Bob Dylan And The Band: The 1974 Live Recordings
On July 29, 1966, just over a month after he released his monumental double LP Blonde on Blonde, Bob Dylan hopped onto his 1964 Triumph T100 motorcycle in bucolic Woodstock, N.Y., took a spill and nearly died. His injuries were serious enough that he was forced to cancel all of his upcoming concert dates. He realized that a break would do him some good and withdrew from public life, spending his time recording new tunes with a Canadian-American group that had been calling itself The Hawks. Over the next several years, Dylan only played a handful of gigs.
It took nearly eight years until he was ready to stage a proper tour again but, finally, on Jan. 3, 1974, accompanied by those same five musicians—who’d changed their name to The Band in the late ‘60s—he got busy. The troupe ultimately performed 40 shows in 21 cities, and afterward, Dylan’s then-label, Asylum Records— which had released his latest studio album, Planet Waves (on which The Band accompanies him) two weeks into the tour— offered up a 21-song souvenir titled Before the Flood, which drew primarily from the group’s three shows at the Los Angeles Forum.
For many fans, the tour was their first glimpse of Dylan in concert, and the live album—his first—was, by most accounts, a superb representation. But ever since, Dylan fans have been clamoring for a more comprehensive aural documentation of the entire 1974 tour and, now, we finally have it.
The 1974 Live Recordings presents an overwhelming 417 tracks, all previously unreleased soundboard recordings, on 27 discs—a deep dive into one of the most historic rock tours of all time. What that means, of course, is that there is a whole lot of repetition: Some of Dylan’s more popular tunes, including “Lay, Lady, Lay,” “It Ain’t Me, Babe” and “Like a Rolling Stone,” turn up at numerous shows, and the various versions can be quite similar. But Dylan also pulls up songs as obscure as “Song to Woody” from his debut album and “Hero Blues,” a 1963 tune that he premiered that year and then ignored until the 1974 tour. Planet Waves is also accounted for, but unlike the Dylan of today, happy to eschew his “hits” in favor of whatever else pleases him at the moment, the 1974 setlists were loaded with enough of the familiar to keep audiences riveted. Throughout, Dylan was given muscular, flexible accompaniment by The Band, allowing the singer to toy with his arrangements, as has always been his wont. And hardcore fans can now delight in tracking the subtle differences.
It’s a lot to take in, but The 1974 Live Recordings is undeniably a vital, long overdue document. Pick a show and relish it.
