If it took boa feathers, pancake makeup and a movie plot completely incomprehensibe to all but him to get Bob Dylan onto a stage near me, that was fine by me and thousands of other music fans in Toronto on December 1, 1975, when the massively overstaffed and overthought and yet grossly underrated Rolling Thunder Revue swept into Maple Leaf Gardens.

To his meandering caravan of minstrels — Joan Baez, Ronee Blakley, Roger McGuinn, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Bob Neuwirth — Dylan had this night added a pair of Canadians, his long-time buddies Joni Mitchell, who played a few other dates with the revue, and Gordon Lightfoot, who did not. Toronto missed out on another tour mainstay, the strange Texas Jewboy Kinky Friedman, but had the full roster of back-up talent hired on by Neuwirth — T-Bone Burnett, David Mansfield, Scarlet Rivera, Rob Stoner, Howie Wyeth and, shock and hooray, Mick Ronson.

“The Bob” had just finished recording “Desire” in New York with some of the band and was “sort of” rehearsing for a tour when Baez et al began dropping by to jam and somebody said, “Hey, let’s put on a show!” or something like that. Lightfoot, whose “Early Morning Rain” had always been one of Dylan’s favourites, was among those, including Patti Smith and Blues Brothers John Belushi and Dan Ayckroyd, who joined the free-for-alls at the Other End.

The original plan was for a casual tour of small clubs, with the proceeds being given away to good causes. Dylan wanted to get some ideas on celluloid too and hired his buddy Howard Alk to direct a tour film and the still-little-known playwright Sam Shepard to do the script. This spool of tatty thread didn’t see the light of day until 1978, as the twistedly improvised “Renaldo and Clara”, and it wasn’t exactly classic Truffaut, as Dylan had hoped. Maybe the French understand it, though.

Damn groupies: Springsteen and John Prine, backstage in New York, asking Bob how it’s done.

And the small clubs soon became hockey arenas thanks to heavy ticket demand. The finale of the first leg of the tour, “The Night of the Hurricane”, took place at Madison Square Garden in New York on December 8, with Muhammed Ali and Roberta Flack saying hello to a smattering of 14,000.

Beyond the movie, Shepard scored much better with his journal, published as “The Rolling Thunder Logbook”, of which I own a well-thumbed copy. It has a nice few pages on Bob and Allen Ginsberg’s visit to Kerouac’s grave in Lowell, Massachusetts.
Ginsberg was along for most of the tour, though I didn’t see him in Toronto (maybe he got stopped at the border) and his planned recitations during the concerts were cut for brevity’s sake. Yeah, that’s it, brevity. I think they just didn’t want him yammering on about karma every night, although Rubin Carter’s fellow inmates were subjected to one of Allen’s monologues when the Revue performed at their prison, with “Hurricane” the single then on the airwaves.

Ginsberg and several others couldn’t be assed to move again after Hannukah, when the Rolling Thunder Revue rolled again, beginning with a second benefit for Hurricane Carter in Houston, and puttered eastward and westward until croaking in a half-empty gym in Salt Lake City. After that, Dylan swore off music for almost two years.

The Toronto show, though, was fascinating from start to finish, both for its star power and the hefty range of songs that emerged from the rotating headliners and “Guam”, the back-up band. Neuwirth performed a short warm-up, then Dylan appeared, in whiteface, and sand “When I Paint My Masterpiece”, the masterpiece presumably being himself.

He did “It Ain’t Me, Babe”, “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”, “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You” and “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry”, then a couple of new ones, “”Romance in Durango” and “Isis”. Then Baez joined him for “The Times They are a-Changin’”, which is going to be an electromagnetic moment in any context.

Baez kept things mercifully short during her own set and didn’t once say, “My husband David”, perhaps because she and Bob were getting it on again (major alchemy backstage and on film on this tour, with Dylan’s wife cast as the third party).

We got “Dark as a Dungeon”, “Never Let Me Go, “I Dreamed I Saw St Augustine”, “I Shall Be Released”, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”, “Love Minus Zero/No Limit”, the magnificent “Simple Twist of Fate”, “Oh, Sister” and a stomping “Hurricane”, “One More Cup of Coffee (Valley Below)”, “Sara” and then, get this, “Just Like a Woman” and “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”.

