It's Only Rock 'n' Roll

"Bob Dylan Live 1975 -- The Rolling Thunder Revue" is the one must-buy reissue of 2002. This document of the astonishing revitalization of Dylan's career after a period of seclusion is one of the greatest live rock albums in history. The music is Dylan at his best, and the package includes terrific liner notes from Larry "Ratso" Sloman, who wrote the indispensable companion piece to the tour "On the Road With Bob Dylan."

Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue of 1975 -- which featured Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn and an all-star band on what is generally considered to be some of the most transcendent moments of Dylan's career -- has been widely bootlegged and traded in America and abroad for the last 27 years. This is the first official compilation from the multi-track masters of those performances, presented in a sequence that replicates the general running order of the shows.

The two CD set, containing 22 tracks and over 100 minutes of music, also features a 56-page booklet which includes a wealth of previously unpublished color and black-and-white images by tour photographer Ken Regan.

Initial pressings of "Live 1975" will have an added DVD. The disc contains performances of "Tangled Up in Blue" and "Isis" from the Renaldo and Clara movie that was filmed during the course of the Rolling Thunder Revue. Both songs were remixed in 5.1 surround sound.

In the summer of 1975, immersed in the creative zeitgeist of Greenwich Village, Bob Dylan began to assemble the nucleus of a new band. They would not only record his next album for Columbia Records in July ("Desire," the follow up to his epochal "Blood On the Tracks"), but would also tag along on the touring gypsy caravan he'd been envisioning for some time.

Dubbed by Dylan the Rolling Thunder Revue, this traveling music festival and movie-making crew would hit-and-run through a couple dozen U.S. and Canadian cities during the late fall and beyond, arriving with little advance notice, often staying an extra day or performing two shows a night, then moving down the road.

The first incarnation of the Rolling Thunder Revue ran six weeks -- October through December of 1975. Although the tour picked up again in 1976 and a live album was released ("Hard Rain") this marks the first time those magical 1975 performances are commercially available.

Audiences were regularly treated to four-hour concert sets, that, in addition to showcasing members of the band (or Baez) on as many as 20 songs, also featured Dylan on nearly the same number of tunes. Repertoire on "Live 1975" ranges from two of his earliest songs -- "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" (dating from 1962) and "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" (1963) -- through the 1965 touchstones "Mr. Tambourine Man," "Love Minus Zero/NoLimit" and "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" (all from "Bringing It All Back Home") and "It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry" (from "Highway 61 Revisited").

The Rolling Thunder Revue shows acknowledged the success of Dylan's most recent album, January 1975's "Blood On the Tracks," as heard on the fresh versions of that LP's two opening songs, "Tangled Up In Blue" and "Simple Twist of Fate." But the release of his next album, "Desire," was coming up in January 1976. The Rolling Thunder Revue was destined to become a daily platform to preview six of that LP's nine songs: "Romance in Durango," "Isis," "Oh, Sister," "Hurricane," "One More Cup of Coffee" and "Sara." With the exception of "Sara," all of these songs were written by Dylan during his time with New York stage director Jacques Levy, who served as stage director for the Rolling Thunder Revue.

Except for one song, the performances heard on "Live 1975" are drawn (though not in any chronological order) from concerts that took place at the Harvard Square Theater (Nov. 20), the Boston Music Hall (Nov. 21) and the Forum in Montreal (Dec. 4). "Hurricane" was recorded Nov. 19 at the Memorial Auditorium in Worcester, Mass.

Although crude bootlegs of these performances have circulated for years, the producers felt that the only way to capture the excitement of these remarkably powerful stage performances was by limiting the selections to the professional sound truck that was used to record Worcester, Boston and Cambridge, Mass., and Montreal. Because the Revue's material was relatively similar from night to night it was decided to consider the best of these performances and assemble them roughly the way they might have occurred once Dylan stepped onstage.