Hear a pristine recording of Bob Dylan's 1976 Austin concert resurfaced after 48 years

On the 12th of May, In 1976, Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue played a concert at the Municipal Auditorium in Austin, Texas, that left a small historical mark. Newspaper clippings from the week reveal that angry fans protested with signs outside the venue (“Boycott Rolling Thunder Ripoff”) when they learned plans for separate early and late shows were canceled at the last minute, setting off a general brawl where seating assignments they suddenly became meaningless. But it is one of the few shows from the 57-date Rolling Thunder Revue that has never appeared in the collecting community either as an audience recording or on audio cassette.

That changed just a few weeks ago when Ray Padgett, author of the book 2023 Pledging My Time: Conversations with Bob Dylan Band Members and admin of the must-have Dylan fan site Highlight under the double E's, released an audio tape of the show along with a recording of the April 29, 1976 Rolling Thunder Revue at the Expo Hall in Mobile, Alabama that is a huge sonic upgrade over the mono recording already out there. Watch both shows here.

The recordings come from the collection of David Hendel, who is the first sound mixer on the second half of the Rolling Thunder Revue. Padgett first became aware of Hendel when he came across an anonymous comment on the Setlist.fm entry for the Austin concert. “I was the sound engineer for this part of the Rolling Thunder Revue tour,” it read. “While I don't have full setlists for both the Mobile, AL and Austin, TX shows, I do have tapes from both shows. However, the songs have been combined into a single tape, so I don't know which song was played in which venue.”

Padgett located the commentator, learned it was Hendel, and interviewed him on his website. “I was cheap, so I didn't have a lot of tapes,” Hendel said. “I would just tape certain shows. A lot of times, I was mixing the sound and not really paying attention to the tape, so sometimes the tape would end in the middle of the song and I wouldn't notice until that song was over. “Oops, I forgot to turn the tape over.” Most of it was for my enjoyment. Very few of the bands I worked with wanted to listen to live tapes.”

Working alongside Dylan experts Les Kokay, Ian Woodward and Mitch Blank, Padgett was able to figure out which tracks on Hendel's tape came from Mobile and which from Austin. As Hendel explained, he did not capture the full concerts. But there are well over an hour each of both shows.

Highlights from Austin's concert include an “I Want You,” an emotional “You're a Big Girl Now,” a furious “Idiot Wind,” and a grand finale of “Knockin' on Heaven's Door,” where they with vocals by Rogan McGuinn of the Byrds. Joan Baez joins Dylan on “Blown' In The Wind”, “Railroad Boy”, “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” and “I Pity The Poor Immigrant”.

The Hard Rain The TV special was filmed 11 days after Austin's concert in Fort Collins, Colorado. And Hard Rain The live LP mixes songs from Fort Collins with tracks from a May 16, 1976 concert in Fort Worth, Texas. But Dylan's band has yet to release any more songs from the 1976 tour. That will likely change in 2026, when a quirk in European copyright law will force them to release what they have or lose the recordings to the public domain .

Unfortunately, this is unlikely to include the legendary Salt Lake City finale of the Rolling Thunder Revue. Fans have been frantically trying to track down a recording of this show for years, which featured the only known live versions of “Black Diamond Bay” and “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts,” but it's nowhere to be found, and it's not on Dylan's vault. The discovery of Hendel's Austin should give fans hope that it will be released somewhere in the world.