I’ll be catching Martin Scorsese‘s Rolling Thunder Revue (Netflix, 6.12) late Friday morning, but knowing I can’t attend the big, ultra-cool 6.10 Manhattan screening (Alice Tully Hall followed by a Tavern on the Green party) breaks my heart into little pieces.
6.11 “road show” screenings will happen in London, Paris, Washington, D.C., Nashville, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Boston, Austin, Dallas, Houston, Portland, Tulsa, Tempe, Chicago, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Bologna and Sydney as well as in Los Angeles and New York, the two cities where the film will continue to play the following day and beyond.
From “Bob Dylan’s Glam Hootenanny: Returning to Rolling Thunder,” a 6.5 N.Y. Times piece by Jon Pareles: “How distant the mid-1970s seem now. They were unkempt, hairy, hedonistic, improvisational, analog, inefficient — anything but neatly calculated and Instagram-ready. Post-psychedelic and pre-AIDS, they were a continuation of the idealistic, natural 1960s, yet they were also an immediate precursor to the polymorphous, synthetic, role-playing disco era.
“The bitterness of Vietnam and Watergate lingered; hippie utopianism was giving way to a more selfish search for individual satisfaction. Things were still scruffy, but not quite so communal.
“The Rolling Thunder Revue, concocted by Bob Dylan, was precisely a manifestation of its era. Starting in Plymouth, Mass., where the colonial Pilgrims landed, it wandered the northeastern United States and Canada from fall into winter of 1975: a brief peregrination. In Dylan’s public career, which is now well into its sixth decade, it stands as his most peculiar tour of all.”