Isis in '75

The double CD Live 1975: The Rolling Thunder Revue makes a big claim to be one of my favourite Dylan albums. I've been listening to it for the last few days. The previous CD in this series, the infamous 1965 electric "Judas!" chant one is pretty amazing, yes, but this is amazing too, in its own subtler way. It's a sound of a rag-tag band on full power, fully enjoying the whole experience.

I read Larry "Ratso" Sloman's account of the tour a few years ago. "Guitar sounds filled the air, Scarlett's haunting gypsy violin presiding over the clatter in hot, musky gyms and clean, stainless-steel auditoriums. The Rolling Thunder Revue was a caravan of gypsies, hoboes, trapeze artists, lonesome guitar slingers, and spiritual green berets" he writes. "They took to the road in the fall of '75, a weird karass, Dylan, Baez, Mitchell, Elliott, Neuwirth, McGuinn, Ronson, Blakley, Ginsberg, it went on and on".

The sense of the tour being something more than travelling between gigs I think helped the music. The tour was something of a statement but also something echoing back to travelling players, a twisting of the American on-the-road story, a sort of carnival. This video comes from the 4 hour film they made during the journey called Renaldo and Clara, a sort of quasi-mythical dramatisation of the Dylan myth and all the other myths he ransacked, appropriated and twisted to create it. I bought it on a DVD someone had burned from an old taped-off-TV video; it's never been released officially, perhaps because it's so rambling and incoherent. But that's part of its charm, as far as I'm concerned. You don't have to watch it all in order (or all of it at all!) to get the feel. You can dip in whenever and wherever you want.

I think the band sounds great, so tightly ramshackle - neither boringly similiar each night but not a hotchpotch either.