When Bob Dylan and the Rolling Thunder Revue “rolled into Lakeland” on Sunday, April 18, 1976, the show lasted nearly four straight hours, according to Jeff Kline, staff writer with The Ledger.
“The Rolling Thunder Revue featured a potpourri of music from folk to hard rock,” Kline wrote at the time. “It also featured a potpourri of musicians, many unknown, most not understandable because the group’s speaker system was pushed beyond its limits.”
He noted that the “capacity crowd” of fans mostly in their 20s also included “ample representation of those over 30 (like Dylan and therefore not to be trusted, as he once said) and a good number of fans under 20 years, drawn perhaps by the Dylan mystique as much as anything.”
According to Kline, when several musicians lit cigarettes onstage, many in the audience followed suit, “and soon the air inside the Arena was a grey haze of tobacco and marijuana smoke.” The show led to 60 arrests for possession of marijuana, wrote Kline, compared with 65 on the night before during a Doobie Brothers concert at the Civic Center…