Bob Dylan and The Band - The 1974 Live Recordings
Columbia Records, 2024
Bob Dylan/The Band: Before the Flood [Asylum, 1974]
At its best, this is the craziest and strongest rock and roll ever recorded. All analogous live albums fall flat. The Rolling Stones are mechanical dolls by comparison, the Faces merely sloppy, the Dead positively quiet. The MC5 achieved something similar by ignoring musicianship altogether, but while the Band sounds undisciplined, threatening to destroy their headlong momentum by throwing out one foot or elbow too many, they never abandon their enormous technical ability. In this they follow the boss. When he sounded thin on Planet Waves, so did they. Now his voice settles in at a rich bellow, running over his old songs like a truck. I agree that a few of them will never walk again, but I treasure the sacrilege; Uncle Bob purveying to the sports arena masses. We may never even know whether this is a masterpiece1.
Robert Christgau, Dean of American Rock Critics
Bob Dylan and The Band’s 1974 Tour parting gift, Before The Flood (Asylum Records, 1974), while a classic live recording in its own right, was merely the coda to a two-month long, historically seismic experience encompassing a 40-concert, 30-date, 21-city tour beginning on January 3, 1974, and ending on February 14, 1974. It was to be Dylan’s first tour since his Bob Dylan World Tour 1966, shortly after which the singer suffered a motorcycle accident and withdrew from touring. Stylistically, Dylan picks up where he left off: applying the postmodern principle of deconstruction to his material. Forget every studio album before Dylan recasts his material in a bright and brutal light. A light that, if stared into, will seize and squeeze one’s understanding of music.
The 1966 World Tour took place between the releases of Highway 61 Revisited (Columbia, 1965) and Blonde on Blonde (Columbia, 1966), a productive period for the singer. Following his motorcycle accident and time away from touring, Dylan kept busy in the studio, creating (with the Band) the music that later became The Basement Tapes (Columbia, 1975). Also during this period, Dylan recorded and released John Wesley Harding (Columbia, 1967), Nashville Skyline (Columbia, 1969), Self Portrait (Columbia, 1970), New Morning (Columbia, 1970), Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid (Columbia, 1973), Dylan (Columbia, 1973), and Planet Waves (Columbia, 1974) where the singer reunited with The Band, conjuring from some potent voodoo dust what would become their joint 1974 Tour.
Honoring the 50th anniversary of the commercial release of Before The Flood, Columbia Records (among other notables) released the 27-CD set Bob Dylan and The Band - The 1974 Live Recordings. The announcement of the release caused a stirring in the loins of Baby Boomers, one both welcome and frightening. This box set is a lot of things, but we should discuss first what it is not:
It is not an exhaustive testament of the 1974 tour in the same way that the Grateful Dead cataloged their Europe '72: The Complete Recordings (Rhino, 2011).
It does not give equal time to The Band’s performances at each concert. The set includes only Dylan's performances. The set does not include The Band’s sets, which typically made up a third of each show.
This article is the first in a series meant to focus on a single, superior cut from each performance. While the performances on Before The Flood are superlative, they might not be definitive considering the additional material provided by this set. I will compare the chosen selection with that released on Before The Flood, and sometimes, they will be one and the same.
This essay and its subsequent subordinate pieces gleefully collapse into the singularity that is Ray Padgett’s Bob Dylan Black Hole “A Show-By-Show Listening Guide to Bob Dylan's Massive '1974 Live Recordings' Box Set2” from his excellent and Dylan-exhaustive Substack Flagging Down The Double E’s. I do not mean to compete with Mr. Padgett’s denouement; only merely accent it. I recommend this website to all music lovers.
Robert Christgau: Album: Bob Dylan/The Band: Before the Flood. (2024). Robertchristgau.com. https://www.robertchristgau.com/get_album.php?id=370
Padgett, R. (2024, September 20). A Show-By-Show Listening Guide to Bob Dylan’s Massive ’1974 Live Recordings’ Box Set. Flaggingdown.com; Flagging Down the Double E’s. https://www.flaggingdown.com/p/a-show-by-show-listening-guide-to
I think that tour was at once an exorcism (from being legendary) and an affirmation (of why Bob Dylan is legendary).