“The Lost Rolling Thunder Show”
By Bill Lattanzi
Trapped forever in grains of silver, thirty four year-old Bob Dylan is blasting through “Isis,” his clear blue eyes fixed on a far-off vision of the song’s “outrageous” snow, harmonica wrapped in an arm-pumping fist. Totem, talisman, sole surviving evidence, I’ve kept the photo with me since the night I took it, through myriad dorms, apartments, and houses from coast to coast. For all the extensive documentation of Dylan’s career, it is, as far as I know, the only visual or aural document in existence of the third ever Rolling Thunder Revue show, November 1, 1975, at then Southeastern Massachusetts University in North Dartmouth, Massachusetts. What follows is a brief replay of the experience of that concert, a fan’s “I was there,” and I hope more than that, an attempt to capture the strange, chaotic vibe of the mid-70s, and what it was like to come of age inside it.
No cameras. No recordings. No booze. Mean-looking dudes, the tour’s roadies and assorted help were fairly barking at us as we stood in line waiting for the doors to open. There were eight in our Dylan-head college student crew: me; Ezra, a junior, with the car; Jimmy, quiet, who would go into business down South; Chris, a tall, handsome Northwesterner who would become an eco-warrior, but here, will play the villain; Peter with the vast LP collection; Judith, a minister’s daughter and religion major; the bohemian painter Arianna, always a little out in space; and my girlfriend—long black Baez-style hair, sarcastic, cigarette-smoking, guitar-playing. She had dated Jack Kerouac’s nephew in high school, and that put me, I thought, one step closer to validity. Our first conversation was about Bob Dylan. Years later, we married, and are married still.
It wasn’t easy getting tickets or even finding out where and when the shows would be. It had started with an on-campus rumor that Dylan’s people had called our college and asked to perform on the bucolic green. They were turned down, outraging us. But could it be real? Bob Dylan with a band of legendary singers and players appearing inside our bubble of a tiny liberal arts school in the most unfashionable corner of Connecticut was about as likely as an alien spacecraft descending to offload more free booze, Columbian weed, and munchies than we could ever consume.
Dylan had released Blood on the Tracks in January, and we’d been listening, reading the reviews, decoding it, and learning to play it. We’d been writing rejected proposals for final papers in English Lit about it (“Shelter From the Storm” is about ART!). Now this “Rolling Thunder Revue” thing (What could it mean? US Air Force Bombers? An indigenous chief?) was set up to bring the music to the people, springing surprise shows in out-of-the-way places. This tour had the spirit of anarchy and freedom, a rebuke, we thought, to the growing trend of arena rock. It would rekindle the 60s flame we’d been too young to experience first-hand. Dylan and troupe were the stars of the firmament, but we’d be there shining beside them, as much a part of it as they were.
The show at our school wouldn’t happen. Another one would, at a school a hundred miles away that we’d never heard of, the announcements real enough to make plans. Four of us formed a reconnaissance squad. One gray afternoon, we set out on a ticket-buying trip to the distant land of North Dartmouth in Ezra’s canary yellow Toyota wagon with one million miles on it. Most campuses now have big, branded welcome signs. At SMU, the turn into the campus was marked by an abandoned drive-in movie theater. Its giant marquee greeted us with the warning, “Death Has Visited This Corner.” The campus was stranger still. Regarded now as something of a Brutalist masterpiece, designed by Paul Rudolph, it looked to us like straight dystopia. We passed one radically shaped hulk of poured concrete after another, searching for the student center. Eventually, we found it.
