The Rolling Thunder TV Special That Wasn't

1976-04-22, Belleview Biltmore Hotel, Clearwater, FL [two shows]

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Photo via @nikkifirewall

Before the second Rolling Thunder tour kicked off, Bob Dylan and the band spent a week or so rehearsing at the Belleview Biltmore Hotel in Clearwater, Florida. Here’s how a couple of the band members described those rehearsals to me:

“I flew down to the Belleview Hotel in Florida for rehearsals. It looked exactly how it sounds, almost that place in that Peter Sellers movie where he was Chauncey [1979’s Being There]. A real old school, sprawling wooden hotel with ballrooms and all this kind of stuff… [Bob] didn’t show up for a while. He was a real nighthawk. We soon learned, it’s not really worth it to come at 3:00 in the afternoon for a rehearsal when Bob isn’t going to be there until midnight.” — Gary Burke

“The rehearsals were kind of nonexistent. We had gone down to Clearwater Florida and taken over this hotel to ostensibly rehearse, but Bob hardly ever showed up. So we didn’t know what the hell he wanted! As the bandleader, I would call rehearsals anyway. We’d show up and rehearse without Bob. I’d be singing the songs in his keys as a stand-in.” — Rob Stoner

Three shows after the tour began, they returned to that same hotel ballroom, this time to record a TV special. This was to be the TV special from the tour. That later Colorado show, the one that became Hard Rain, was just supposed to be a regular concert. They only decided to film it last-minute, to replace this first attempt from Florida; Bob had a contract to deliver something to the television network, and he ended up hating what they did in Clearwater.

He taped two shows, one early and one late. Neither was really a regular Rolling Thunder show, though combined they could become one. Fully half of the early show is solo-acoustic, almost like a 1966 show. Eight solo songs to open—he generally did two at the regular shows—then five Joan Baez duets (again, more than usual), then just a few songs with the band. The late show, on the other hand, is entirely full-band. No solo songs, no Joan duets.

When you watch the film, you can tell which songs come from which show from his headscarf. In a TV taping situation like this, you’re supposed to wear the same thing every time for continuity, but of course Dylan goes rogue. The early show, it’s orange; the late show, it’s blue.

Two different shows, two different headscarves

Despite the first three shows being sort of warmups for this taping, Dylan immediately plays a bunch of songs they hadn’t played before. In the early show, 7 of the 15 songs were tour debuts. In the late show, 8 of the 14 songs were. It’s typical Dylan to, when it comes time to tape the big TV special, throw out most of the songs they’d been practicing and throw in a bunch of stuff they hadn’t. Most of the full-band songs were holdovers from Rolling Thunder ’75, at least, but this is the only time the Rolling Thunder band ever played “Most Likely You Go Your Way”:

And it’s the only time we can hear them do “Like a Rolling Stone.” They did it once in 1975, but at a show that was not bootlegged.

Percussionist Gary Burke remembers the TV taping feeling chaotic in the moment. He told me:

“We were going to shoot a show for Burt Sugarman, the man behind Midnight Special. Bob was the MC; he would introduce different segments of the show. He was obviously very uncomfortable doing that. I remember one time he put his glasses on to read the lyrics because there were so many verses he couldn’t remember them all. Someone handed him a book of Bob Dylan songs to read the verses from, which I thought was really funny.”

Sugarman’s right-hand man, Stan Harris, directed this shoot. He came to Dylan by recommendation of guitarist Mick Ronson; Harris had filmed David Bowie’s 1973 concert film, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, when Ronson was in Bowie’s band. “They built these rafters all around [the ballroom] and there were all these kids sitting in them, with their legs dangling down,” T Bone Burnett recalled to writer Sid Griffin (whose Rolling Thunder book has a great chapter on this taping). “The backdrop was all these dangling legs, and we just took one look at it and thought ‘[surely] this isn’t what we’re doing.’”

I like the backdrop with the dangling legs, personally, but I see why Burke told me, “it felt a little showbiz-y.” Unlike Hard Rain, this performance does not look like a regular concert. It looks like what it was: a contrived TV taping. (Griffin compares the set to the hot new show Saturday Night Live, which had just premiered a few months earlier.)

