Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story

Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, Big Bopper and Dion’s “Winter Dance Party Tour” was a terrible idea – zigzagging across the upper Midwest in the dead of winter – made horribly worse by the plane crash in poor weather conditions that killed all three except Dion, who stayed on the tour bus. On January 31, 1959, four days before Holly’s death, 17-year-old Bob Dylan saw him perform at the Duluth Armory.

Here's a theory: As an impressionable kid, this might have been a haunting experience for Dylan and one wonders if the Rolling Thunder Revue was his belated response, an attempt to get it right this time.

In autumn 1975, Dylan rounded up Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Allen Ginsberg, put together a backing band and toured New England by bus and campers playing mostly theatres and college auditoriums. Joni Mitchell and Gordon Lightfoot joined for a few dates.

A film crew accompanied the tour, Dylan directing the musicians and some inner circle friends for an impromptu movie he envisioned. (At four hours, the mostly improvised Renaldo & Clara is for Dylan completists only).

Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese (2019) rescued the best of that footage and includes interviews with Dylan, Baez and McGuinn, among others. When released, some criticized Scorsese’s use of several fictional talking heads (hence the title, A Bob Dylan Story), although none add much to the overall narrative.

Dylan seems energized playing to smaller rooms and performing new material from Blood on the Tracks and the upcoming Desire. Off-stage, he’s not the guy with the shades, amused by private jokes only he understands in Don’t Look Back (1967), the documentary about Dylan’s 1965 tour of England. Here he’s more the avuncular dad on family vacation, even taking the wheel of an RV to drive to the next tour stop.

The band, made up of mostly spare parts, has a sound that sometimes verges on punk or metal, driven by the unlikely choice of Mick Ronson on lead guitar. Formerly with David Bowie, Ronson may have felt relieved to not have a lead singer simulate fellatio on his guitar during a solo.

Like other rockumentaries, the film looks to frame Rolling Thunder in a historical context, namely the upcoming bicentennial and the perceived country’s mood at the end of 1975 (“people lost their sense of conviction,” says Dylan). Scorsese shuffles several presidential clips, including one from Jimmy Carter’s acceptance speech: “We have a country that in Bob Dylan’s words, is busy being born, not busy dying.”

It felt like an optimistic time, particularly for my generation, today’s detested Baby Boomers. Nixon rightfully left office, Vietnam and the military draft in the rearview mirror. We had our choice of FM rock stations, and something called Saturday Night Live debuted on NBC that October, a kind of Rolling Thunder Revue itself in presentation and values.

Rolling Thunder concerts ended with a cast rendition of This Land Is Your Land. Today, its lyrics seem more distant, and the sound of rolling thunder isn’t that of the wheels of a traveling caravan of musicians; it’s likely something a little more ominous.