We needed eight seats. Only students could buy tickets, so we searched out non-Dylan fans, and then asked to borrow their IDs for purchase. We were able to get seven without too much trouble, but then we hit a dry spell, and remained one short. The box office would close at four and it was now ten of. I noticed a conservatively dressed and adult-beyond-her-years looking female student, checking her mail at the nearby student post office. I approached with caution. Would she be going to the show? “No,” she said. “Certainly not.” She said she wouldn’t want to put me in danger and politely declined my request for her ID. She explained that if Jesus chose the moment of the concert to return, because I would be, in that moment, part of the sinful world of rock, I would be condemned to Hell. As a Christian, she cared for everyone, and wouldn’t want to contribute to the possible loss of my soul. She was both charming and serious. I acknowledged her kindness. efforts, and I absolved her of all responsibility. I said that I would take my chances on Jesus being otherwise occupied. She was hesitant, but finally agreed to loan me the ID, an act of kindness I have always remembered. I quickly bought the ticket, and returned her ID with a minute to spare. We had our eight. We were going to see Dylan.
The road was dusky on the way back. Pot smoke wafted through the car, tunes blasting on Ezra’s eight track. (Steely Dan would be about right, but I don’t remember exactly. Ezra was an Allman Brothers guy. Live at Fillmore East, maybe?) Out on the horizon, there was a pretty line of gold in the violet sunset. Purple clover, Queen Anne’s lace. Like it’s been since I was fourteen (and still today), Dylan lyrics flitted through my brain, lighting up the world. Sundown, yellow moon.
We flew through an open, flat zone of nothing. To the right was untended rocky land, a ditch beside us climbing up the far side to a ten-foot berm of dirt that ran for a mile or more ahead and behind. A silhouette appeared atop the berm. A four-legged thing with horns, hairy. Maybe the canary yellow caught his crazed eye. Suicidal or badly miscalculating, he leapt high, appeared for a moment like a cloaked wraith above us, and smashed directly into the center of Ezra’s windshield, his horned goat face wide-eyed. The car swerved badly. The goat bounced off and spun in the air before us. His heavy body swung around, leading his badly broken neck, a grotesque outtake from the Wizard of Oz tornado scene. Ezra battled for control as the car veered wildly. “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay,” I kept saying, head in hands in the back seat, certain we would die. Somehow Ezra tamed the car and slowed to a stop. Everyone intact, we stumbled out to see the goat splayed out behind us on the highway.
A van roared up behind us and parked. Two men got out, opened the back, and heaved the dead goat into the vehicle.
“Don’t worry,” one of them said. “We’ve got him.” They were from animal control, chasing down an escaped goat from parts unknown. Backing him up against the highway, they thought, they’d either get him, or he’d jump and get got. We were the lucky getters.
All of us stunned, Jimmy managed to get out, “What about us? What about the car?”
“You can find some help at the next exit, probably.”
The goat hunters got back in the van and left as fast as they’d arrived. Dazed, we assessed the damage. The windshield was mostly smashed, but the car was drivable. After a stop at the police station to report the incident, Ezra managed to peer through the spider-webbed glass to get us home in one piece. It felt right, fighting off a creature from the wilderness to get to Dylanland.
Our crew of eight arrived early on the night of the show, so we were close to the front of the line when the doors opened. We moved past the mean security guys toward the entrance, where more mean security guys frisked anybody they chose. This was a choke point, because in defiance of the no photography rules, I had brought along not one, but two bulky 35 millimeter cameras. (These were those ubiquitous single lens reflex types you see in all the old movies, from Blow-Up to the parody of it at the end of the first Austin Powers movie. Think of a half-width brick with a glass and metal lens protruding from the center.) I brought two so that, with thirty-six shots to a roll, I could get seventy-two pictures without having to re-load.
Today, there’s a lot of talk about respecting the artist’s wishes, especially Dylan’s, given the recent contretemps over his company booting Daniel Hildebrand, the owner of the Daily Dylan website out of a show in Glasgow. But at the time banning cameras was unheard of. I’d strolled up the aisle and snapped pics of Joni Mitchell, the Grateful Dead, Patti Smith, The Band, Tom Waits and more. We didn’t consider ourselves mere audience members at these events. you see. We were participants. Contrary to the woman’s worry about my soul, a concert was a congregation of the faithful, a summoning of a certain spirit, one that would bring a better world into existence, if only for a night. Capturing that on film was part of the process. Beyond that, I think that if my rebellious teenage self was reflective enough, he would have said: Didn’t Kerouac, Rimbaud, and Dylan himself all glorify rules-breaking, especially in pursuit of art? I’m not following leaders, he’d smirk, I’m photographing parking meters. If I was a thief, well, I dug it. As we approached the goons, I gave one camera to Jimmy and we both stuffed them into our jean fronts, the lenses bulging—ambitious packages for a couple of scrawny college boys. Billy, they don’t like you to be so free.
