Most of the people were wide-eyed with disbelief yet kind of bummed. Over and over, they said that they felt duped, suckered, maybe even a little betrayed. Of the 20 or so people Owen-Gleiberman (Variety) had conversations with, not one said, “Really? That’s kind of cool!” The fakery left no one with that Andy Kaufman feeling of awe. And this was a crowd of people who were disposed to like the movie, many of them with two or three degrees of separation from Martin Scorsese. The question I kept getting was, “Why did he do it?”
Dylan himself was a famous purveyor of images that weren’t real. He was a Jewish kid from Minnesota who sold himself, early on, as a hardscrabble folk singer. He’d tweaked his persona nearly as often as the Beatles, and on the Rolling Thunder Revue tour, in case we missed the point, he performed onstage in white-face mime make-up, as if putting a mask on over the mask. Who was Bob Dylan? As Todd Haynes caught — brilliantly — in his 2007 Dylan fantasia
“I’m Not There,” Bob Dylan was whoever he wanted to be, and whoever we wanted him to be. Protest singer, electric rocker, cowboy hermit, post-counterculture divorce casualty (and yes, that was another conscious image: the subject of Dylan’s greatest album, “Blood on the Tracks”), and now roving hippie troubadour. Dylan was an artist who made himself up as he went along. (Variety)
"The tour was a catastrophe," Dylan explains in the clip, which features interviews with the legend and other members of the tour. "It wasn’t a success. Not if you measure success in terms of profit."
"We didn’t have enough masks on that tour," he continued, as scenes of the circus-themed tour flashed on the screen. "Life isn’t about finding yourself or finding anything, life is about creating yourself."
Hear Bob Dylan Rehearse ‘One More Cup of Coffee (Valley Below)’ in 1975- Previously-unheard performance was recorded at a motel one day before the Rolling Thunder Revue began touring in October 1975
Collection will include five full shows from fall 1975 leg, recently unearthed rehearsal tapes.
Martin Scorsese’s upcoming tour documentary on Bob Dylan will be released on Netflix in June, it has been announced.
Bob Dylan’s massive Rolling Thunder Revue box set will feature over 100 previously unreleased live recordings taken from the first leg of the musician’s famed 1975 tour. The 14-disc set will be released June 7th via Columbia Records/Legacy Recordings.
The box set will come with a 52-page booklet featuring some never-before-seen photographs from the Rolling Thunder Revue, plus an essay from novelist and musician Wesley Stace. The set is available to pre-order and is available digitally and on CD.
