Article Contributed by Sacks and Company
Published on 2026-11-06
Photo credit: Jerry Aronson
Bob Dylan’s highly acclaimed The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1976 Live Recordings is out today on Columbia Records and Legacy Recordings, the catalog division of Sony Music Entertainment—order/listen/share here. The 39 CD box set fully captures this tour alongside a stellar company of backing musicians and guest artists, yet another breakthrough in Dylan’s performance career. A 3-LP set of the complete May 16, 1976 Fort Worth show, remixed from the original multi-track tapes, is also available today.
Beginning on April 18th, 1976 in Lakeland, Florida, and concluding in Salt Lake City on May 25th, 1976, the tour spanned twenty-five dates, almost all of which are represented in the 371 never-before-heard tracks. A storied and brilliant era of Dylan’s career, the tour’s tapes unveil how Dylan’s progressively furious performances all culminate in the complete Fort Collins recording on May 23, 1976, remixed from the original multi-track tapes, which yielded the special Hard Rain, broadcasted on television only once.
‘“Idiot Wind” in NBC’s Hard Rain is among the most rageful and brilliant performances Dylan ever committed before camera,” writes writer and music journalist Mikal Gilmore in his exclusive liner notes essay. “Yet again, it was for nought. […] One night, one hour only. It never saw any time in a theater. It was never rebroadcast, never issued as a video tape or DVD. It’s gone. All that’s left of the Rolling Thunder movie that was never made but instead played out on stages for four-and-a-half weeks in the spring of 1976, is what you now hold in your hands. Play the music, close your eyes, and watch the story.”
The second leg of the legendary Rolling Thunder Revue tour saw Dylan welcome old friends and collaborators to his troupe. Dylan reunited with Joan Baez to perform a moving set of duets across many dates, including performances of “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Railroad Boy.” Dylan’s band included bassist Rob Stoner, violinist Scarlet Rivera, drummer Howie Wyeth (who had all worked on the chart-topping album Desire), guitarists Mick Ronson (of David Bowie’s Spiders from Mars), Steven Soles, David Mansfield and T Bone Burnett.
Burnett recalls, “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.”
The 39 CD Deluxe set includes 381 tracks, 371 of which have never been released, plus a booklet with liner notes by Mikal Gilmore and rare photographs. The 3LP complete Fort Worth show includes 22 tracks.
