Album: Bob Dylan

Live 1975: The Rolling Thunder Revue, Columbia

Conceived in Greenwich Village coffee-shops in the full flush of Dylan's Seventies re-emergence with Blood on the Tracks and Desire, the Rolling Thunder Revue was his response to the era's stadium-rock excesses. This small-scale travelling minstrel show featured Bob and a few of his old folkie chums (Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn, Ramblin' Jack Elliott etc), along with the poet Allen Ginsberg, various friends and hangers-on, and the playwright Sam Shepard. The latter's task was to try to bring coherence to the various semi-improvised dramatic scenes filmed along the way, which would eventually secure brief release as the four-hour movie Renaldo and Clara. Filleted out from the others' contributions, Dylan's performances finally appear now as the fifth instalment in his Bootleg Series, a curate's egg double-album whose high points – mostly his urgent, intimate solo renditions of "Mr Tambourine Man", "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue", "Tangled up in Blue" and especially "Simple Twist of Fate" – are counterbalanced by a certain clumsiness in the band's gypsy/ flamenco/country arrangements of songs such as "It Ain't Me Babe" and "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll". Particularly grating are Joan Baez's backing vocals, which are either too camply mannered, or barked out as if she's shouting to hear herself above the on-stage mêlée. Despite that, there are some moments of genuine impassioned drama, such as the "Hurricane" that would ultimately help get the boxer Rubin Carter released from jail, and "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall", transmuted here into a rollicking good-time electric boogie.