“The level of quality was incredible”: Why the Rolling Thunder Revue was Roger McGuinn’s favourite tour
Roger McGuinn is a rock ‘n’ roll chameleon. Rising to fame as the frontman of American rock band The Byrds, McGuinn revolutionised electric guitar playing, adapting his own banjo finger-picking styles and experimenting with his signature Rickenbacker 12-string.
The Byrds gave Bob Dylan’s ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ a second life, existing in limbo between folk and rock, and earned them their first number one. Their second, a rendition of Pete Seeger’s ‘Turn! Turn! Turn!’, became synonymous with the hippie idealism of the Sixties.
McGuinn went on to release ten solo albums, collaborating with icons such as Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen, Bo Diddley and, perhaps most central to his musical identity, Dylan. The two first crossed paths in the early days of the Byrds. After the band found fame through one of Dylan’s most poignant tunes, Dylan became a frequent visitor of McGuinn’s home in Malibu, liking the house so much that he’d even asked to rent it.
“One time we were up there and he said, ‘I wanna do something different, man,’” McGuinn recalls. “When I asked what he meant, he said, ‘I dunno, maybe something like a circus.’” The pair reunited again six months later, when McGuinn bumped into Dylan in his old stomping grounds of New York’s West Village. Dylan promptly invited McGuinn to go on tour with him, feeling inspired upon returning to his old haunts.
That tour would become the Rolling Thunder Revue, one of the most legendary in rock ‘n’ roll history. On the road from 1975-76, the genesis of Rolling Thunder was, in Dylan’s words, to “play for the people”. Dylan consciously played smaller auditoriums in less-populated cities, curating an intimacy that his swift rise to fame rarely allowed. A rotating number of musicians joined him on tour alongside McGuinn, including Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. The tour would later be immortalised in Martin Scorsese’s titular documentary, released in 2019.
McGuinn joined for both the Fall 1975 and Spring 1976 legs of the tour, going so far as to cancel a planned tour of his own in order to participate. “He wanted to revive the spirit of Greenwich Village with Rolling Thunder,” McGuinn remembers. “It was like a travelling artists’ colony. There were about 300 people on the road with him.” Dylan’s road manager and associate Bob Neuwirth assembled the tour’s backing musicians from Dylan’s recording sessions for his album Desire, including violinist Scarlet Rivera and guitarist Mick Ronson.
McGuinn recalls getting into all sorts of hijinks with Ronson on tour, creating a circus of their own. He recounts: “Mick and I were drinking buddies on the Rolling Thunder tour. We’d be taking advantage of the hospitality suite every night. We’d both be hitting the vodka, mostly. Mick was a Vodka Collins man, which was a sort of lemonade with vodka. He was great. We’d play guitars and hang out. I remember running him around the Belleview Biltmore Hotel in Clearwater, Florida, in a wheelchair. Everybody stopped and just stared at us.”
Despite coming from David Bowie’s Spiders from Mars, Ronson possessed a humility that McGuin quickly took a liking to. “Mick never talked about the old days with Bowie and the Spiders From Mars,” he says, “he just blended in with everyone else on that tour. He was just like one of the folkies. We’d both wait until we were summoned by Dylan.”
McGuinn found himself in an environment far beyond his hippie dwellings of Malibu and the tour quickly became a favourite. “The Rolling Thunder tour parked [in Clearwater, Florida] for a couple of weeks,” he remembers. “It must have cost Dylan a lot, because he was putting us all into luxury resorts. The level of quality was incredible; we were all living high on the hog.”
Even while McGuinn and Dylan’s relationship had its unstable moments, the pair’s collaboration on the Rolling Thunder tour remains a defining moment for the counterculture, and certainly solidified McGuinn’s virtuosity as a pillar in rock history.
Watch McGuinn and Dylan perform ‘Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door’ on the Rolling Thunder Revue tour below.
