Word: thunderous
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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History I, or The Rolling Thunder Tour Gets Under Way: Back in the late summer of 1975 Dylan returned to New York from California, that godless land of Linda Ronstadt, and began to put together a touring band of gypsies--old friends like Allen Ginsburg and old New York folkies like Bobby Neuwirth and Ramblin' Jack Elliot, cut with hard-core rockers at loose ends like Roger McGuinn and Mick Ronson--and took it out on the road. He called it the Rolling Thunder Revue, and it was to be everything the 40-data tour with The Band...
...promise of good times--it was also something like an imperial summons. Most of the old New York folky crowd's careers were floundering; they were only too happy to tour. One who desperately also wanted to come, and who never got the call, was Phil Ochs. The Rolling Thunder bus pulled out of New York without him; a month later Ochs was a suicide at 41. Ochs and Dylan had fallen out way back in 1965 over "Please Crawl Out Your Bathroom Window"; Dylan, like rock and roll, never forgets. And Rolling Thunder, while showcasing the old folkies...
This brings us to the movie itself. According to Dylan, the Rolling Thunder Tour's sole purpose was to make money ($1.25 million worth) to support the movie, and now we have the finished product to judge, all three hours, 52 minutes worth. It opens with Dylan singing "When I Paint My Masterpiece" and closes with "Knocking on Heaven's Door," and every song between those two clicks; Dylan singing with demonic intensity as he did on neither the Rolling Thunder television special or the live album. Renaldo and Clara also contains some of the best concert footage ever shot...
...face fills the screen constantly, his voice is heard only five or six times, most of those coming from off-camera. Dylan does it with a wink and a nod, the subtle eye brow raise of a born actor; it is very much his film. But like the Rolling Thunder Revue itself, we are left with the idea that maybe it's all a big joke, Dylan giving all those people a last laugh and cruel shove. Allen Ginsburg as some sort of earth father reminds us that the Beats for all their wildness never had the discipline for truly...
...next day there were no slips. The world premiere of John Green's Mine Eyes Have Seen, a huge, jazzy work that might better be called Mine Ears Have Heard, had both thunder and clarity. It got a standing ovation. Said Jaffe with some understatement: "That was a great big body of sound...