The Real Hard Rain Falls at Last

After a long time moldering in the celluloid tins, Bob Dylan’s “Live 1975 CD” is out just in time for the feast of St. Nicholas. This two-disc document ably covers the well-recalled New England blitzkrieg tour Dylan launched on the wake of the Desire LP in, that’s right, 1975.

He and the Rolling Thunder Revue troupe stormed towns like Worcester, Lowell, Springfield and Boston, and the unfolding event was pivotal, as it represented Dylan’s return to center stage after a long while of parsimonious performing. This tour just about never ended.

Larry Sloman, former editor of the University of Wisconsin Daily Cardinal, provides liner notes and offers now a book on the tour to boot. Download a complete chapter of Sloman at Bobdylan.com.

Well recalled these tracks are as they conjure the time when friends would excitedly, giddily dial to tell of a concert next week in Lowell, or one this afternoon in Providence, and off some would go, in ‘70s Toyota Land Rovers and ‘60s Mustangs. The large ensemble gave the show a special flavor. There was young tall T-Bone Burnett, David Blue, violin-playing street-urchinist Scarlett Rivera (a song unto herself), and Nashville’s Ronnie Blakey. Remembered much: British guitar hero Mick Ronson with axe low slung applying raving, screaming Chuck Berry figures to Hard (“The people are many and their hands are all empty”) Rain. Unbelievably. Or going to the rest room while Joan Baez did her vocal exercises. [Joe Hill has left the building.] Applause.

A DVD included culls the best five minutes from the epic-length Renaldo and Clara meet the Night and Fog, the movie Dylan made of this tour. Off stage the concert might have been some great fun, at first, but the Dylan’s flick was, like show biz in the large, a tedious waiting for things to happen. On stage in the early going the Rolling Thunder Revue was dynamical. Dylan had spent some time with New York theatre people (Oh Calcutta’s Jacques Levy and Law and Order’s Jerry Orbach) prior to and during Desire’s taping, and he had some highly emotive stage mechanisms to apply to these dramatic numbers.

Last update: 4/12/2003; 11:47:26 AM.