Rolling Thunder Revue

I don’t remember a thing about Rolling Thunder

(Bob Dylan)

Strange flyers are circulating through the streets of Plymouth, Massachusetts. The lettering looks like something off an Old West poster, or maybe a Barnum Circus bill. And the black-and-white photos in the middle could be mugshots of wanted men, or portraits of attractions from a freak show. “Rolling Thunder Revue”, reads the title. Below it, four names: Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Jack Elliott, Bob Neuwirth. “Plymouth Memorial Building, Thursday and Friday, Oct. 30 & Oct. 31, 8 P.M.”.

Plymouth: the city of the Pilgrim Fathers, the city where the Mayflower landed. In October 1975, as America braces for the grand celebrations marking two hundred years since the Declaration of Independence, Bob Dylan chooses that very town as the starting point for his most picaresque tour ever, the Rolling Thunder Revue. But no one knows anything about it yet. A week earlier, the organizers had booked a small hall – fewer than two thousand seats – officially for a Joan Baez concert. Then the flyers started circulating. And the tickets sold out in no time.

“There was a certain measure of humility and respect, mixed with a dash of arrogance, in choosing this place for the tour's opening night”, writes Larry “Ratso” Sloman in “On The Road With Bob Dyan”, the most irresistible chronicle of the Rolling Thunder Revue. “For Dylan and his band, it was the best place to start from scratch, to get the caravan rolling”.

And another member of the brigade, playwright Sam Shepard (recruited by Dylan to work on the film being shot during the tour, “Renaldo And Clara”), captures the mood of those days in Plymouth in his “Rolling Thunder Logbook”: “New England is in the grip of Bicentennial fever, as if desperately trying to bring the past back to life to reassure everyone that we come from somewhere. The feeling that there was, at least once, some form or structure, and that our current state of madness might somehow be healed by ghosts. Copies of history are for sale everywhere. Citizens in costume, flags waving. The present is swallowed by the past. In all this, the Rolling Thunder is also searching for something. It's trying to establish connections. To find some kind of point of reference along the way. It's not just another music tour, but a pilgrimage. We're looking for ourselves somewhere out there”.

That this is not simply a Bob Dylan concert is clear from the flyer alone: the Rolling Thunder Revue is a collective adventure, a choral variety show. Alongside the host, there aren't just the headliners Baez, Elliott and Neuwirth, but also people like Mick Ronson (the legendary guitarist of David Bowie's Spiders From Mars), Roger McGuinn, T-Bone Burnett and others still, including those who will join along the way. Each with their own moment in the spotlight, across a marathon three-hour show.

A wonderful traveling circus that relies on word of mouth and small venues, the polar opposite of the previous year's mammoth stadium tour alongside the Band. “An old-fashioned medicine show, a musical extension of the commedia dell'arte”, in Sloman's words. And just as in commedia dell'arte, over the course of the tour (though only starting from the November 2 show at the University of Lowell, again in Massachusetts) Dylan takes the stage with his face painted white and wearing a feathered hat: “There weren't enough masks on that tour”, he would later quip, with the most sardonic of his smiles, in the unmissable documentary Martin Scorsese devoted to the Rolling Thunder Revue in 2019. “We should have had masks for everyone”. It's no coincidence, then, that on Halloween night 1975, for the second Plymouth show, Dylan wears a see-through mask bearing the likeness of none other than Richard Nixon, as immortalized in the opening sequence of “Renaldo And Clara”…

On that adventure, reality and fiction blend in more or less equal measure, just as they do in Scorsese's retelling of it (one of his best inventions: Sharon Stone pretending to have been a groupie…). By Dylan's own account, the tour was originally meant to be called the Montezuma Revue. But then, one evening, he supposedly heard thunder rumbling in the sky: “Boom! That's when I thought of the name”. Only later would he learn that Rolling Thunder, to Native Americans, means “he who speaks the truth”… What is certain is that Rolling Thunder was the name of a Native American chief, one of the many characters Dylan and company would meet along the way. But it was also the name of an American military operation during the Vietnam War: and the Revue's backing band would be christened Guam, after the island where the U.S. base was located from which the planes bound to bomb Vietnam took off…

“Here's another old friend!”, announces master of ceremonies Neuwirth from the stage, and a roar greets Dylan as he launches into a still slightly hesitant “When I Paint My Masterpiece”, sharing the microphone with none other than his accomplice Neuwirth. “It Ain't Me, Babe”, adorned with David Mansfield's pedal steel flourishes, gradually gains confidence on the momentum of the chorus, but it's with a blazing “A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall” that Dylan and Guam truly win over the crowd, amid the jagged glam rock edges of Mick Ronson's guitar and Rob Stoner's supple, plastic bass.

Then, wrapped in the mysterious aura of a tarot card figure, Scarlet Rivera takes the stage, the raven-haired priestess of the electric violin. Dylan has already recorded a new album with her, “Desire”, though it won't be released until early 1976. In Plymouth, he unveils no fewer than six of those songs to the public for the first time, from the tex-mex atmospheres of “Romance In Durango” to the esoteric mood of “Isis” (destined to become the most shamanic moment of the 1975 shows), all the way to the gypsy elegy of “One More Cup Of Coffee (Valley Below)” and the mystical love songs “Oh Sister” and “Sara”. “I've never heard Dylan sing so powerfully”, poet Allen Ginsberg, the entourage's official bard, would later say. “He sounds like an emperor of sound”. And of course, among those new songs, pride of place goes to “Hurricane”, the torrential indictment of the conviction of boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter: it would soon be released as a single and become the rallying cry of the campaign to reopen the case, to which the tour would be dedicated.

When the curtain slowly rises for the second part of the set, the audience is greeted by an interplay of voices that is both surprising and strangely familiar: Bob Dylan and Joan Baez in duet, just as in those Sixties that already feel so far away. “The Times They Are A-Changin'” sounds a touch nostalgic, but the cover of Johnny Ace's “Never Let Me Go” immediately finds the key to a tender romanticism. For the only time on the entire tour, the two sing a solemn “The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll” together, and the ovation is guaranteed. “The kid's got talent”, Joan jokes before launching into her own solo set with “Diamonds And Rust”, inspired precisely by her tumultuous relationship with Bob.

When he returns to the stage, Dylan is alone with his guitar, ready to cast a spell with a mesmerizing “Mr. Tambourine Man”. From there on, the band takes back the spotlight to carry the show to its grand finale: everyone joining in together (Allen Ginsberg included) for America's quintessential alternative anthem, Woody Guthrie's “This Land Is Your Land”. “At half past eleven, three hours after the show began, Dylan leaves the stage followed by the band”, notes eyewitness Sloman. “But the audience refuses to let it end, pouring wave after wave of applause and shouts into the splendid hall. The ovation goes on unabated for at least eight minutes: an incredible display of warmth and affection. Then, slowly, the pilgrims begin to file out in small groups. They had come looking for a new world in music, and it seemed clear they had found it”.

“Didn’t you used to play guitar?”

“No, that’s the other guy”

“What other guy, Bob?”

“The little fella, I can’t remember his name anymore”

“Ah, you mean that Jewish kid from Minnesota. His name was Zimmerman”

“Yeah, that one”“Why did you change your name, Bob?”

“Just because, no particular reason”

“Do you still play guitar?”

“Yeah, now and then. We’re out on the road with a show”

“Yeah, I heard about it. What’s it called again? Rumbling something…”

“Yeah, something like that”

“Where are you playing?”

“Small places. Around”

(from Sam Shepard, “Rolling Thunder Logbook”)

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25/02/2026