Roger McGuinn’s favorite tour of all time

ted to revive the spirit of Greenwich Village with Rolling Thunder,” McGuinn remembers. “It was like a travelling artists’ colony. There were about 300 people on the road with him.” Dylan’s road manager and associate Bob Neuwirth assembled the tour’s backing musicians from Dylan’s recording sessions for his album Desire, including violinist Scarlet Rivera and guitarist Mick Ronson.

McGuinn recalls getting into all sorts of hijinks with Ronson on tour, creating a circus of their own. He recounts: “​​Mick and I were drinking buddies on the Rolling Thunder tour. We’d be taking advantage of the hospitality suite every night. We’d both be hitting the vodka, mostly. Mick was a Vodka Collins man, which was a sort of lemonade with vodka. He was great. We’d play guitars and hang out. I remember running him around the Belleview Biltmore Hotel in Clearwater, Florida, in a wheelchair. Everybody stopped and just stared at us.”

Despite coming from David Bowie’s Spiders from Mars, Ronson possessed a humility that McGuin quickly took a liking to. “Mick never talked about the old days with Bowie and the Spiders From Mars,” he says, “he just blended in with everyone else on that tour. He was just like one of the folkies. We’d both wait until we were summoned by Dylan.”

McGuinn found himself in an environment far beyond his hippie dwellings of Malibu and the tour quickly became a favourite. “The Rolling Thunder tour parked [in Clearwater, Florida] for a couple of weeks,” he remembers. “It must have cost Dylan a lot, because he was putting us all into luxury resorts. The level of quality was incredible; we were all living high on the hog.”

Even while McGuinn and Dylan’s relationship had its unstable moments, the pair’s collaboration on the Rolling Thunder tour remains a defining moment for the counterculture, and certainly solidified McGuinn’s virtuosity as a pillar in rock history.