Overview

"Book 5 details Bob Dylan's return to live performance, beginning and ending with his biggest tours to date. Aside from special one-off performances, Dylan had not staged a full-scale tour since 1966. In the intervening eight years, the world of rock 'n' roll touring had changed dramatically. Now, in the 1970s, touring was big business, and operations had scaled accordingly. For Dylan's return to touring at the start of 1974, he reunited with The Band, booking a forty-concert, thirty-date, twenty-one-city tour that traveled to arenas across the United States and Canada. When the tour was announced in November 1973, it generated a tremendous amount of excitement among fans and the media, with Dylan landing on the cover of Newsweek. Dylan closed out 1974 by writing and recording Blood on the Tracks, an album that is widely regarded as a masterpiece. During a summer spent on his farm in Minnesota in 1974, he worked on the songs, filling every space of three small pocket notebooks with his already tiny handwriting and in the lyrics to ""Idiot Wind."" Words, phrases, and ideas jostle for space, building into songs that run into one another on the page. The energy of Dylan's inspiration is palpable, as is his work ethic and master craftsman's touch. Feeding off the revitalized energy that could be felt in New York City's Greenwich Village, Dylan decided to gather musicians, poets, playwrights, filmmakers, and other artists to form what would become known as the Rolling Thunder Revue. Across thirty shows from October 30 to December 8, 1975, Dylan and his caravan would travel through small towns in the Northeast, showing up, playing live concerts with little to no advance warning. A crew would be on hand to film the proceedings, some scenes highly scripted, others improvised and inspired by the moment. In stark contrast with the tightly formatted 1974 tour, the Rolling Thunder Revue would be open and evolving. Between February and December 1978, Dylan embarked on his first world tour since 1966. Backed by an eleven-piece band, he performed 114 shows across four continents, with stops in Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Europe, the United States, and Canada. The tour began with Dylan's first visit to Japan. In the midst of this grueling tour, Dylan experienced a religious awakening, and his first public expression of his newfound faith came during the final show of the tour when he debuted ""Do Right to Me Baby (Do Unto Others),"" an original gospel song riffing on the Golden Rule. For the next few years, Dylan explored his new gospel sound in songs."

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Author Information

"Parker Fishel is an archivist who served as co-curator of the inaugural exhibitions at the Bob Dylan Center. His company, Americana Music Productions, provides consulting, research, and production work for artists and estates, record labels, and other entities looking to preserve archives and share the important stories found in them. His selected credits include Ann Arbor Blues Festival 1969 (Third Man Records), the Chelsea Hotel-inspired Chelsea Doors box set (Vinyl Me, Please), and several volumes of Bob Dylan's GRAMMY Award-winning Bootleg Series (Sony/Legacy). Fishel is also a board member of the Hot Club Foundation and a co-founder of the nonprofit improvised music archive Crossing Tones. Mark Davidson is the Curator of the Bob Dylan Archive and Senior Director of Archives and Exhibitions for the Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie Centers in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He holds a PhD in musicology from the University of California-Santa Cruz with an emphasis on folk music collecting, and an MSIS in archiving and library science from the University of Texas at Austin. He has written widely on music and archives, including his dissertation, ""Recording the Nation: Folk Music and the Government in Roosevelt's New Deal, 1936-1941,"" and the essay ""Blood in the Stacks: On the Nature of Archives in the Twenty-First Century,"" published in The World of Bob Dylan (2021). Raymond Foye (b. 1957, Lowell, Mass.) studied film with Stan Brakhage at the Art Institute of Chicago and worked as a literary editor at City Lights Books, where he edited The Unknown Poe (1980) and other titles. While living in San Francisco he edited two issues of Beatitude magazine and was a contributor to the punk zine Search and Destroy. His close friendship with the poet Bob Kaufman resulted in his editing Kaufman's final book of poems, The Ancient Rain (1981), for New Directions. In 2019, he co-edited Kaufman's Collected Poems for City Lights, for which he received the American Book Award. In 1985, he traveled with Francesco Clemente to India, where they founded Hanuman Books and published fifty books over the next ten years, including original titles by Cookie Mueller, Patti Smith, Robert Frank, and William Burroughs. From 1990 to 1995, he worked as director of exhibitions and publications at Gagosian Gallery in New York. Since 1995 he has worked as an independent curator, editor, and writer. Most recently he co-edited (with George Scrivani) Gregory Corso: The Golden Dot, Last Poems 1980-2000, for the Lithic Press. He is a contributing editor to the Brooklyn Rail and is a regular contributor to Gagosian Quarterly. Joy Harjo is an internationally renowned performer and writer of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She served three terms as the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2019 to 2022. The author of nine books of poetry, including the highly acclaimed An American Sunrise, several plays and children's books, and two memoirs, Crazy Brave and Poet Warrior, she is the recipient of honors including the Ruth Lily Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American Poets Wallace Stevens Award, two NEA fellowships, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. As a musician and performer, Harjo has produced seven award-winning music albums, including her newest, I Pray for My Enemies (2021). She is executive editor of the anthology When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry, and the editor of Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry, the companion anthology to her signature Poet Laureate project. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, board of directors chair of the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation, and the first Artist-in-Residence for Tulsa's Bob Dylan Center. She lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Richard Hell is the author of several books of fiction, poetry, essays, notebooks, autobiography, and collaborations, including The Voidoid, Go Now, Godlike, Across the Years, Artifact, Hot and Cold, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp, Massive Pissed Love, Wanna Go Out? by Theresa Stern (with Tom Verlaine), and Psychopts (with Christopher Wool). His book of poems, an essay, and eighty-eight notebook entries, entitled What Just Happened, was published in June 2023. He lives in New York."

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