Four performances on Bob Dylan’s 1976 live album Hard Rain came from one night in Fort Worth. On November 6, that May 16 concert is due to appear in full on three LPs and as part of a 39-CD archive covering the spring leg of the Rolling Thunder Revue. The two editions offer different ways into the tour, with the Texas concert providing a point of overlap.

The 1976 Rolling Thunder Revue box, booklet, photographs and CDs are laid out on a white background.
The 39-CD Rolling Thunder Revue box, shown in the label’s product photograph.

The box contains 381 tracks, of which 371 are previously unreleased. Its running order starts in Lakeland, Florida, on April 18 and works through the surviving professionally recorded shows, including the May 23 concert at Fort Collins. Some performances are marked incomplete. The count describes individual recordings, so a song heard on more than one date can account for multiple entries.

The three-LP edition follows the 22-track Fort Worth programme. It is newly mixed from the original multitrack tapes, and the same concert appears on discs 32 and 33 of the box. Listeners choosing the LP get the complete recorded programme of one night, from “Mr. Tambourine Man” to “Gotta Travel On”. Listeners choosing the box get that sequence in the context of the surrounding tour dates.

Hard Rain gives buyers a way to make sense of the overlap. In the Fort Worth tracklist, the archival credits identify “I Threw It All Away”, “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again”, “Oh, Sister” and “Lay, Lady, Lay” as performances already issued on that album. Their placement in the concert gives them neighbours they did not have on the shorter release. The new edition also includes the Fort Worth “Going, Going, Gone”, which was shared in advance.

The name Hard Rain also belongs to the television special associated with Fort Collins. Dylan’s archive includes the complete May 23 performance, remixed from multitrack tapes. The Fort Collins “Idiot Wind” is the performance associated with the television broadcast and the 1976 album. The Fort Worth vinyl has an “Idiot Wind” from a week earlier. That is one reason to check the city and date when looking for a version you already know.

The official store also lists a separate two-CD Fort Worth edition for December 18. It contains the same 22-track concert as the November vinyl, with 18 performances previously unreleased. A listener who only wants the Texas date on CD can therefore wait for December instead of buying the full tour box in November.

Fort Worth is the easier place to hear how the pieces of one show fit together. It sets the band arrangements alongside Dylan’s duets with Joan Baez, including “Railroad Boy” and “I Pity the Poor Immigrant”. The box makes it possible to follow those songs between cities, where changes in their placement and the surrounding material give a sense of how the programme moved. The LP is a single evening with a beginning and an end. The CD set is for tracing what happened between evenings.