Throughout the show there was as much texture in the sound as there was in the lush tapestries laid about the stage, with Mansfield’s pedal-steel, Ronson’s rock guitar and Rivera’s electric violin not just taking turns punctuating the lyrics but often combining in a decidedly exotic blend. It was a real treat, capped off with a group finale, Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land”. It doesn’t get much better than that.

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Well it certainly didn’t get any better any of the other times I saw Bob Dylan live. I’d almost seen him perform impromptu, in what would have been an historic event, when he showed up on Centre Island to see Lightfoot’s set at the 1972 Mariposa Folk Festival. As will soon be explained in another concert review, though, the crowd got so frenzied that Dylan found his very presence sucking all the wind out of every other artist’s sails and was forced to beat a hasty retreat, songs unsung.

His planned concerts came on October 12, 1978 (backing “Street Legal”) and October 29, 1981 (”Shot of Love”), both at Maple Leaf Gardens, and on June 6, 1990, (”Under the Red Sky”) at the O’Keefe Centre. It is always a treat to see Bob Dylan play, make no mistake, but he is famous for his mood-prone unevenness, and I fear that, apart from Rolling Thunder, I’ve yet to see a committed performance. These three others were, for the most part, forgettable, despite some magical moments where one’s jaw drops without neural prompting.

In ‘78 he did “Forever Young”, in ‘81 “Mr Tambourine Man” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”, and he always sang “Like a Rolling Stone”. These were fundamentally breathtaking moments.

Dylan’s so-called “Never Ending Tour”, launched in 1988, has meanwhile become just that, and I’ve heard plenty of testimony that he’s still out there knocking audiences dead on a regular basis.

Thanks to the Bobspotters at A Ballad of a thin Man, here are the complete set lists for the three non-Revue Toronto shows:

Al Kooper at the keyboards for Bob in ‘81.

1978: “My Back Pages”, “I’m Ready”, “Is Your Love in Vain?”, “Shelter from the Storm”, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”, “Tangled Up in Blue”, “Ballad of a Thin Man”, “Maggie’s Farm”, “I Don’t Believe You”, “Like a Rolling Stone”, “I Shall Be Released”, “Going, Going, Gone”, “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)”, “It Ain’t Me, Babe”, “Am I Your Stepchild?”, “One More Cup Of Coffee (Valley Below)”, “Blowin’ in the Wind”, “Girl from the North Country”, “Where are You Tonight? (Journey through Dark Heat)”, “Masters of War”, “Just Like a Woman”, “To Ramona”, “All Along the Watchtower” “All I Really Want to Do”, “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”, “Forever Young”, “Changing of the Guards”

1981: “Gotta Serve Somebody”, “I Believe in You”, “Like a Rolling Stone”, “I Want You”, “Man Gave Names to All the Animals”, “Maggie’s Farm”, “Girl from the North Country”, “Ballad of a Thin Man”, “Simple Twist of Fate”, “All Along the Watchtower”, “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight”, “Forever Young”, “Gamblin’ Man”, “The Times They Are a-Changin’”, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”, “Watered-Down Love”, “Masters of War”, “Mr Tambourine Man”, “Solid Rock”, “Let It Be Me”, “Dead Man, Dead Man”, “When You Gonna Wake Up”, “In the Garden”, “Blowin’ in the Wind”, “It Ain’t Me, Babe”, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”

1990: “Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine)”, “I’ll Remember You”, “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again”, “I Believe in You”, “Masters of War”, “Gotta Serve Somebody”, “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”, “Love Minus Zero - No Limit”, Ballad of Hollis Brown”, “Gates of Eden”, “Desolation Row”, “What Was It You Wanted”, “What Good Am I?”, “All Along the Watchtower”, “I Shall Be Released”, “Like a Rolling Stone”, “I’ve Been All Around This World”, “Maggie’s Farm”

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* See #12: Heatwave
* See #13: Watkins Glen
* See #14: The Who
* See #15: Crosby, Stills Nash & Young
* COMING SOON: The Compleat Dorseyland Concert Directory