When Highway 61 ran through Gainesville

Dylan's Rolling Thunder hit Florida, 50 years ago this week

The national vibe isn’t always this toxic. It’s been better, it’s been worse, and it will be both again. Sometimes that’s hard to remember.

Which, today at least, is why I’m here.

Saturday, two things happened as I was trying to figure out what to write. One, a guest at the Washington Hilton took an express route through a main security checkpoint and was apparently stopped just outside the interior ballroom, where he allegedly shot a security guard in an attempt to run toward a bunch of administration big shots, including you-know-who, at the White House correspondents’ annual event.

Second, I realized Saturday marked the 50th anniversary of the Rolling Thunder Revue’s Gainesville stop. This was a historic concert for the University of Florida and for me personally. It took place during a hectic production weekend for New Look magazine, where I had just become editor and was in the midst of putting together my first issue.

Naturally, I snuck away from the hard work to attend what was probably the greatest concert of my life. I had to come back after the four-hour show, quickly write my first-ever New Look story, paste in Bob Wool’s excellent concert photos (some of which you can in this first image below), and finally get the magazine wrapped in time for our deadline at the printer.

Photos by Bob Wool

If I cared more about juicing up my Substack numbers, I’d write about the biggest news story of the year out of Washington — at least until the next real or fake assassination attempt comes along, whichever the case may be.

But nah, I’m sticking with Rolling Thunder, and here’s why:

For those of you youngsters under 70, Bob Dylan is one of the great poets of our time, the only songwriter with a Nobel Prize in Literature. Unfortunately though, before and after his two Rolling Thunder tours in ’75 and ’76, he never really seemed to have much fun on stage.

He’s still writing great songs, still performing, and still rarely looking like he’s having any fun.

Dylan wanted those Rolling Thunder shows to be different, and if he couldn’t do it on his own, the all-stars in the traveling caravan he concocted — Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn, and Kinky Friedman and The Texas Jewboys, among them — certainly could help. And they did, big-time.

Baez in particular seemed super-charged and ready for fun, beginning at least the night before the Gainesville show, when my friend, New Look writer Sharon Alford, chatted her up at the Great Southern Music Hall, where a young comic, Steve Martin, had just done his set. Baez was having a drink in the lobby, happily answering Sharon’s questions until T-Bone Burnett literally picked her up off her feet and carted her off, Sharon says.

Martin at that time was just starting to build his fan-base. The next day, most of the crowd had no idea who he was when he introduced Dylan’s show at Florida Field with a funny Ed Sullivan impression. I’m guessing he’d been invited by Joan.

Dylan, on the other hand, was coming off one of the great creative peaks in his long career. He had recently released Blood on the Tracks, widely considered to be one of his top three albums, which is saying a lot. He followed it up with Desire, for which he added Scarlet Rivera, a classically trained violinist with a dark, mysterious personal style, whose swooping melodic lines gave the music a swirling, nomadic edge. She was perfect for this revue, which Dylan at times performed in white face-paint like a carnival musician.

Photo: Forbes

I was frustrated by his decision to quit touring in late 1975 before he got to Florida, and I was overjoyed by his decision to resume several months later with an Easter Sunday show in Lakeland, a couple of hours south of Gainesville, as his first date. Gainesville was scheduled for the following Sunday, and I attended both shows.

I also climbed a fence to get into the sound check at UF the night before and was able to chat with Rivera, who talked about how Dylan was changing set-lists, arrangements, even personnel from one show to the next. Very un-Dylan-like.

Still, the anniversary would’ve slipped my mind last weekend if it weren’t for a Facebook post by Jeff Goldstein who, 50 years ago, was a busy young concert promoter in Gainesville about to embark on the biggest venture of his life. Goldstein says he had a hand in putting on much of the music around Gainesville between 1970-’76, which was a very special time in that North Central Florida university town.

Goldstein convinced a booking agency to route Rolling Thunder through Gainesville, based on his assurance that he could secure the Gators’ football stadium as the venue. He had visions of UF opening the field to an additional 50,000 fans in what would have been the revue’s biggest crowd by far.

Trouble was, the university had no intention of letting that happen. Officials allowed a smaller show — still with more than 24,000 fans, which made it a huge success commercially as well as artistically.

Although there were a lot of complaints about the sky-high $8.75 ticket price.

Goldstein has a lot more to say about the run-up to that show, and you can find some of it on his Facebook page. I posted in his thread too, and got so much positive feedback that I decided to write this version for Substack and leave the D.C. drama to others this week.

Washington might have the bigger story, but Gainesville had the better one.