The 1976 leg of the Rolling Thunder Revue — Bob Dylan‘s all-star caravan tour where he crisscrossed the country with Joan Baez and a band that included guitarists Mick Ronson and T-Bone Burnett and violinist Scarlet Rivera — will be chronicled in the massive, 39-disc box set The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1976 Live Recordings. The package, which arrives November 9, includes 381 tracks, and 371 of them have never been officially released. There’s also a booklet with liner notes from veteran Rolling Stone writer Mikal Gilmore.
For a preview of the set, check out a live rendition of the Planet Waves deep cut “Going, Going, Gone” from a May 16, 1976, tour stop in Fort Worth, Texas. The initial leg of the Rolling Thunder Revue took place between October 30, 1975, and December 8, 1975, primarily hitting smaller halls across the East Coast of the United States with little advance notice. Dylan brought a camera crew around for the ride, providing material for his 1978 movie Renaldo and Clara and Martin Scorsese’s 2019 pseudo-documentary Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese. (In 2019, every show in the vault from this tour was released on the box set Bob Dylan – The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1975 Live Recordings.) The 1976 leg of the Rolling Thunder Revue hit larger venues and spread out across a wider section of America.
The penultimate show in Fort Collins, Colorado, was filmed for the NBC television special Hard Rain. A companion live album with the same title hit stores at the same time, though some of the tracks were taped May 16 in Fort Worth, Texas. The nine tracks on Hard Rain and a recording of “Seven Days” from an April 21, 1976, show in Tampa, Florida, on the first volume of the Bootleg Series were the sum total of live material officially released from the 1976 Rolling Thunder Revue prior to this new collection.
Editor’s picks The 250 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century So Far The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century A quirk of European copyright meant these recordings would enter the public domain if they weren’t released within fifty years of their creation. This has compelled Dylan’s record label to release several copyright protection packages in the past, though some of them were under-the-radar discs available in just a handful of record stores. The shows on this new set would have entered the public domain on January 1, 2027, if this set hadn’t been created.
Sadly, the final stop on the Rolling Thunder Revue in Salt Lake City on May 25, 1976, isn’t part of this box set because Dylan’s camp sent the recording equipment home following the Fort Collins TV taping a couple days earlier. It’s become somewhat of a holy grail show for Dylan obsessives since it featured the sole live rendition of the Blood on the Tracks epic “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” to this day, and the only “Gates of Eden” on the entire tour. (One contemporaneous newspaper account says Dylan also performed Desire‘s “Black Diamond Bay,” but this was likely an error.) Four years ago, Dylan super-fans launched a campaign to find an audience tape of the show, but it didn’t produce any results. In all likelihood, it simply doesn’t exist.
But even without the mythical Salt Lake City tape, The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1976 Live Recordings gives the Dylan fan community quite a lot to chew on over the next few years, at least until the inevitable 1978 tour box arrives in the final weeks of 2028. The track list for Bob Dylan’s The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1976 Live Recordings: April 18, 1976 – Civic Center, Lakeland, FL Related Content Bob Dylan Wraps Up Dramatic U.S. Tour by Adding One More Guitarist Into the Mix: Jimmie Vaughan Fights With Bob Dylan, Magic With U2: Daniel Lanois on His Life in Music Daniel Lanois Looks Back at His Work With Bob Dylan and U2 Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon Performs Entire Set of Bob Dylan Covers at Eaux Claires Fest Disc 1Visions of JohannaIf You See Her, Say HelloVincent van GoghWeary Blues from Waitin’I’ll Be Your Baby TonightMaggie’s FarmOne Too Many Mornings – Incomplete April 20, 1976 – Bayfront Civic Center Auditorium, Disc 2Mr.
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