ICYMI: Rolling Thunder Revue is a new film on Netflix, a Bob Dylan documentary by Martin Scorcese that was just snuck on with no fanfare. Via the Guardian:
The film is about Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue show of US and Canada in 1975 – a 57-date tour in which the troubadour appeared in whiteface makeup, with an extraordinary changing list of support acts that included Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Roger McGuinn, Ronee Blakley, “Ramblin’” Jack Elliott, Bob Neuwirth and the violinist Scarlet Rivera. And these weren’t massive arenas he was playing, they were little halls and venues, with publicity sometimes limited to flyers handed out on the day to astonished denizens of the little towns in which the Ken Kesey-style tour bus would cheerfully roll up with the grinning Dylan at the wheel. Try to imagine it happening now.
What was it like for Dylan to be spearheading this event, a kind of musical rumour meandering through an America that was just recovering from the mortification of Watergate and gearing itself up as best it could for its bicentennial celebrations? “It was so long ago I wasn’t even born,” says the wry Dylan now with a shrug, and his interviewee appearances are all very funny, that voice as dry as prairie grass.