85
is an invention of his own mind. The point isn’t to figure
him out but to take him in. He gets into you anyway, so why
not just take him in? He’s not the first one to have invented
himself, but he’s the first one to have invented Dylan. No one
invented him before him. Or after.”
Any fans who did place a bet and did see the Rolling
Thunder Revue in the early days came away thinking two
things: That’s as close to Dylan—the great Dylan—as I’ll ever
get. And: Lucky me.
The fans who went to the last-ever appearances of the
Rolling Thunder Revue in the spring of ’76 probably had a dif-
ferent take. As the show moved through the Orlando Sports
Stadium and University of Florida Field in Gainesville in
late April, the initial thrill was gone, the gas draining by
dribs and drabs. “The Rolling Thunder Revue, so joyful and
electrifying in its first performances, had just plain run out
of steam,” wrote Janet Maslin in Rolling Stone. Indeed, some-
thing that had been built on imagination and spontaneity
suffered in its middle age, when those impetuses had since
evaporated. Dylan wanted to preserve what had occurred, of
course—all that filming, after all—and in late May he sched-
uled a couple of final dates, and arranged for a Colorado con-
cert to be filmed and recorded for the Hard Rain NBC TV
special and companion live album. Only a few days later, the
Rolling Thunder Revue, unquestionably one of the greatest-
ever rock tours, played to a half-empty capacity-17,000 Salt
Palace in Salt Lake City.
Perhaps Dylan, too, was dispirited by the denouement.
Or maybe the breakup of his marriage was not a thing that
Rolling Thunder had proved any kind of antidote for. But
anyway: He would do the occasional one-off appearance, but
wouldn’t tour or record new material for yet another two
years. His hiatus from public life, brilliantly and rapturouslyIF THE GOLDEN CHORDS OF HIBBING,
Minnesota, had become marginally (well, a
bit above marginally) more successful, they
might have enjoyed a town-to-town tour like
Rolling Thunder’s early days. That seemed
to be what Dylan was imagining. Opposite,
clockwise from top: He and Baez rehearse
backstage in a bare-bones setting; he and
Ginsberg visit Jack Kerouac’s grave during
an early stopover in Lowell, Massachusetts;
the two former lovers reminisce about their
earlier romance, in Becket, Massachusetts.
Left: No dressing rooms, but locker rooms.
It’s fun to remember, when looking at the
two lower pictures on this page, that Dylan
rehearsed his rock band in a Newport
mansion the night before he “went electric”
in 1965. Precisely a decade later, he and
his “merry players” romp on the beach
below the Breakers, the very grandest pile
of marble in that grand Rhode Island town,
a mansion built by Cornelius Vanderbilt. In
the photo at bottom—another scene being
filmed for possible inclusion in the imagined
future film—Dylan tootles on the trumpet
and T-Bone Burnett plays guitar, serenading
diners Ronee Blakley and Bob Neuwirth.80-96 LIFE_Bob Dylan 2020 Rolling.indd 85 FINAL 1/13/20 4:37 PM