The thing is…the video is pretty good! Maybe the vibes might have felt off, but Bob and the band sound sharp, and I personally dig the stage setup surrounded by fans (or, in some cases, hotel staff who got pulled in) on scaffolding surrounding the stage. I’m glad it got canned because otherwise we wouldn’t have gotten the even-better Hard Rain special, but I’m also glad it’s out there for us to enjoy anyway.

Here are the setlists for the two broadcasts, this first attempt and then the Colorado one they actually aired. I’ve bolded the songs that were different between the two. As you will immediately notice…that’s most of them.

What you might also notice is that the Clearwater setlist has more holdovers from Rolling Thunder ’75. In fact, if you didn’t know better, you might mistake this for a fall show. “When I Paint My Masterpiece” and “Isis” and “Just Like a Woman” were all pretty distinctive songs in the fall. Whereas the Hard Rain setlist features more of the distinctive 1976 songs—and, more importantly, that furious 1976 sound—with “Idiot Wind,” “Shelter From the Storm,” and “Maggie’s Farm.”

Which lands the Clearwater broadcast in a weird transitional place. Visually, it looks like 1976 (see: headscarf), but, sonically, it sounds closer to 1975. The only really notable 1976-specific song on the first show that didn’t make the second is “Lay Lady Lay.” This version features some of the new lyrics you hear on Hard Rain (“Forget this dance, let’s go upstairs…”) and some other new verses too:

His shoes are dirty but his feet are clean
And he’s seen miles that you’ve never seen
Why wait any longer for the one you adore?
You can have your cake, but just try and eat it

Why wait any longer? Why wait any more?
You’re acting* so conceited

(* He mumbles that bit here, but sings it clearly at other shows)

Overall, though, despite a few angry new lyrics, the energy is fairly jovial. Dylan gives his compatriots enthusiastic intros. “Wanna bring out a special friend of mine throughout the years, Miss Joan Baez. She is great!” he says when Joan comes out. And, a few songs later, “Here’s a good friend of mine, we’ve known each other for about 1200 years, Mr. Bobby Neuwirth from Canton, Ohio.” At one point, during one of David Mansfield’s mandolin solos, Dylan walks over to him and mimes (I assume) messing up the instrument’s tuning pegs.

So why did Dylan nix the special? Accounts vary. Late drummer Howie Wyeth told Clinton Heylin that it happened pretty much immediately: “[He] got into a big argument with [Sugarman] over the dinner table one night, after we’d already done half of it. And then he said, ‘No! We’re not doing it. Fuck it!’”

Dylan may have been pissed, but, I was surprised to learn, plans to air this special continued anyway for a while. This syndicated news story ran May 16, almost a full month after the special was taped:

Cameraman Paul Goldsmith, who shot Hard Rain a week after that news story ran—thus giving Dylan a better option to swap in—confirmed to me that Clearwater at least remained a possibility to air up until after the tour. Dylan held a screening at his house with clips from both films, the Clearwater one and the Fort Collins one, to make a final decision. Goldsmith told me:

You screened your Hard Rain film for Bob at his house, alongside the Midnight Special version from Florida, so he could pick one to use I guess. How did that happen?

That’s when Bob lived in Point Dume. [My company] TVTV was the producer, so we made it, and then the editing was a couple of our partners along with Howard Alk. They had cut a 10-minute piece or something. We screened our 10-minute clip and another clip from the Midnight Special one, the first attempt at this kind of film. And that stuff was just horrible…

So what we screened that day at Bob’s house just felt incredibly vibrant and virile and youthful, which Bob was looking for. Because Bob was getting a little older, too. He wanted to be hip and current. And the way we filmed it, that just felt like punk. And the other version is a big stage with this little figure on it, and the cameras are wide, and they have star filters that make the lights kind of twinkle. It could have been John Denver on that stage, because the visual style overcame Bob’s qualities. Which is hard to do, but if you put enough filters on the camera and you film wide, it’s possible. Anyhow, there was no comparison. You couldn’t have had a more extreme example of the new and the old, the moribund and the vital.

Out with the old, in with the new. The special filmed across two shows in Clearwater, Florida was never aired. But, thankfully, it leaked, so we can see it anyway.

1976-04-22, Belleview Biltmore Hotel, Clearwater, FL [early - partial tape]
1976-04-22, Belleview Biltmore Hotel, Clearwater, FL [late]