Bob Dylan's 1976 Rolling Thunder Revue Gets Its 39-Disc Reckoning

A new 39-disc box set, The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1976 Live Recordings, collects every surviving professionally recorded tape from the second leg of Bob Dylan's roving 1976 tour — 381 tracks that, for half a century, sat in the shadow of the mythologized 1975 run.

For years, the public record of the 1976 shows was thin. Dylan released Hard Rain, a nine-song set stitched from two May 1976 concerts, months after the tour ended. It satisfied almost no one. Lester Bangs decried its "musical wretchedness" in NME and wrote that it "amounts to an insult." Rolling Stone called it Dylan's "least accessible, most chaotic and contemptuous album since *Self Portrait."

After that, only bootlegs held the rest. Official releases — a 22-track collection and Martin Scorsese's quasi-documentary with its accompanying box — focused on 1975, the year of the white face paint, Sam Shepard's tour diary, and benefit shows for boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter. The 1976 leg remained undocumented.

What does the new set actually contain?

Sound engineer David Hendel taped the run from April 18, when the band began an 11-day Florida stint, to May 25, when it ended at the long-since-demolished Salt Palace. That finale is missing, as are chunks of several shows, and the set includes only Dylan-led numbers — solo turns, duets with Joan Baez, and full-band work with the backing group that called itself Guam. Joni Mitchell, Roger McGuinn and a then-largely-unknown T Bone Burnett took their own lead spots in the revue format but don't appear separately here.

The box also ships alongside two standalone full-concert releases: Fort Worth, May 16, and Fort Collins, a week later — the two shows that had supplied Hard Rain's material. Heard in full, Grayson Haver Currin writes, they explain away that album's initial frustration. The Fort Collins show quietly hit streaming services a week before the box's arrival.

How rough was the 1976 tour?

Rough. After scant rehearsals, the band ground through Florida, taping a TV special in a hotel ballroom twice that never aired. A Louisiana show was canceled over slow sales; Willie Nelson was paid to join them in Houston and a quarter of Hofheinz Pavilion still sat empty. U.S. Marshals subpoenaed Nelson backstage in a narcotics case, then asked for autographs — an anecdote modern Dylan chronicler Ray Padgett documents in his new guide to the tour.

Rather than take another loss in Dallas, the troupe played Gatesville State School for Boys, a youth correction center notorious for tracking escapees with dogs. "The gentleman who put together this pack of maniacs is gonna come up onstage and sing a little bit," Baez told the children, to very little applause.

The performances themselves

The set dispels any idea of the 1976 leg as a footnote. Highlights include a ragged "Dink's Song" with Baez, an early take on "Seven Days," and Dylan navigating a bomb scare in Florida. In Florida he rewrote "If You See Her, Say Hello" into something brutal, singing: "If you're making love to her/Watch it from the rear/You never know when I'll be back or liable to appear."

The anger peaks on "Idiot Wind" — eight minutes Currin calls "death-metal mean." After Fort Collins, Dylan didn't play the song again until 1992, and hasn't played it in the 34 years since. The band dropped 1975's closing "This Land Is Your Land" for "Gotta Travel On," with Mitchell, Nelson, Kinky Friedman and Allen Ginsberg improvising lyrics nightly. In Fort Collins, they returned for the tour's lone encore: "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall."

Currin frames the Fort Collins exit as the end of Dylan's rock'n'roll era and the start of two decades of inconsistency — a path that ultimately led to the deepest renaissance any American songwriter has had. The box finally lets listeners hear that ending as an exclamation point, not a denouement.