Martin Scorsese Helps Us Relive Bob Dylans Wildest Tour in Rolling Thunder Revue

Its the summer of 1975, and Bob Dylan is going back on the road for the Rolling Thunder Revue, his most unconventional tour yet. In Rolling Thunder, a new Netflix documentary about the tour directed by Martin Scorsese, Dylan and a handful of collaborators sit down to discuss the fabled adventure, which saw the singer seek out smaller, more intimate audiences at idiosyncratic, sometimes secret locations. Dylan also tweaked his aesthetic for the tour, often wearing stark white face makeup or surrealistic masks. In a new trailer for Rolling Thunder, available exclusively on Vanity Fair, Dylan speaks candidly about the tours legacy.

“It wasnt a success,” he says bluntly. “Not if you measure success in terms of profit.”

Though the tour is regarded as a financial failure it retrospect, it looms large in Dylans career: a kooky journey that saw the singer assemble an alt-star crew including Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, poet Allen Ginsberg, Sharon Stone, and playwright Sam Shepard, who was hired to write a screenplay based on the tour. He ended up writing a poetic literary accompaniment, titled the Rolling Thunder Logbook, instead. Later, Shepard and Dylan would co-write Renaldo and Clara, a loose, vignette-driven film that would incorporate concert footage from the tour.

Speaking of: Scorsese has a lot of material to work with in Rolling Thunder, thanks in part to Dylans ambitions at the time to heavily document the tour and turn it into a film. This brief trailer alone includes never-before-seen glimpses into that time in the Nobel Prize-winning musicians life, featuring rare footage of him performing onstage and paling around with friends in between gigs. The film also includes sit-down interviews with Stone and Baez, who hails Dylans stage presence. “The charisma that he has Ive never seen anywhere before or since,” she says.

Theres also a brief snippet of an interview conducted with the late Shepard, who died in 2017. “It was a circus atmosphere,” he says of the tour. “It was a feeling of being alive.”

Even now, thats the running theme about the tour, according to Dylan. “Life isnt about finding yourself or finding anything,” he declares in the trailer. “Life is about creating yourself.“

In anticipation of the documentary, Dylan is also set to release a 14-CD box set of live recordings from the tour, which will be available June 9. Rolling Thunder will premiere on Netflix on June 11.

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