In his Rolling Thunder chronicle, On the Road with Bob Dylan, Larry “Ratso” Sloman describes that night’s venue as “the first large hall” of the tour, making it sound like a proper theater. It was actually the college gym, with the stage at the far end like an old grammar school. We rushed toward the stage. Some long-haired dude with dilated pupils had reserved the front row for his friends, but I talked him out of it: “You can’t see the drummer!”
“Oh yeah,” he said, his eyes growing wider. “You’re right!”
When he moved behind us, the eight of us scored the best seats in the house.
As the hall filled up, we caught peeks of various Revue folk looking out from the wings, even strolling the aisles. Most were unknown to us. But was that Ramblin’ Jack Elliott? Yeah, that was him. Members of the production crew wandered by. We heard them passing the word there would be no filming tonight from the Dylan team. Who even knew there were film cameras? Maybe the lone authorized photographer, Ken Regan, had the night off too, as he was nowhere in evidence. I stood up to take in the crowd only to see Allen Ginsberg wrapped in an extra-large cloak.
“Mr. Ginsberg!” I blurted, walking up to him. He smiled, a gleam in his eye, and engulfed me in a deep, long bear hug. He smelled like warm wool with a hint of patchouli, not unpleasant. When he finally let me go, he held me at arm’s length, looked deeply into my eyes, and without a word, walked away.
At the time, this felt like a Buddy-Holly-stares-at-young-Dylan-and-passes-the-torch moment. Only later did I realize that Allen Ginsberg hugged a whole lot of long-haired, skinny young men, or at least would have liked to. (For instance, In Martin Scorsese’s trickster faux-documentary of the tour, fulsomely titled Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese, strings player David Mansfield recalls of Ginsberg: “I wasn’t a bad-looking, you know, little 19-year-old at the time. He had a thing for straight, talented teenage boys.”) For the moment, though, I had arrived only one degree away from greatness. That last degree—making yourself great—was the tough one. If there was a magic sextant that could guide you from proximity to the promised land itself, I never found it.
Lost in the many recaps of the Rolling Thunder Revue, even in most of Ray Padgett’s thorough-going online series[1], is the fact that the experience was much more than the best Bob Dylan show you’d ever see. It was also a revelatory parade of greater or lesser known folk and rock luminaries, each with their own aura, whose music took up more than half the show. Riveted through their sets, you’d almost forget about Dylan. And while it’s hard, fifty years after the fact, to accurately recall, even with the help of online setlists, everything that occurred on stage that night, and in what order, I’m going to try to reconstruct the full evening’s experience here. If there’s some haziness around the edges, that was part of the time, too.
