FREE CONTEST WINNERS    BOB DYLAN 1975-1981 ROLLING THUNDER & THE GOSPEL YEARS DVD

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CONTEST: The DVD is entitled Dylan 1975-1981. Send us a few lines and tell
us about your favorite Dylan moment from that time period.

Without question it was The Quintessential Bob Dylan who appeared before a large, outdoor ‘birthday’ crowd in Fort Collins, CO, in late May of bicentennial 1976.

That evening's cool reworking of Dylan's historic catalog (particularly Blood on the Tracks) combined with the ‘Semitic’ theatrics (or as once described by one critic, the ‘Arab Terrorist’ look) has always represented to me the ‘Ground Zero’ epitome of Dylan as a performing artist. Quite ironic, I might add, given that this performance eventually surfaced as (of all things) the aptly titled Hard Rain TV special released by NBC a few months later.
 
Indeed, many other Dylan fans that I've since encountered concur with this view, often agreeing that for the just-turned-35 Bob Dylan it must have seemed a most appropriate moment for that rather climactic, dramatic blend of reflection and reinvention.
 
Clinton Heylin has boldly referred to this 1976 tour in general as one of Dylan's best – and well, that makes two of us; as two of my most inspiring listens are, to this day, the grainy ‘Dust Bowl’ Oklahoma City & Fort Worth tapes of that year captured on some very archaic equipment by some very lucky people.
 
The well regarded Dylan scholar Paul Williams has recently claimed that these surviving Rolling Thunder recordings tend to sound better with each passing year and again I have to agree, adding that as a ‘modest’ Dylan collector the 1975-76 Rolling Thunder Revues are about the only gigs I pay much mind to these days outside of Dylan's formative years in the Village.
 
In light of the bigger picture, 1976 was (at least for me) the Last Good Year, indeed the end of the line so to speak; I'd just come off a 3 year ‘free as a bee’ Kerouac-like stint, hitchhiking across the States (as well as Canada) and now resigned to surrendering myself to the Real Life/Real Job routine … winding down personally along with the great era of cutting edge music, 60s-style (surely due in part to the passing of a long dirty war in SE Asia but still ripe enough to be soon bulldozed by lame Disco Fever) … with Hard Rain brilliantly lamenting the whole affair.