, Salt Lake City, UT

Photo by David Stratford

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: