The last Rolling Thunder show before Hard Rain began with fans camped outside in line to buy tickets for 34 hours!

Admittedly, the fans did not intend to camp out quite that long. Tickets were to go on sale at 9am Thursday, and fans started camping out at 11pm the night before. Ten hours to wait, they thought. …

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Today, the Rolling Thunder Revue leaves Texas and enters the home stretch. Only four more shows to go—including the biggest, followed by the most mysterious.

But today’s show is neither. The first show of the final four took place in Oklahoma City, Dylan’s first-ever show in the state that now houses his archives. This was a last…

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You’ve heard songs from this Fort Worth show even if you don’t know you have. Why? Because it’s one of the two shows used on the live album Hard Rain. Producer Don DeVito hired a mobile recording truck to record this show and Fort Collins. They used four tracks from this and five tracks from Fort Collins and, voila, Hard Rain. (Again, I’m referring to the live album; the TV special of the same name comes entirely from Fort Collins and features a different track list.)

Hard Rain does an exceptional job representing this tour. But it’s only nine songs long. So, for fun, I decided to create an alternate Hard Rain. A second live album, also nine songs and roughly 50 minutes long, using entirely different songs from these same two shows. If they had released a double-LP, this could have been the companion disc. Or just an alternate-universe Hard Rain. I’m not saying it’s better than Hard Rain, but it’s almost as good (“almost” because any 1976 live album without “Idiot Wind” will never quite match up).

Download the hypothetical companion album below. I’ve called it Headin’ South, in keeping with the Hard Rain tradition of naming your live album after a song that’s not actually on it (“Blowing down the backroads headin’ south…”). All these tracks come from the Fort Worth and Fort Collins soundboards, just as the songs on Hard Rain did. Listen along while you read my track-by-notes.

DOWNLOAD 'HEADIN' SOUTH'

Side One

1. A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall

Hard Rain begins with a radically rearranged classic—“Maggie’s Farm”—so I figured Headin’ South should too. A song that everyone will recognize from the ’60s, but then go, whoa, it didn’t use to sound like that.

2. Mozambique

As I’ve noted before, Rolling Thunder ’75 was the real Desire tour. The few Desire songs he retained in ’76 kinda felt like holdovers. The main exception was “Mozambique,” not played at all in 1975. I like the Hard Rain “Oh Sister” fine (and I prefer that song in general), but, in terms of accurately representing this tour, I’d argue they should have swapped it with “Mozambique.”

3. You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go

“Light” is not the first word that comes to mind when discussing 1976, but even a dark and angry album needs moments of levity. “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome” serves that function here, just as it did on Blood on the Tracks.

4. Rita May

The one “new” song of the tour, it’s surprising this wasn’t on the original Hard Rain. It was on the B-side of the “Stuck Inside of Mobile” Hard Rain promo single instead. Time to promote it!

5. Going Going Gone

You’d think “Going Going Gone” would have been a Tour ’74 staple, but Bob and The Band never played this Planet Waves song. Instead it got its debut in 1976, and became a staple then. Good way to close an album side.

Side Two

1. Deportee

The main thing Hard Rain is missing, in my book, is any Bob-Joan duets (there were some in the film version). So we have the pairing of “Deportee” and “I Pity the Poor Immigrant.” It kills me a bit to omit “Railroad Boy”—my favorite of them all—but it would kill me even more to break up this topical pairing. Timely then, and sadly just as timely now. The first is acoustic…

2. I Pity the Poor Immigrant

…and the second is electric.

3. Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door

The penultimate song of every show, and the penultimate song here. Plus a little showcase for Roger McGuinn.

4. Tangled Up in Blue

Hard Rain ends with “Idiot Wind,” so we need another epic closer. Unlike “Idiot Wind,” “Tangled” was not a tour staple—in fact, this was the only time the full band performed it. But it has the appropriate chaotic energy. I’m sure if they’d played it more they would have tightened it up, but I kinda like how shambolic it is.

BONUS COMPANION LP: Travel On

What all the official live releases—albums, Bootleg Series, box sets—omit is that there was so much more to a Rolling Thunder show than just Bob Dylan. Two hours of music without Bob onstage at all, every single night on both tours. So, for the true heads, I also made a Hard Rain companion album featuring some of the tour’s other musicians, known collectively as Guam. Although the main man makes a couple cameos too.

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Throughout this Rolling Thunder 1976 anniversary series, I’ve emphasized all the ways this iteration of the tour differs from Rolling Thunder 1975. And there are many. But today might be the day that feels the most in the spirit of Rolling Thunder 1975.

Just like he did near the end of the ’75 tour, near the end of ’76, Dylan and the band played at a prison. This time, though, the appearance has nothing to do with Rubin “Hurricane” Carter. It doesn’t have anything to do with anything that I could figure out. For reasons that remain murky, Dylan and co. set up shop at a juvenile detention facility, the Gatesville State School for delinquent boys.

The show was a last-minute affair. Two Dallas shows were originally on the printed itinerary, according to a couple participants. But those were cancelled. Then plans were made for a free show in Austin at legendary music hall Armadillo World Headquarters. But that got scrapped too, in favor of this shortened performance for 300 juvenile delinquents.

Professor William Bush, who wrote a book about the history of the Texas juvenile system—where this Gatesville facility was particularly notorious—explains that this show came about because of a new boss tasked with fixing things up:

Ron Jackson was the executive director of the Texas Youth Council, the state agency that oversaw all of the state’s ‘training schools’ for juvenile delinquents. He ascended into that role thanks to a major class-action civil rights lawsuit that concluded in 1973-74. Jackson was considered much more progressive than his predecessor, and he was younger and clearly open to hosting a show like that.

Stage manager Gerry Bakal remembers that certain kids there, the worst offenders, were not going to be invited to attend. When Dylan heard about that, though, he objected. “Bob insisted that everybody sees the show or nobody’s going to see a show.” So they were all invited.

Bandleader Rob Stoner recalls the performance:

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Too bad there’s no tape of Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder show in Austin.

That’s what I would have had to write a few years ago. But, in December 2023, one appeared! A never-heard soundboard straight from the sound guy, no less. Where did it appear? Why, right here in this newsletter!

(Ouch, I think I pulled something patting myself on the back so hard.)

Thou…

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Today we hit one of my favorite shows of Rolling Thunder 1976. It’s got an impassioned performance, a partial soundboard, and a bit of unique BobTalk. But I won’t bury the lede. The big news is the setlist. Three songs in particular, all not only new to the tour but also his first time played ever (at his own concerts, at least—we’ll get there).

First up…

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Today we hit a bummer milestone: The first newsletter with no tape. There have been two prior tapeless shows on this tour, but they both came from cities with two shows on the same day (Mobile and New Orleans), so we at least had a tape of one of the two that day (soundboards in both cases too!). Alas, there is no audio evidence whatsoever of what Bob g…

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The Rolling Thunder Revue had big plans for Texas. After a second show in Houston, the tour was scheduled to continue on to play, among others, Dallas, Lubbock, Abilene, and Amarillo.

Nope, nope, nope, and nope.

All of those shows, plus the planned second Houston show and a planned second Austin show, were canceled—in most cases after tickets had gone on sale. They were selling, but not enough people were buying. When I interviewed bandleader Rob Stoner, he remembered this as a low point. “[The cancellations were] kind of discouraging. You’re coming off this heady Rolling Thunder thing and suddenly…people aren’t showing up. That takes the wind out of your sails.”

Blame circulated throughout the local press. Remember how the tour started with so many shows in such a small area of Central Florida? They essentially tried to do the same in West Texas, packing too many shows in too small a region. Demand simply wasn’t there.

One newspaper writer concluded, “Even though it may have been the people holding his strings (and not Dylan himself) who were responsible, such total disregard for the thousands of area Texans who had shelled out $9 apiece to see The Man in person has caused ill feelings to the extent that one Lubbock writer says people are cursing her because the concert was canceled. Most, however, are cursing Dylan. Indeed, Dylan’s blood on the tracks has turned to bad blood in West Texas.”

Others quoted Dylan lines back to him:

Over in East Texas, though, one of the two planned Houston shows did go on—but just barely. Even for just that one, ticket sales were so slow that a ringer had to be brought in last-minute: Willie Nelson, riding in to save the day with his only Rolling Thunder appearance. Rolling Stone reported:

It was the Rolling Thunder Revue’s second stop here this year, just five months after the less-than-successful Rubin Carter Astrodome benefit, and Bob Dylan was taking no chances. To insure that this assault on Texas would start on a high note, he’d invited the Lone Star State’s favorite son, Willie Nelson, to share the stage May 8th at the Hofheinz Pavilion. But faced with competition from a pair of John Denver shows and a sold-out Johnny Winter/Weather Report concert, the revue managed to fill only three-quarters of the 10,700-seat arena.

Big of Willie to step up and help sell tickets, right? Well, sort of. His then-manager told Rolling Stone, that, when they first were asked to join the bill, “Dylan’s people offered only expenses. I passed. CBS [records] called up and offered in excess of $10,000 as payment to insure Bob Dylan sold the date. We played.”

A couple years ago, I unearthed a soundboard of most of Willie Nelson’s previously uncirculating set. He sounds great, less than a year after releasing his seminal Red Headed Stranger album. Even back then, he has so many hits he has to cram ‘em into medleys, like this one of “Funny How Time Slips Away,” “Crazy,” “Night Life” (a combination he still does today!):

A newspaper review notes Willie got bigger cheers than Dylan. Sounds like the Outlaw Tour!

It wasn’t all good news for Willie though. Backstage, before he took the stage, he got subpoenaed as part of a Dallas investigation into narcotics trafficking*. A news article about the incident notes, “The two plainsclothes [sic] U.S. marshals who served him stuck around for autographs.”

(* Any Hold Steady fans out there? The chorus to one of their most popular songs goes “Subpoenaed in Texas…”)

The next month, he had to appear before a grand jury in Fort Worth. Afterwards, a reporter asks him if he knows anything about drugs. “Nothing at all,” he replies. Then he turns and grins toward the camera.

Back in Houston, Willie stuck around for a surprise encore, singing “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” on a microphone with Dylan and Baez. Wouldn’t you know it, the circulating audience tape cuts off just before that. I guess it was a surprise to the taper too!

1976-05-08, Hofheinz Pavilion, Houston, TX
1976-05-08, Hofheinz Pavilion, Houston, TX [Willie Nelson set]

The Baton Rouge show featured no new songs, and the audience tape sounds like trash. So, while all reviews indicate another excellent show, I want to move straight on to what happened after the show.

After this show, the troupe planned to drive a couple hours west to Lake Charles. But the Lake Charles show was cancelled due to low ticket sales (the first Rolling Thunder ’76 show to suffer this fate, but sadly not the last). Which left Dylan and everyone with a few free days to kill in Louisiana.

What do you do with a few free days in Louisiana? Alligator cookout, of course!

This is maybe the anecdote I’ve heard the most from the second Rolling Thunder tour, a tour with generally fewer offstage shenanigans than the first. Practically every participant I interview brings it up.

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Today’s New Orleans tape—one of two that day—is perhaps the best-known concert we’ve hit so far, in large part due to the stellar soundboard. And we’ll get to that in a minute. But first, I want to talk about where Dylan and the entourage went the night before the show.

Answer: A Tom Waits concert! This syndicated news item ran in the New Orleans Times-Picayune:

Singer-songwriter Tom Waits had some special company during a recent show at Ballinjax Electric Bistro in New Orleans. After his first set, the Rolling Thunder Revue troupe—82 members and hangers-on-strong—strolled in, fresh from a party aboard the steamboat Natchez. All the principals were there—Bob Dylan (attired in turban, shades, black leather jacket and smoking a pipe). Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn and Kinky Friedman—and the latter three commandeered the stage for a stretch. First up was McGuinn, who did 30 minutes’ worth of tunes. Friedman followed with a four-song set, and then Baez—dressed in a two-piece white suit—stepped up to sing a cappella a new tune that she said would be the title song on her next album. A line in the tune drew the biggest cheer of the night: “Women are not equal to men—but you can never tell it by me.” Dylan didn’t budge from his front-row center seat, and he left shortly after Waits finally was able to see his way clear to the stage.

Waits apparently was not amused. He nicknamed them the “Rolling Blunder Revue” and complained to Rolling Stone a few months later, “They got up there for an hour just before I was supposed to begin my set. Nobody even asked me; before I knew it, fuckin’ Roger McGuinn was up there playing guitar and singing and Joan Baez and Kinky were singing. By the time I got onstage the audience was stoked. They were all lookin’ around the room and shit. I don’t need this crap—it was my show. I was drinkin’ too much on top of everything else.”

I guess Tom wished he wasn’t in New Orleans that night!

When I interview Rolling Thunder 1976 participants, the New Orleans shows come up a lot. Maybe more than any other 1976 show outside Fort Collins (which became Hard Rain). People mention them for a fairly wide variety of reasons too.

Soundman David Hendel recalled some special fast food:

One of the shows, in New Orleans, we were at The Warehouse [a famous music venue once located on Tchoupitoulas Street] setting up, and Joan Baez went out and bought lunch for the crew. She personally went out and came back with bags of McDonald’s, just for the setup crew. We were fairly well into the tour by then. It just impressed me that she actually cared about us.

Bassist-bandleader Rob Stoner remembered a special guest showing up for the show:

[Dennis Hopper] just showed up for that show. Probably because he wanted to go to New Orleans since it’s such a great party town. All kinds of movie stars and celebrities would periodically drop in for a gig or two. Hopper was hip enough to know that New Orleans was the one to show up for.

Jacques Levy’s widow Claudia Levy recalled these two shows for more chaotic reasons (which were partly Hopper’s fault):

Jacques hated when you would go to a rock and roll show and you’d have to wait for them to set up [between acts]. That never happened on Rolling Thunder. When the curtain opened on the band, it was like a theatrical opening of the show and they started playing right away. You didn’t want people plugging in and setting up. Only once did that happen, in New Orleans on the second tour, which was really scary. They were playing an old place where they used to do cattle auctions. It was a big round wooden structure with a high ceiling and something happened with the sound system. It wasn’t working right. So they were delayed, a lot. People were getting very restless. And, you know, the North is Bob’s territory. The South, not as much. They weren’t as patient with having to wait. They were stamping and shouting.

Dennis Hopper was there. And Dennis thought the world of himself. He decided that he was going to read a poem and calm everybody down. Jacques was trying to dissuade him from doing that, but Dennis insisted that it was going to change the whole temperature of the place. And he did it. By the time he was done, we were really scared. The place was shaking. Really literally shaking.

Jacques didn’t ruffle. He was not a man who lost his temper or raised his voice. He could figure out how to deal with whatever issues there might be. And he knew that if you had to counter any kind of restiveness, you send out Roger, ‘cause he could do it. So Jacques said to McGuinn, “Okay, Roger, hit the beaches.” And Roger went out and started playing “Eight Miles High.” That did the trick.

Last year I brought up that story to McGuinn himself. He said, “I don’t remember that specifically, but Jacques was very calm. I miss him.”

Advance man and sometimes security guard Mike Evans remembers a different sort of drama: A food fight at the hotel:

The tables are turned over. Pitchers of orange juice are being sent like mortar shells over the top. Neuwirth is leading one charge. Food is flying around. I can’t say Bob was involved because I don’t think he went up, but everybody else was there in the food fight. Baez was there. Animal House hadn’t come out yet. I hate this word: I was triggered when I saw Animal House. That was what it looked like. Just this over-the-top food fight.

So these would be memorable shows even if we didn’t happen to have one of the best tapes of the tour from it. You can even hear Dennis Hopper up there reciting his audience-enraging poem, Rudyard Kipling’s “If”:

None of those people, however, mentioned what stands out most on this tape to me: The live debut of “Rita May”! Actually, the debut of “Rita May” period. The song wouldn’t get released until that fall, as the b-side to the Hard Rain version of “Stuck Inside of Mobile.” So no one would have known it on this, its debut outing. This was the only time he ever played it live too.

One other song stood out to me on this tape, but it’s not during Dylan’s set. It was the solo song by Donna Weiss, who had joined the 1976 tour to serve loosely as Ronee Blakley’s vocal replacement (minus the acting part, since they weren’t filming a movie this time). She sings a song labeled on this tape as “Sweet Amarillo, Tears On My Pillow.”

I really liked the song, so I decided to look it up. What I didn’t realize is that “Sweet Amarillo” is sort of a Bob Dylan song.

It originated in the Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid soundtrack sessions. You can hear a minute-long outtake on the 1973 copyright collection:

It sounds very unfinished, but has the bones of that chorus. The two backing singers you hear very prominently in that tape are Weiss and a woman named Brenda Patterson. When Dylan didn’t release the song himself, he apparently gave it to them. Weiss finished writing it, and Patterson released it on her own album the next year (with Dylan not credited as a writer for some reason, just Weiss).

(That same year, 1974, another singer, Jackie DeShannon, recorded another Donna Weiss composition: “Bette Davis Eyes.” The song wouldn’t make much impact though until Kim Carnes covered it in 1981, turning it into a number one hit and Donna Weiss’s biggest claim to fame).

Now, three years after Pat Garrett, here Weiss is singing “Sweet Amarillo” at a Dylan show.

That 1974 Patterson version made no dent, Weiss never recorded it, and Dylan never released it beyond that obscure copyright dump. So that was the end of the story for “Sweet Amarillo” right? Wrong!

Fast-forward almost 50 years…

In 2004, the Americana band Old Crow Medicine Show takes a half-baked Pat Garrett outtake titled “Rock Me Mama” and turns it into “Wagon Wheel.” The song is an enormous hit, certified three times platinum (meaning it sold three million copies). It becomes the band’s biggest song by far. Then in 2013, Darius Rucker, the Hootie and the Blowfish frontman gone country, covers it and makes it an even bigger hit. Forget three times platinum; this new version goes diamond: 10 million copies sold.

Dylan’s people were stoked. This forgotten Pat Garrett outtake is suddenly one of the biggest songs he ever (partially) wrote. It has over one billion streams between the Rucker and Old Crow versions. That’s far more than any actual Dylan recording does. (Adele’s cover of “Make You Feel My Love” still tops it, barely.) After Rucker’s version went to number one, Old Crow Medicine Show frontman Ketch Secor told CMT, “We got an email from Bob Dylan’s manager saying congratulations… It’s not every day that country music recognizes this great pioneer and huge influence, Bob Dylan. Bob doesn’t have many No. 1 songs in any genres. So it was a big deal to get one.”

Could lightning strike twice? Worth finding out. So Dylan and his people promptly dug up another half-finished Pat Garrett outtake to give Old Crow Medicine Show. It was, yes, “Sweet Amarillo.” Weiss and Patterson’s finished version was clearly forgotten. Old Crow finished Dylan’s demo a different way, Dylan himself apparently gave them notes (he wanted Secor to play fiddle instead of harmonica and suggested the chorus come in at the eighth bar, not the 16th), and Old Crow released it in 2014, ten years after “Wagon Wheel.”

Alas, Old Crow’s second completed Pat Garrett song hasn’t yet had a fraction of the success of the first. Maybe Darius Rucker needs to cover it. Though, to be honest, I still prefer the Donna Weiss version she sings at today’s Rolling Thunder show.

1976-05-03, The Warehouse, New Orleans, LA [late show]

Last night, Bob Dylan finally ended the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour. Or did he? That’s the question fans have been debating in group chats and message boards for weeks now.

The case in favor: For the first time since it began, Dylan is heading out on his own headlining tour this summer with no Rough and Rowdy Ways branding—they even removed the skeleton logo from the website tour page (which they never did during the two Outlaw tours). The case against: We’ve been fooled before (ahem), and Dylan didn’t do anything last night to indicate it was anything other than one more show. No, he didn’t finally play “Murder Most Foul.”

Reporting in from that maybe/maybe-not final show last night in Abilene, Texas—his first show there, after a botched attempt 50 years earlier—is Erin C. Callahan. Callahan is the host of the excellent Dylan podcast Infinity Goes Up on Trial, where once a month she interviews a Dylan expert or fan (here’s my ep about Rolling Thunder). She’s the co-editor of The Politics and Power of Bob Dylan’s Live Performances: Play a Song for Me and a forthcoming book about Dylan in the ’80s, where I wrote a chapter about the Tom Petty tours.

Here’s Erin on Dylan in Abilene last night (bonus: we’ve already got a tape too):

Last week, Bob Dylan went to sleep in Shreveport and, after a brief stop in Tyler, woke up in Abilene for the last show on this leg of the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour. Abilene seems like a strange place for Dylan to end the tour. This is also the first time he’s played Abilene. The question stands, why single out Abilene as the last stop on the tour, whether it’s the end of the Spring 2026 leg or of the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour in general?

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He played “Stuck Inside of Mobile” in Mobile. Would he play “Hattie Carroll” in Hattiesburg??

No, he would not. Though that titular connection’s admittedly more of a stretch.

But who needs “Hattie Carroll”? A much bigger live debut happened at this Hattiesburg, Mississippi show: The first-ever “You’re a Big Girl Now.” Th…

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Today is the first concert of Rolling Thunder 1976 where they performed two shows—an early show at 5 PM, a late show at 10 PM. There’s no tape of the early show, or even much setlist info, but there is a soundboard of the late show. Not to pat myself on the back too hard, but it’s one I uncovered myself a couple yea…

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For the second song of today’s set in Pensacola, the final of nine consecutive performances in Florida (!), Dylan played “Just Like a Woman.”

Why does this matter? He’d played the song twice already this tour. But both those times—St. Petersburg, Clearwater—he performed it with the band, in an arrangement similar to how they did it in 1975. At today’s Pensacola show, however, he performed it solo, just like he had every night back in 1966. It was the only time he did so on this tour.

That got me thinking about one of the most interesting parts of Rolling Thunder 1976 setlists, and one big thing that differentiates the tour from 1975. Every night, he would open with two solo-acoustic songs. In ’75, he played a few solo tunes in the middle of the show, but now he started off his set with them. The song choices also varied more than they did in ’75—particularly in the second slot.

The number-one song, the first of the concert (well, of the Dylan portion; “Guam” had already been up there rocking for an hour) most nights was “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Here’s tonight’s rendition:

There were only two exceptions, two times he opened a regular concert with anything other than “Tambourine” (with the usual caveat there are a few setlists we don’t know, plus I’m not counting the TV tapings). The first exception came opening night. The very first song of Rolling Thunder ’76 was not “Mr. Tambourine Man.” It was “Visions of Johanna.” Here’s what I wrote about it in my song-by-song look at opening night:

Opening a show with “Visions of Johanna” - hell, opening an entire tour with it - is a bold move. He’s only ever opened one other concert with “Visions” that I can find, a random one-off in 1989. I was hoping for a killer full-band arrangement like Rolling Thunder II offers for so many other ’60s songs, but it’s solo acoustic. Too bad; a scorching ’76-band version of “Visions” would be a hell of a thing. Still, Bob making his unusual entrance with a seven-minute “Visions” must have been pretty amazing to see. Especially after an hour-plus of mostly-loud sets from the Guam backing band.

This was the only time “Visions” was performed at a regular concert the whole tour, though he did also play it at one of the Clearwater TV tapings.

Also, a local newspaper reported that a show in Corpus Christi opened with “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall.” This falls into the “Just Like a Woman” category of songs he played both solo-acoustic and electric with the band on this tour. In the latter incarnation, it gave the album and TV special its title: Hard Rain. (Another in the both-solo-and-band category this tour: “Tangled Up in Blue.” I wrote about the truly wild band arrangement here.)

The second slot of the two opening acoustic numbers varied a lot more. Here are all the songs he rotated through in that second slot:

• If You See Her, Say Hello

• It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)

• Tangled Up in Blue

• The Times They Are a-Changin’

• Simple Twist of Fate

• Just Like a Woman

• Love Minus Zero / No Limit

• It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue

• Spanish Is the Loving Tongue

• It Ain’t Me Babe

• Gates of Eden [reportedly]

Looking at that list, most of those songs feel unsurprising. It’s not like he busted out a solo-acoustic “Subterranean Homesick Blues” or anything. But I made a playlist of all the solo-acoustic performances, and what struck me listening to it is—they’re really good!

The solo acoustic numbers can feel like an afterthought this tour. There weren’t any included on Hard Rain, for instance, but they sound great. Take this “The Times They Are a-Changin.’” Nothing special on paper—an old warhorse he’s sung in this format hundreds of times—but I find this a very convincing version.

Ditto today’s “Just Like a Woman” in Pensacola. As I mentioned, it was the only time on the tour he performed it this way. He had a lot of other acoustic songs to get to.

One of my favorite performances of the entire tour also comes from one of these opening acoustic mini-sets. It’s also the only time he ever performed this song live at a regular concert. In San Antonio, he played “Spanish Is the Loving Tongue.” Presumably a nod to Texas border culture, in the home of the Alamo. Stunning.

If there’s one solo-acoustic song you know from this tour, though, it’s probably none of those. It’s a song he only played twice, and neither on a tape with particularly good sound quality. So why is this particular song well-known?

Well, it’s another Blood on the Tracks song that, like “Idiot Wind,” he wrote vengeful new lyrics for this tour. They flip the song’s meaning entirely from regret to rage. It’s “If You See Her Say Hello.” It used to go like that, but now it goes like this:

If you’re making love to her, watch it from the rear
You’ll never know when I’ll be back, or liable to appear
For it’s natural to dream of peace as it is for rules to break
And right now I’ve got not much to lose, so you’d better stay awake

1976-04-28, University of West Florida, Pensacola, FL

Catch up on all the entries so far here or by clicking the image below:

One big difference between Rolling Thunder ’75 and ’76 I’ve mentioned before: The size of the venues. In 1975, for the most part, Dylan played small theaters, and tickets were hard to come by. In 1976, Dylan mostly played giant arenas and stadiums. Tickets were easier to get, and in a few cases the shows sold so poorly they had to be canc…

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Bowling Green and Chattanooga were supposed to be it for me this tour, but, thanks to an invitation to speak to some journalism classes in Oxford a couple hours away—shoutout professor RJ Morgan and all the great Ole Miss students I met—I tacked on an extra show in Jackson, Mississippi. It was Dylan’s first visit here since 2016, and my first ever. (I teased Prof Morgan about inviting someone from northern Vermont to speak to a class titled “Bob Dylan and the South.” I mean, I’m pretty close to the south of Canada.)

Dylan has played Oxford exactly once, back in 1990. That show became famous as the only time he played “Oxford Town,” his song about the deadly campus riots when James Meredith became the first Black student to matriculate at Ole Miss. So, driving from Oxford to Jackson, it was not lost on me that Dylan also has an early song about this city’s most famous Civil Rights figure too. (Hint: I’m currently writing this from the Medgar Wiley Evers Airport.)

No, I did not really expect Dylan to bust out “Only a Pawn in Their Game” last night, but it wouldn’t surprise me one bit to learn that, on one of Bob’s trips here, he made one of his anonymous hood-up tourist visits to Medgar Evers’ house. It’s still there. The driveway you walk up is where Evers was gunned down by a Klansman who, as Dylan’s song controversially noted, was part of a bigger racist system. As I was leaving, I met a young man going door-to-door pitching AT&T service. He’d only vaguely heard of Evers, but seemed amazed to find this piece of history on a random side street in a fairly rundown neighborhood. He said he’d skip trying to sell them broadband service, but would come back later to take the tour.

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In 1976, Gainesville, Florida was put on the rock-and-roll map. Not because of this show—because local boy Tom Petty made his recording debut! (And before we get to Bob, take two minutes and watch one of my favorite stand-up bits ever, by comedian Pete Holmes, which I stole for today’s subject line: Where’s Tom Petty from?)

B…

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Last night, Bob Dylan played his third show ever in Macon, Georgia. Macon is, as you know he knows, the home of Little Richard. And that’s only the start of the city’s musical story. Below, scholar and writer Anne Margaret Daniel reports on the Dylan concert—but first she takes us on a virtual walking tour through Macon’s musical history. Here’s Anne Margaret Daniel:

A Rambling Man Passes Through Town: Bob Dylan and Macon Music

On Wednesday, April 22—Earth Day—it was close to ninety degrees in Macon, Georgia—summer heat already, on top of a longtime drought that has the huge old magnolia trees already in full bloom, and the red clay ground baked bricklike in all the city’s green open spaces, from parks to cemeteries. After a terrible winter in the Northeast, the hot sun and fragrant air were twin benedictions to me. I roved around town in a sundress, espadrilles, and a straw picture hat, happy and grateful that Bob Dylan had brought me here.

Macon is a completely unique place for a musician to perform, and for a music lover to come and hear that performance. For its size—a population of around 70,000 in the 1960s—Macon is the birthplace of a great number of musicians, including Mildred Bryant Jones, Lucille Hegamin, Veronica “Randy” Crawford, Richard “Little Richard” Penniman, and Jason Aldean. Other musicians gravitated to the town young, and remained there, now claimed lovingly by the town as native sons: Bill Berry, Otis Redding, and the Allman Brothers Band.

Back in 1958, Bob Zimmerman styled his hair in a wild curly pompadour, and the following year the Hibbing High Hematite yearbook predicted Bob’s future: “to join Little Richard.”

Richard (whose name was meant to be Ricardo, but his birth certificate erred) Wayne Penniman was the third of twelve children born to Leva Mae and Bud Penniman. As a little boy in Macon in the 1940s, Richard was known for singing loudly in local churches, and on the porch steps of his family’s two-rooms-and-a-hallway shotgun home. When his idol Sister Rosetta Tharpe played the City Auditorium in 1947, she invited the fourteen-year-old to open for her after hearing him singing her songs outside the venue.

The Penniman home place, moved to the historic and aptly named Pleasant Hill neighborhood when threatened by highway expansion, is now a local treasure: Little Richard House and Resource Center. The skinny hallway with its pine plank floorboards is where Richard slept in bunk beds with his host of brothers and sisters. The piano he played when Mercer University awarded him an honorary Doctorate in Humanities is on the back patio, and you can play it, too, if you dare. When you go, ask for Rose Hunt-Person to give you the tour—this elegant lady knows all about Little Richard and his career, and the neighborhood and cultural events all across town.

Otis Redding was born in nearby Dawson—in 1941, just like Dylan—but grew up and began his musical career in Macon. As a teenager he played with Little Richard’s band The Upsetters. Redding was just 21 when he had his first hit single, “These Arms of Mine,” in 1962. His commitment to helping other young performers was already significant by 1967—he ran camps for kids at his brand-new ranch in Round Oak, Georgia, and sponsored college scholarships for local high schoolers. In December of that year, Redding was in his Beechcraft Model 18 when it crashed into a lake near Madison, Wisconsin, killing the singer and four members of his backing band the Bar-Kays; only trumpeter Ben Cauley survived. Redding’s funeral service was at the City Auditorium in Macon, and crowds filled Cherry Street and Cotton Avenue outside as the 3,000-seat space overflowed. The next month, “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” went to number one on the Billboard charts.

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Before the second Rolling Thunder tour kicked off, Bob Dylan and the band spent a week or so rehearsing at the Belleview Biltmore Hotel in Clearwater, Florida. Here’s how a couple of the band members described those rehearsals to me:

“I flew down to the Belleview Hotel in Florida for rehearsals. It looked exactly how it sounds, almost that place in that Peter Sellers movie where he was Chauncey [1979’s Being There]. A real old school, sprawling wooden hotel with ballrooms and all this kind of stuff… [Bob] didn’t show up for a while. He was a real nighthawk. We soon learned, it’s not really worth it to come at 3:00 in the afternoon for a rehearsal when Bob isn’t going to be there until midnight.” — Gary Burke

“The rehearsals were kind of nonexistent. We had gone down to Clearwater Florida and taken over this hotel to ostensibly rehearse, but Bob hardly ever showed up. So we didn’t know what the hell he wanted! As the bandleader, I would call rehearsals anyway. We’d show up and rehearse without Bob. I’d be singing the songs in his keys as a stand-in.” — Rob Stoner

Three shows after the tour began, they returned to that same hotel ballroom, this time to record a TV special. This was to be the TV special from the tour. That later Colorado show, the one that became Hard Rain, was just supposed to be a regular concert. They only decided to film it last-minute, to replace this first attempt from Florida; Bob had a contract to deliver something to the television network, and he ended up hating what they did in Clearwater.

He taped two shows, one early and one late. Neither was really a regular Rolling Thunder show, though combined they could become one. Fully half of the early show is solo-acoustic, almost like a 1966 show. Eight solo songs to open—he generally did two at the regular shows—then five Joan Baez duets (again, more than usual), then just a few songs with the band. The late show, on the other hand, is entirely full-band. No solo songs, no Joan duets.

When you watch the film, you can tell which songs come from which show from his headscarf. In a TV taping situation like this, you’re supposed to wear the same thing every time for continuity, but of course Dylan goes rogue. The early show, it’s orange; the late show, it’s blue.

Despite the first three shows being sort of warmups for this taping, Dylan immediately plays a bunch of songs they hadn’t played before. In the early show, 7 of the 15 songs were tour debuts. In the late show, 8 of the 14 songs were. It’s typical Dylan to, when it comes time to tape the big TV special, throw out most of the songs they’d been practicing and throw in a bunch of stuff they hadn’t. Most of the full-band songs were holdovers from Rolling Thunder ’75, at least, but this is the only time the Rolling Thunder band ever played “Most Likely You Go Your Way”:

And it’s the only time we can hear them do “Like a Rolling Stone.” They did it once in 1975, but at a show that was not bootlegged.

Percussionist Gary Burke remembers the TV taping feeling chaotic in the moment. He told me:

“We were going to shoot a show for Burt Sugarman, the man behind Midnight Special. Bob was the MC; he would introduce different segments of the show. He was obviously very uncomfortable doing that. I remember one time he put his glasses on to read the lyrics because there were so many verses he couldn’t remember them all. Someone handed him a book of Bob Dylan songs to read the verses from, which I thought was really funny.”

Sugarman’s right-hand man, Stan Harris, directed this shoot. He came to Dylan by recommendation of guitarist Mick Ronson; Harris had filmed David Bowie’s 1973 concert film, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, when Ronson was in Bowie’s band. “They built these rafters all around [the ballroom] and there were all these kids sitting in them, with their legs dangling down,” T Bone Burnett recalled to writer Sid Griffin (whose Rolling Thunder book has a great chapter on this taping). “The backdrop was all these dangling legs, and we just took one look at it and thought ‘[surely] this isn’t what we’re doing.’”

I like the backdrop with the dangling legs, personally, but I see why Burke told me, “it felt a little showbiz-y.” Unlike Hard Rain, this performance does not look like a regular concert. It looks like what it was: a contrived TV taping. (Griffin compares the set to the hot new show Saturday Night Live, which had just premiered a few months earlier.)

The thing is…the video is pretty good! Maybe the vibes might have felt off, but Bob and the band sound sharp, and I personally dig the stage setup surrounded by fans (or, in some cases, hotel staff who got pulled in) on scaffolding surrounding the stage. I’m glad it got canned because otherwise we wouldn’t have gotten the even-better Hard Rain special, but I’m also glad it’s out there for us to enjoy anyway.

Here are the setlists for the two broadcasts, this first attempt and then the Colorado one they actually aired. I’ve bolded the songs that were different between the two. As you will immediately notice…that’s most of them.

What you might also notice is that the Clearwater setlist has more holdovers from Rolling Thunder ’75. In fact, if you didn’t know better, you might mistake this for a fall show. “When I Paint My Masterpiece” and “Isis” and “Just Like a Woman” were all pretty distinctive songs in the fall. Whereas the Hard Rain setlist features more of the distinctive 1976 songs—and, more importantly, that furious 1976 sound—with “Idiot Wind,” “Shelter From the Storm,” and “Maggie’s Farm.”

Which lands the Clearwater broadcast in a weird transitional place. Visually, it looks like 1976 (see: headscarf), but, sonically, it sounds closer to 1975. The only really notable 1976-specific song on the first show that didn’t make the second is “Lay Lady Lay.” This version features some of the new lyrics you hear on Hard Rain (“Forget this dance, let’s go upstairs…”) and some other new verses too:

His shoes are dirty but his feet are clean
And he’s seen miles that you’ve never seen
Why wait any longer for the one you adore?
You can have your cake, but just try and eat it

Why wait any longer? Why wait any more?
You’re acting* so conceited

(* He mumbles that bit here, but sings it clearly at other shows)

Overall, though, despite a few angry new lyrics, the energy is fairly jovial. Dylan gives his compatriots enthusiastic intros. “Wanna bring out a special friend of mine throughout the years, Miss Joan Baez. She is great!” he says when Joan comes out. And, a few songs later, “Here’s a good friend of mine, we’ve known each other for about 1200 years, Mr. Bobby Neuwirth from Canton, Ohio.” At one point, during one of David Mansfield’s mandolin solos, Dylan walks over to him and mimes (I assume) messing up the instrument’s tuning pegs.

So why did Dylan nix the special? Accounts vary. Late drummer Howie Wyeth told Clinton Heylin that it happened pretty much immediately: “[He] got into a big argument with [Sugarman] over the dinner table one night, after we’d already done half of it. And then he said, ‘No! We’re not doing it. Fuck it!’”

Dylan may have been pissed, but, I was surprised to learn, plans to air this special continued anyway for a while. This syndicated news story ran May 16, almost a full month after the special was taped:

Cameraman Paul Goldsmith, who shot Hard Rain a week after that news story ran—thus giving Dylan a better option to swap in—confirmed to me that Clearwater at least remained a possibility to air up until after the tour. Dylan held a screening at his house with clips from both films, the Clearwater one and the Fort Collins one, to make a final decision. Goldsmith told me:

You screened your Hard Rain film for Bob at his house, alongside the Midnight Special version from Florida, so he could pick one to use I guess. How did that happen?

That’s when Bob lived in Point Dume. [My company] TVTV was the producer, so we made it, and then the editing was a couple of our partners along with Howard Alk. They had cut a 10-minute piece or something. We screened our 10-minute clip and another clip from the Midnight Special one, the first attempt at this kind of film. And that stuff was just horrible…

So what we screened that day at Bob’s house just felt incredibly vibrant and virile and youthful, which Bob was looking for. Because Bob was getting a little older, too. He wanted to be hip and current. And the way we filmed it, that just felt like punk. And the other version is a big stage with this little figure on it, and the cameras are wide, and they have star filters that make the lights kind of twinkle. It could have been John Denver on that stage, because the visual style overcame Bob’s qualities. Which is hard to do, but if you put enough filters on the camera and you film wide, it’s possible. Anyhow, there was no comparison. You couldn’t have had a more extreme example of the new and the old, the moribund and the vital.

Out with the old, in with the new. The special filmed across two shows in Clearwater, Florida was never aired. But, thankfully, it leaked, so we can see it anyway.

1976-04-22, Belleview Biltmore Hotel, Clearwater, FL [early - partial tape]
1976-04-22, Belleview Biltmore Hotel, Clearwater, FL [late]