Soft Thunder

The late boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter may not have committed the murders for which he was convicted in 1967, but plenty of evidence suggests that he did.

And of the several good reasons not to invest in Columbia/Legacy’s new 14-disc Bob Dylan box, The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1975 Live Recordings, that one is the strongest.

“Hurricane,” the righteously indignant song about Carter’s arrest and trial that Dylan wrote with Jacques Levy and recorded in October 1975, paints Carter as a hardworking, peace-loving, and totally innocent victim of a racist frame-up. Totaling 8½ minutes, it was released as a double-sided single, whereupon it hit the Top 40 and ignited a free-Carter movement resulting in a 1976 retrial.

But Carter was found guilty that time too, and six years later the Supreme Court of New Jersey upheld the verdict. He was eventually freed in 1985 when a district judge deemed “racism rather than reason” to have been at the root of Carter’s convictions, and prosecutors decided a third trial wouldn’t be worth the trouble.

By that time, Dylan hadn’t performed “Hurricane” for nearly a decade and would never perform it again. It’s just as well. It makes Dylan seem like a fool.

One encounters “Hurricane” seven times on The 1975 Live Recordings, twice in rehearsal incarnations and five times in concert. Hearing Dylan parade his gullibility so often and at such lengths (56 minutes altogether) is not pleasant. By comparison, “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”—which also takes liberties with the facts of a real-life legal case but which occurs only five times on the new box—is a model of sober jurisprudence.

“Hurricane” and “Hattie Carroll” aren’t the only numbers that wear out their welcomes. Because The 1975 Live Recordings contains five complete Dylan performances, and because his set lists barely varied, almost every song gets pounded into the ground.

It’s too bad. As seven of the eight performances of “Isis” prove, the autumn of 1975 found Dylan in particularly strong voice, and his large, ragtag band could really whip up a storm.

But the main reason the tour has become legendary—indeed, the main reason that Martin Scorsese’s semifictional Netflix film Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story makes riveting viewing—is that it wasn’t all about Dylan.

During the first half of each show, band members (Bob Neuwirth, Rob Stoner, a then-unknown T Bone Burnett) and famous guests (Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Roger McGuinn, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott) took turns warming up the crowd, creating a communally festive atmosphere. Recordings of these sets exist. And had Columbia used them rather than the Dylan-only sets, the variety alone would’ve been invigorating.

NO SUCH PROBLEM afflicts the new DVD, Blu-ray, and two-CD expanded edition of The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus (ABKCO).

The backstory: Seven years before Dylan’s revue, the Rolling Stones had had a similar idea, except that their event would be a one-off TV special, not a road show.

To that end, the Stones, the Who, Taj Mahal, Marianne Faithfull, Jethro Tull, the Dirty Mac (Eric Clapton, John Lennon, Keith Richards, Mitch Mitchell), Yoko Ono, some circus performers, and the classical musicians Ivry Gitlis and Julius Katchen crammed into a big top and gave the invited fans a show of a lifetime.

On film the Who takes top honors, on CD Taj Mahal. But the Stones deliver too. And no one, unlike 10½ hours of Rolling Thunder Dylan, leaves the audience wanting less.