There are live albums that, very politely and with great effort, reproduce the records you already own. Then there is Hard Rain, which sounds as though somebody threw those records into a washing machine with a brick.
Recorded during the second Rolling Thunder Revue in 1976, it captures Dylan at a strange moment: Blood on the Tracks and Desire were behind him, his marriage to Sara Dylan was collapsing, and the travelling circus of Rolling Thunder was beginning to feel less like liberation and more like a job that had to be finished.
“Maggie’s Farm” is the perfect opener. The studio version was Dylan’s declaration that he would no longer play by other people’s rules. Here it sounds like he has returned to Maggie’s farm with a flamethrower. “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again” gets a similarly muscular treatment, its surreal studio laziness replaced by the momentum of a band that has been on the road too long.
But the real treasures are the Blood on the Tracks songs. “Shelter from the Storm” loses the intimacy of the studio recording and becomes something much larger and more desperate. “You’re a Big Girl Now” is similarly transformed: private heartbreak becomes public theatre. And “Idiot Wind” is the album’s volcano, louder and nastier than the studio version, with Dylan sounding as though he has decided that emotional restraint is a bourgeois conspiracy.
Even “Lay, Lady, Lay” changes character. The Nashville Skyline original is warm and intimate; here it is a full-scale rock performance. The bedroom has become an arena.
That is the great strength of Hard Rain. Dylan doesn’t simply perform his old songs. He puts them through whatever has happened to him since he wrote them. A character trait that continues to this very day.
In the live-album catalogue, it sits somewhere between the monumental Before the Flood and the more expansive Rolling Thunder recordings later released in the Bootleg Series. Before the Flood sounds like Dylan conquering the world. This sounds like Dylan trying to keep the circus moving while his personal life is catching fire.
It is rough, sometimes ragged, occasionally exhausted—and completely alive.
Donnie’s Rating: 9/10
