Description
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In fall 1975 and spring 1976 Bob Dylan led a travelling retinue of musicians around America on the two legs of the Rolling Thunder tour. Along for the ride were Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, David Blue, Kinky Friedman, T-Bone Burnett, Allen Ginsberg, Sam Sheppard, Mick Ronson and dozens more musicians, friends, family and hangers-on. The circus was documented in the film "Renaldo and Clara", the live album "Hard Rain" and a TV concert special of the same name, while in between the two legs of the tour Dylan released the classic Desire album. It is this period of heightened creativity and personal drama that Dylan authority, author and musician Sid Griffin, examines in "Shelter From The Storm". players were first marshaled, and the influences and implications around Renaldo & Clara. In a plethora of new interviews, unique behind-the-scenes accounts, and deconstructions of tour documents such as the NBC television special Hard Rain, Griffin provides new insight into Dylan's most legendary tour and offers unprecedented analysis of the musical torrents that came pouring forth as the Thunder Rolled.
By the tour's conclusion, both Dylan and the wider music industry were on the verge of significant transformation. Yet for those few gilded months, all that mattered was the nightly drama of the show and the sparking, transcendent possibilities of rock'n'roll itself. As this important new contribution to Dylan literature makes vividly clear, Rolling Thunder's headline act proved beyond doubt that he was more than an icon of the fast-fading 60s.