The warm-up band took the stage, strapping on their instruments in nonchalant 70s style. They eventually kicked off with a long, indifferent instrumental. Heading them up with a frontman’s swagger, wielding a big electric bass, was the self-described “Rockin’” Rob Stoner, who told us they were Guam, a name that sounded made up on the spot, and somehow a joke on us. The group shared the de rigueur style of long hair, jeans, and ragged shirts. Except that, way in the back, unaccountably, in a body-hugging Kelly green pantsuit and blonde shag, writhed English guitar hero Mick Ronson from David Bowie’s Spiders From Mars band, and Mott the Hoople. Through the night, he’d beam out searing alien solos from a distant planet. I recognized, too, the aforementioned, angelic-looking David Mansfield, familiar from a picture in Rolling Stone or somewhere, playing all manner of acoustic stringed instruments. Guam traded off lead singers. After a few Stoner tunes, we were introduced to a tall, frightened-looking guy in shades named T-Bone Burnett, who sang something distinctive and a little eccentric. My girlfriend and I gave each other a look. This T-Bone guy had potential. (I can’t be sure, but the song may well have been Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London,” which Burnett played often on the fall tour, according to Mansfield in the Ray Padgett interview. Yes, the unrecorded song was around that early.) Stoner came up with the highlight, a slow bluesy rocker about the famous Yankees pitcher Jim “Catfish” Hunter, who had recently signed baseball’s first million-dollar contract as an early free agent. Catfish . . . million dollar man. There was something about the lyrics, and the cadence, and the song’s implicit praise of freeing oneself that lifted it above everything else they played. The language was oddly familiar: “Used to work on Mr. Finley’s farm…” Later, we’d learn that, of course, Dylan wrote it. (Dylan was a baseball fan? We were beside ourselves. He lives in the same world as us?) I pulled out the camera and sneaked a few good shots here, one of them that classic rock photograph angle—low, looking up at the singer, all crotch and thick Fender bass. But with only the two rolls in hand, and shooting guerilla style, I bided my time, waiting for bigger game.
Guam took their bows, and Ramblin’ Jack strolled out alone with his guitar to tell half-finished stories (“They don’t call me Ramblin’ cuz I travel”) and sing three songs, including a beautiful “Dark as a Dungeon.” (Where the rain never falls and the sun never shines/It’s dark as a dungeon way down in the mines.) It sounded like it was written by a coal miner in the distant past instead of by Merle Travis in 1968. Later in the tour, Dylan and Baez would take over the song, but their version wouldn’t touch Elliott’s delicacy.
Bob Neuwirth appeared to sing “Mercedes Benz,” the short Janis Joplin ditty, funny and cynical, that some of us knew he’d written. He looked beefy and bloated, a big change from the speedy days of Don’t Look Back. Of course he, like the others, was entirely a myth until he stood in front of us, more or less emceeing the show. In my memory, Dylan now drifted on quietly (Is that him? That’s him!) in his ‘65 Newport leather jacket and flowered hat, to join his old pal for “When I Paint My Masterpiece.” Dylan was the most dangerous photographic prey. I sensed security on the lookout, and I had visions of them grabbing me by the shirt and roughing me up behind the gym. I worked quickly, the camera bobbing up for a shot and quickly down to escape attention. I was thrilled to see Dylan there in the viewfinder, to know a few bits of him were captured with every click in crystals of silver halide, waiting to be transformed in the darkroom. The real Dylan vanished after the one song, as quickly as he’d arrived. Was that really him? That was really him.
Joan Baez came out solo and, in some order, sang “Diamonds and Rust” (pretty ballsy considering Dylan was right there); “Joe Hill,” which I found interminable on the Woodstock album, but here was very moving; and an a cappella version of the spiritual, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” The song, starting with the same self-dramatization that Monica Barbaro’s a cappella bit had in 2024’s A Complete Unknown, drained the punk attitude right out of me. For a moment, my soul seemed salvageable. I wished my religious friend from the ticket line was here to share the moment. She might have felt the spirit in the house and changed her mind about Jesus’s judgement.
Roger McGuinn was next, his eyes nearly as crazed as the goat’s, to kick off “Eight Miles High,” complete with that twelve-string mad-genius opening. The band galvanized. It was a dream, a rock ‘n’ roll journey, alive, fantastically well played and sung, a new level of professionalism to go with the band’s ragged charm. I couldn’t take a bad shot. McGuinn retired and somebody else came out (maybe a Ramblin’ Jack return?), before McGuinn returned came back a few songs later for “Chestnut Mare.” The performance was even better than “Eight Miles High.” It is possible this was the highlight of the night. The gym levitated. Later Dylan, in his minimal half-sentence stage patter, would say, “How ‘bout that Roger McGuinn?,” to an appreciative roar.
