I knew Janet Maslin was a music critic for
Rolling Stone before she became a film critic for
The New York Times, but I didn't realize she was an enormous Dylan fan who actually followed the Rolling Thunder Revue's fall tour.
She recently gave an interview about it here. An enjoyable read to any Dylan fan.
FWIW, she's the only critic I know who defended the monstrously shitty
Budokan album, quite possibly the worst album Dylan's ever released IMHO. (It's between that, the live album documenting the awful 1987 tour with the Grateful Dead, and the
Dylan compilation from 1973 - a bunch of crappy outtakes that Columbia released when Dylan left them for David Geffen's new label.) Until I read that interview, I had no idea she defended the notoriously awful
Renaldo and Clara film too. I've never seen it, but I have seen all the live footage (thanks mainly to the Scorsese film), and to be fair, that footage alone does make a great concert film, one that Dylan should have sent to NBC instead of taping the inferior Fort Collins show and digging himself deeper into a financial hole.