Book 5 details Bob Dylan’s return to live performance, beginning and ending with his biggest tours to date.
Aside from special one-off performances, Dylan had not staged a full-scale tour since 1966. In the intervening eight years, the world of rock ’n’ roll touring had changed dramatically. Now, in the 1970s, touring was big business, and operations had scaled accordingly. For Dylan’s return to touring at the start of 1974, he reunited with The Band, booking a forty-concert, thirty-date, twenty-one-city tour that traveled to arenas across the United States and Canada. When the tour was announced in November 1973, it generated a tremendous amount of excitement among fans and the media, with Dylan landing on the cover of Newsweek.
Dylan closed out 1974 by writing and recording Blood on the Tracks, an album that is widely regarded as a masterpiece. During a summer spent on his farm in Minnesota in 1974, he worked on the songs, filling every space of three small pocket notebooks with his already tiny handwriting and in the lyrics to “Idiot Wind.” Words, phrases, and ideas jostle for space, building into songs that run into one another on the page. The energy of Dylan’s inspiration is palpable, as is his work ethic and master craftsman’s touch.
Feeding off the revitalized energy that could be felt in New York City’s Greenwich Village, Dylan decided to gather musicians, poets, playwrights, filmmakers, and other artists to form what would become known as the Rolling Thunder Revue. Across thirty shows from October 30 to December 8, 1975, Dylan and his caravan would travel through small towns in the Northeast, showing up, playing live concerts with little to no advance warning. A crew would be on hand to film the proceedings, some scenes highly scripted, others improvised and inspired by the moment. In stark contrast with the tightly formatted 1974 tour, the Rolling Thunder Revue would be open and evolving.
Between February and December 1978, Dylan embarked on his first world tour since 1966. Backed by an eleven-piece band, he performed 114 shows across four continents, with stops in Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Europe, the United States, and Canada. The tour began with Dylan’s first visit to Japan.
In the midst of this grueling tour, Dylan experienced a religious awakening, and his first public expression of his newfound faith came during the final show of the tour when he debuted “Do Right to Me Baby (Do Unto Others),” an original gospel song riffing on the Golden Rule. For the next few years, Dylan explored his new gospel sound in songs.
