In 1975, Bob Dylan was at a crossroads. With a generation of musical descendants eagerly mining his already substantial legacy, the 2008 Special Citation recipient convened an eclectic array of collaborators for the Rolling Thunder Revue, resulting in some of the most original music of his career.
Forty-four years later, fans of this era may now delve into two significant archival releases.
Today, Netflix released Martin Scorsese's "Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story," a new documentary drawn from contemporaneous footage.
And on June 7, Columbia Records released "The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1975 Live Recordings," a box set containing five complete concerts from the tour and hitherto unreleased rehearsals.
Nearly a decade after crafting his epochal work of the '60s, Dylan spent much of the early 1970s in seclusion with his family in Greenwich Village and Malibu.
New York Post crime reporter Anthony Scaduto, an improbable yet diligent biographer, speculated about the singer-songwriter's uncertain future in his 1972 book: "From a dialogue with his Maker, Dylan seems to have moved to a dialogue between men. It is possible he will be able to undertake that dialogue without becoming a puppet of that illusion he perceives."
A January-February 1974 tour with The Band — his first since a mysterious motorcycle accident in 1966 — enraptured audiences ("But even the president of the United States/Sometimes must have to stand naked" elicited tens of thousands of cheers as Watergate entered its denouement) while presaging the bombast of the arena rock era.
However, the success of the tour was offset by a frayed marriage and the tepid response accorded to the accompanying "Planet Waves," his first album of new songs in three and a half years.
For much of 1974 and 1975, he retreated to his Minnesota farm and downtown New York, writing the confessional songs widely heralded as a return to form (1975's "Blood on the Tracks") and a suite of more surrealistic work (1976's "Desire") in collaboration with Jacques Levy, a psychologist and theater director who fostered the career of 1979 Drama winner Sam Shepard.
By the summer of 1975, he had envisaged the Rolling Thunder Revue as an a way to return to the road to "play for the people." Arenas largely would be eschewed in favor of smaller venues, including theaters and college field houses. The professional arrangements of The Band would give way to the loose ecumenicism of friends new (former David Bowie guitarist Mick Ronson, street violinist Scarlet Rivera, future roots rock luminary T-Bone Burnett) and old (Joan Baez, Ramblin' Jack Eliott).
Echoing previous tours, Dylan decided to film the concerts and backstage proceedings. He also enlisted Shepard to write a fictional screenplay, further blurring the lines between reality and fantasy. Confined almost entirely to the byways of New England, the ensuing first leg of the Revue would be canonized by ardent fans in near-mythological terms.
But a spring 1976 leg of southern and western arenas failed to live up to critical and commercial expectations, while the failure of the resulting "Renaldo and Clara" (in which Shepard's work was largely rejected in favor of improvisation) effectively cast the tour as a footnote most notable for its copious literary legacy, including books by the playwright and veteran journalist Larry "Ratso" Sloman.
Following his 1977 divorce, Dylan veered in other directions, mounting a Vegas-style world tour — replete with a Presleyesque white jumpsuit — before briefly converting to evangelical Christianity. In 1988, he began to reclaim some of the Revue's unbridled spirit with the "Never Ending Tour," bringing his songbook for the next thirty-one years (and counting) to such disparate venues as Barcelona's Liceu, Japan's Naeba Ski Resort and Tulsa's River Spirit Casino.
"For one glorious fall, it all came together," said novelist Wesley Stace in the liner notes to the box set, "thus proving again a poem I heard once upon a time, which I paraphrase from memory, since I can find no trace of it anywhere: 'You do it once, you do it for fun; you do it again, and then you’re done.'"
Read more about "The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1975 Live Recordings" here and "Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story" here.