Rolling Thunder Revue - Origins

Origins

In late July 1972, Dylan saw The Rolling Stones perform at Madison Square Garden. According to Arthur Rosato, the soundman on Renaldo and Clara, their 1972 world tour reignited his interest in playing live, and also had a large influence on Dylan's return to the concert circuit.

In October 1975, soon after completing Desire, Dylan held rehearsals for an upcoming tour at New York's midtown Studio Instrument Rentals space. The bassist Rob Stoner, the drummer Howie Wyeth, and the violinist Scarlet Rivera, all of whom were heavily featured on Desire, were retained for the rehearsals. Joining them were T-Bone Burnett, Steven Soles, and David Mansfield. The three had been dismissed during the Desire sessions in attempt to focus the overall production, but Dylan decided to recruit the trio for the upcoming tour.

When rehearsals began, many of the musicians were apparently uninformed about plans for an upcoming tour. At the same time, Dylan was casually inviting others to join in with the band. According to Stoner, the group rehearsed "for like a day or two - it not really so much a rehearsal as like a jam, tryin' to sort it out. Meanwhile all these people who eventually became the Rolling Thunder Revue started dropping in. Joan Baez was showing up. Roger McGuinn was there. They were all there. We had no idea what the purpose for these jams was, except we were being invited to jam."

According to Lou Kemp, a friend of Dylan's who eventually organized the tour, the Rolling Thunder Revue "would go out at night and run into people, and we'd just invite them to come with us. We started out with a relatively small group of musicians and support people, and we ended up with a caravan." At one point, Patti Smith was invited to join, but amicably declined Dylan's invitation. However, Dylan did add one surprising element to the Rolling Thunder Revue when he invited Mick Ronson to join the tour. Ronson was the lead guitarist and arranger in David Bowie's former backing band, The Spiders from Mars. Ronson would accompany the Rolling Thunder Revue throughout the upcoming tour.

Another musician invited on the tour was introduced to Dylan on October 22, when Dylan went to see David Blue perform at The Other End. It was there that he met Ronee Blakley, the actress/singer who had recently starred in Robert Altman's celebrated film Nashville. At the end of Blue's show, Blakley joined Dylan on-stage for a few songs, joined by poet Allen Ginsberg and guitarist Kenny Davis (Leichtling); afterwards, Dylan extended her an invitation to join the Rolling Thunder Revue. She initially declined due to prior commitments, but eventually changed her mind and appeared at rehearsals two days later.

However, the same day Blakley showed up for rehearsal, Dylan returned to the recording studio to re-record Desire's "Hurricane" (due to legal concerns involving the song's original lyrics). Employing Blakley as a substitute for Emmylou Harris (who had prior engagements to attend to), Dylan quickly recut "Hurricane", the last recorded work done for Desire before its release in January 1976.

Sometime in October, Dylan also contacted an old friend and filmmaker, Howard Alk. Dylan's ambitions apparently included a film of the tour, and Alk accepted Dylan's offer to shoot the film. When the tour rehearsals were still in progress, Alk reportedly began filming scenes in Greenwich Village for possible inclusion in the film.

Dylan also contacted the actor/playwright Sam Shepard. Shepard was still relatively unknown at the time, and probably Dylan was introduced to him by Jacques Levy, who at that time had been co-writing with Dylan some of the lyrics of the Desire album (Shepard was also a former lover of Patti Smith). Shepard flew in from California and met with Dylan at rehearsals, where Dylan asked him if he had seen Marcel Carné's Les Enfants du Paradis or François Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player. Dylan said that those were the kinds of films he wanted to produce on the tour.

The poet Allen Ginsberg would accompany the tour for most of its 1975 run, but his planned recitations, as well as some performances by other Revue members, were cut before the opening date to keep the concerts at a manageable length. However, Ginsberg's recitation was restored at one concert, at the prison where Rubin Carter was serving his sentence.

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