Genre: American pop/rock
Places I remember: Marbecks Records (Auckland)
Fab, and all the other pimply hyperboles: Shelter From The Storm
Gear costume: Everything else.
Active compensatory factors: Hard Rain is from 1976's Rolling Thunder Revue. Compare this to the fuller Rolling Thunder Revue concert found on the Bootleg series Vol 5 (Live 1975) and experience the difference.
The light and airy atmosphere from 1975 is replaced by brooding malevolence in Hard Rain. The face makeup, cool hat and feathers have been replaced by scraggy beard and gypsy scarf!
Stripped back from the artiface, the single version is raw power (and that gets dissipated over a double CD anyway).
The versions here are well chosen - there's a snarl, snap, crackle about Idiot Wind that is largely kept in check on the studio version from Blood on the Tracks. Each song has been deconstructed, rearranged and then punk'd up into a rolling thunder menace.
This is the Dylan album I want! It sits alongside John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, Neil Young's Tonight's the Night in the honest emotion charts.
Where do they all belong? Less is more. We now have a multi CD pack with a variety of RTR concerts to experience, but I'll be sticking with the brutal Hard Rain.
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