Materialists, rejoice: There are 39 more discs of Bob Dylan live recordings on the way. Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1976 Live Recordings is yet another archival collection from Dylan’s storied, titular tour of small auditoriums, with guests including Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Willie Nelson, and Allen Ginsberg. This set, out November 6, contends with the second leg of the tour, which took place in spring 1976; the 1975 run received the box set treatment in 2019, accompanying Martin Scorsese’s documentary on the tour. The second leg’s May 16 concert at Fort Worth will get a standalone 3xLP release on the same day. Listen to “Going, Going, Gone” from that show below.
Every professionally recorded show from the second leg—which is nearly all of them—is included in the new collection. Dylan’s bands for the shows included Rob Stoner, Scarlet Rivera, Howie Wyeth, Spiders From Mars guitarist Mick Ronson, and T Bone Burnett. We would usually type out the tracklist for this sort of thing but [gestures at headline].
Burnett says, perhaps a little hyperbolically, in a press release, “The Rolling Thunder Revue was the first national punk rock tour. It opened a door that led to a furious explosion of new music—the Clash, Elvis Costello, the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, and on and on. Dylan had done it again. He is good at walking through doors that no one else even sees, doors that others think are walls.”