Hard Rain (Bob Dylan album)

Hard Rain is a live album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on September 13, 1976, by Columbia Records. The album was recorded during the second leg of the Rolling Thunder Revue.

The album was partly recorded on May 23, 1976, during a concert at Hughes Stadium in Fort Collins, Colorado; the penultimate show of the tour, the concert was also filmed and broadcast by NBC as a one-hour television special in September. (Hard Rain's release coincided with this broadcast). Four tracks from the album ("I Threw It All Away," "Stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again," "Oh, Sister," and "Lay, Lady, Lay") were recorded on May 16, 1976, in Fort Worth, Texas. Neither the album nor the television special was well received.

"Although the band has been playing together longer, the charm has gone out of their exchanges," writes music critic Tim Riley. "Hard Rain...seemed to come at a time when the Rolling Thunder Revue, so joyful and electrifying in its first performances, had just plain run out of steam," wrote Janet Maslin, then a music critic for Rolling Stone. In his mixed review for Hard Rain, Robert Christgau criticized the Rolling Thunder Revue as "folkies whose idea of rock and roll is rock and roll clichés."

A representation of the earlier 1975 portion of the Rolling Thunder Revue was released in 2002 on The Bootleg Series Vol. 5: Bob Dylan Live 1975, The Rolling Thunder Revue. A more comprehensive 14-disc collection entitled Bob Dylan – The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1975 Live Recordings was released in 2019 to coincide with the Netflix documentary-film Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese.

Despite heavy promotion that placed it on the cover of TV Guide, NBC's television broadcast of the May 23rd concert drew disappointing ratings. The album peaked at  in the U.S. and   in the UK. Hard Rain eventually earned gold certification.

Three of the recordings on Hard Rain ("Lay, Lady, Lay", "Idiot Wind", and "Maggie's Farm") were included on the Masterpieces compilation (1978), and "Shelter from the Storm" was included on the Live 1961–2000 compilation (2000).

Personnel

 * Bob Dylan - vocals, guitar, production

Additional musicians

 * Gary Burke - drums
 * T-Bone Burnett - guitar, piano
 * David Mansfield - guitar, pedal steel guitar on "Idiot Wind"
 * Scarlet Rivera - strings
 * Mick Ronson - guitar on "Maggie's Farm"
 * Steven Soles - guitar, background vocals
 * Rob Stoner - bass, background vocals
 * Joan Baez - guitar, background vocals
 * Howard Wyeth - drums, piano

Technical

 * Don DeVito - production
 * Don Meehan - recording and mixing engineering
 * Ken Regan - cover photo
 * Paula Scher - cover design
 * Lou Waxman - chief of tape research