Bob Dylan's Colorado Connection
A freewheelin' tale of blood on the tracks, rolling thunder and hard rain.
I’ve had Bob Dylan on the brain ever since I saw A Complete Unknown, the biopic nominated for eight Oscars, including Best Picture. (I can’t top my pal Leland Rucker’s capsule review: “Good film. [Timothée] Chalamet was great!! Too bad it was made up.”) It put me in mind of what his nibs was doing 50 years ago.
The backstory: At 18 years of age, still lacking any real direction and learning his craft, Dylan was essentially a scrawny kid trying to be a folk singer. He arrived in Denver in the summer of 1960 and wandered over to the Satire Lounge on Colfax Avenue to play some Woody Guthrie music. He was then offered his first job as a professional entertainer at the Gilded Garter, a honky-tonk palace in Central City, then a restored frontier town that had become a Colorado tourist attraction, complete with saloons and bad-guy actors with Western outfits and blanks in their six-shooters. He lasted all of a week and a half.
Fifteen years later, Dylan was once again an ascending star after spending the late ’60s and early ’70s refusing to behave like the counterculture hero that the early ’60s had made him. He recorded the largely acoustic Blood on the Tracks, an agonized masterpiece released in January 1975 that followed the breakdown of his marriage.
Dylan’s next logical step was to hit the road to promote the album, but little about the ensuing tour followed any formal reasoning. The Rolling Thunder Revue started out in October 1975 with the idea of a communal tour. Rather than playing conventional concerts at large rooms and coliseums, Dylan assembled a loosely knit group of merry old friends. The large, shifting entourage—including Joan Baez and such Greenwich Village regulars as Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Bobby Neuwirth and guests Allen Ginsberg, Joni Mitchell, Mick Ronson, Roger McGuinn and Arlo Guthrie—toured until spring 1976.
The Rolling Thunder Revue started out with surprise concerts at small halls and worked up to outdoor stadiums. Dylan and his production taped a show in Clearwater, Florida, and the program was auctioned off to NBC-TV after being offered to all three networks. A few weeks later, Dylan rejected the tape. Instead, he gave his nod to a group of documentary makers who filmed the May 23 concert…under cloudy skies at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. 25,000 of us fans were drenched by rain.
The footage of the Colorado concert, appropriately titled Hard Rain, aired on NBC in September. Most mainstream TV critics panned the show. That month also saw the release of the live Hard Rain album, which consisted of nine songs, four of which came from Dylan’s TV special; it was certified gold.
While some Dylanologists considered other RTR concerts superior, Dylan remained unrepentant. “I don’t really talk about what I do,” Dylan said to TV Guide. “I just try to be poetically and musically straight. I think of myself as more than a musician, more than a poet. The real self is something other than that. Writing and performing is what I do in this life and in this country.”
