Cameraman Paul Goldsmith Talks Shooting 'Hard Rain' and Rolling Thunder
"You’re standing right next to Bob and Joan. Up close. That’s where my camera is."
A couple months ago, the above photo went up for auction. I’d never seen it before. It comes from the Hard Rain concert—49 years ago today!—and centers a person you don’t normally see in such shots: The cameraman! I wondered who that was shouldering that video camera a couple feet away from Bob’s face, capturing the Hard Rain close-up footage you’re probably familiar with.
His name is Paul Goldsmith, and it turns out he shot some of the Rolling Thunder footage used in Renaldo and Clara too. At the time, he was part of a guerilla video collective called TVTV that used gonzo journalism techniques for TV documentaries. (Goldsmith made a documentary about TVTV a few years ago; it’s where Bill Murray got his start, a few years before Saturday Night Live.)
That led him to Dylan’s Rolling Thunder orbit, first as an independent cameraperson who joined partway through the 1975 tour, and then bringing his full TVTV team to shoot Hard Rain for a promised NBC special. That shoot came on short notice, after Bob nixed an earlier tour film shot by Burt Sugarman’s Midnight Special crew a few weeks prior. Goldsmith was reluctant to share too many personal stories, but he told me about the work itself, and how his camera captured Hard Rain. This interview has been edited and condensed.
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