Ronee Blakely had been a sensation that summer in Robert Altman’s film Nashville, playing a doomed country singer. She now stepped forward for one song, something upbeat. She was small and hard to see beneath a hat. We all wondered if she and Dylan were having an affair, as if that could be the only explanation for her presence. The same for the tall, snaky violin player, bewitching us with her dissonant, compelling solos and fills. Mysterious and dark, in spider’s web makeup, long raven hair and gypsy-drag gown; we had no idea who she was. Her presence, like Ronson’s, was unexpected, another antipodal point to add to this wide world of weird. Dylan introduced her as Scarlett Rivera, and a mini-cult was born, to be later burnished by the half-true story that Dylan had picked her up on the street when he saw her walking with a violin case in Greenwich Village.
Dylan’s set now began in earnest, with “It Ain’t Me, Babe” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” The night now really felt like the Fellini-esque commedia dell’arte family circus Dylan told Sloman he was after (you can hear the clip in the Scorsese doc or read it in Sloman). It was all so heartfelt. By the following spring, the tour’s spirit would fray. Dylan would be shouting his lungs out, the music harsh, the concerts the kind of big arena shows the fall tour stood, at least for us, in opposition to. But that night, November 1, 1975, the Day of the Dead, at Southeastern Mass U., we all lived the dream. Dylan was warm, engaged, honest, in good voice. In short, he was brilliant.
Desire wouldn’t come out for another couple of months. With no notice, we were about to hear most of it. “This is a song for Mr. Sam Peckinpah,” Dylan said, the name bitten off, a tribute to the hard-living director of Dylan’s major motion picture debut, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. I don’t think I knew it was shot in Durango, Mexico, and I definitely did not know that the song was called “Romance in Durango.” After a pause, a drum crack, and a full-throated cry that went right through us: Hot chili peppers in the blistering sun!
Between songs, frat boys in the back had been chanting slowly, loudly, clearly, “Every-body must get stoned!” Bob Dylan finally responded. “Yeah . . . Go get stoned,” then launched into “Isis.” Okay, did I say McGuinn was the highlight? This was the highlight, a fantastic new Dylan song, like nothing he’d ever done, in that moment topping the unstoppable past, and in a completely new style. “Isis” was a movie, “Isis” was a myth. “Isis” was a mystery. “Isis” rocked. “If you want me to, YES!” The roof opened, the sky cracked. Maybe the world was about to end. Dylan left the stage.
Intermission? We were at a show? We collected ourselves, vibrating after two hours, not knowing we had much more to go. Even in the intermission, theater was happening. An elaborately painted muslin stage curtain unfurled in silence. You can see it in the Scorsese film, filled with carnival figures from the past. Rock concerts in those days—David Bowie and Alice Cooper excepted—had close to zero stagecraft beyond maybe smoke, and a spotlight on the soloist, if the spotter could figure out which longhair was playing and knew the difference between the pedal steel and the guitar. This was high-end stuff.
From behind the curtain came the sound we’d heard about but never dreamed we’d hear in person—Baez and Dylan together, singing the anthem, turning back the clock to the time we were too young to be a part of— “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” The banner rose to reveal them, mid-tune. They used to say about the classic Hollywood dancers Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers that he gave her class, and she gave him sex appeal. This was Rogers and Astaire in reverse. Baez was made ten times cooler and sexier standing next to Dylan, and scruffy Dylan looked like a class act standing next to her. In the applause, Baez looked down at the front row, directly at my buddy Peter, a fellow sophomore. “My god, you’re all so young,” she said. She was only thirty-four, but I thought, “And you’re so old.” They played one we didn’t know, called “Never Let Me Go.” It was beautiful. We were ecstatic. “Mama, You’ve Been on My Mind” and “I Shall Be Released” followed. The latter would become something of an anthem, the traditional sing-along show ender, for all manner of group shows. Here it was still its natural self, Dylan’s recurring theme of freedom just out of reach clear in duet form. Then the best of all: Baez left the stage, Dylan came down even closer to us, sat on a chair and sang “I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met).” It’s the lament of a rejected lover, with a bitter ending: “Is it easy to forget? I’ll say, It’s easily done / You just pick anyone / An’ pretend that you never have met!” As there’s no recording of this particular performance, only the one pic I snapped and later lost, there’s no one who can provide evidence to deny what I’m about to say. This was the greatest single moment of Bob Dylan’s career. Hyperbolic? Unprovable? Subjective? Ridiculous? Sure. But everyone has their own Bob Dylan, their own treasured moment, and this is mine. God, it was beautiful, the emphasis not on meanness but on heartache, Dylan inhabiting the song’s emotions like a method actor living his part. I hear it still.
