The Rolling Thunder Review was more fun than the law allows. By a long shot. It was a bus full of musicians and singers and painters hurtling through the dead of night, making a movie, writing songs and playing some of the most incendiary, intense and inspired rock n roll, before or since. (T-Bone Burnett, from the Foreword)
In the Autumn of 1975 when America was festering with Bicentennial madness Bob Dylan and his Rolling Thunder Review – a rag-tag variety show that Dylan envisioned as a travelling gypsy circus – toured 22 cities across the Northeast US.
In amongst the motley crew that included Joni Mitchell, T-Bone Burnett, Allen Ginsberg, Mick Ronson, Joan Baez, Arlo Guthrie and Ramblin Jack Elliott, was playwright Sam Shepard, ostensibly hired to write the script for a Fellini-esque movie that would come of the tour.