The band reassembled. The Desire songs came one after the other in a rush, each one a revelation. “Hurricane,” “Oh, Sister,” “One More Cup of Coffee,” and “Sara.” Oh, my god, “Sara.” Then, an unforgettable “Just Like a Woman.” Halfway through this run, I think during “Hurricane,” Dylan, guitar around his neck, singing at the mic, looked down and saw me and my camera. He couldn’t leave the mic because he had to sing, but immediately, he leaned back, jerked his head out of frame, and danced around like he was dodging a wasp. I got the message and put the camera away, at least for a while. The next night, in Lowell, Dylan started the practice of appearing in whiteface on the tour. An homage to Les Enfants Du Paradis? A rebuke to the minstrel tradition? Simply a way for his face to be visible to those in the back? Of all these options, it’s just as plausible that it could’ve been me. Nope, it was me.
A ludicrous claim, and one that I don’t seriously believe. Still, is it really any less credible than any other explanation? I might have wondered about it at the time. And maybe I still do. My delusion, though, maybe reveals something about our desire, as fans, as listeners, to attach ourselves to the artist’s story, to matter in the grand design. Again, we are more than consumers, we are participants. Or are we just thieves?
The cast assembled for the finish, “This Land Is Your Land.” Then they left, and the house lights came on. There’s a moment in the Scorsese film showing the crowd at end of one of the shows. They look dazed, happy, bewildered, shaken. In one shot, a woman cries uncontrollably. Maybe we didn’t sob, but that was us, too. We staggered out to lay on a small, goatless berm by the parking lot, and we stared up at the stars. A friend later gave me the phrase for the moment, “ecstatic togetherness,” capturing that feeling of being as one, uplifted, alive to the world and ourselves.
In the spring, Chris, the future eco-warrior, and I moved to an off-campus apartment together. This did not go well, due to the fact that I was an absent-minded, wannabe intellectual who drank to excess. I was heavily involved in various art and theater projects, and struggling page-by-page through a dense philosophy text for a class far out of my ken. Petty details like vacuuming, washing dishes, and taking out the garbage were bourgeois wastes of time. Chris took exception. One day toward the end of semester, I noticed the pile of Rolling Thunder pics were no longer on the top of the bedroom bureau where I had “stored” them. There were a lot of piles in the room, so it took a while before I concluded they’d gone missing. I asked Chris if he’d seen them. He smiled like a killer from a horror film. “I wanted to do something that would really hurt you,” he said. The fucker had destroyed them. I ran to my book of negatives. He’d found those too and removed them to God knows where, preventing me from ever reprinting them. The bits of soul I’d stolen and frozen onto photo paper had escaped. All but one, the best of all, Dylan singing “Isis.” I’d kept in the inside flap of a loose leaf notebook, so I could show it at a moment’s notice. All the rest—Stoner’s swagger, McGuinn’s crazed look, Ronson’s pantsuit, Baez dancing, Ginsberg in the aisle, Dylan in flight—all of them were gone.
Maybe dignity’s never been photographed, but the lost show was, even if all but one of the pictures have returned into sand. I write this in place of them.
Bob Dylan, North Dartmouth Massachusetts,
November 1, 1975. Photo courtesy of Bill Lattanzi.
[1]http://www.flaggingdown.com/t/rolling-thunder
