The 25 Best Live Rock Recordings - No. 6: Before The Flood

No. 6 - Bob Dylan And The Band - Before The Flood (Asylum, 1974)

Wikipedia

“Well, I wake up in the morning, fold my hands, and pray for rain
I got a head full of ideas, that are drivin' me insane…”

Sometimes it requires context — a larger, surrounding history that provides a denser, more substantive story.

From February 4 to May 27, 1966, Bob Dylan and members of what would be called “The Band” three years later (sans Levon Helm who was replaced by drummer Mickey Jones who later became a founding member of Kenny Rogers And The First Edition), undertook a world tour. Dylan had just completed his “Positively 4th Street” single and wanted to take the polished sound he had achieved in the studio on the road. The tour occurred between the release of Highway 61 Revisited (Columbia) on August 30, 1965, and before the release of Blonde on Blonde (Columbia) on June 20, 1966. The tour provided the fractious aftermath of Dylan's turning to electric music as he famously did on Sunday, July 25, 1965, at the Newport Folk Festival, causing many traditional folkies and record company executives to shit a collective brick.

On July 29, 1966, after wrapping up the release of Blonde On Blonde, Dylan suffered a motorcycle accident near his home in Woodstock, New York. Circumstances and injuries remain murky surrounding the accident that ostensibly led to Dylan’s eight-year retirement from touring. During this period, Dylan and the Band recorded over 100 songs, between June and September 1967, that would eventually be released as The Basement Tapes (Columbia, 1975). Roughly, during this same period and after, Dylan recorded John Wesley Harding (Columbia, 1967), Nashville Skyline (Columbia, 1969), Self Portrait (Columbia, 1970), New Morning (Columbia, 1970), Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid (Columbia, 1973), the poorly received Dylan (Columbia, 1973), and Planet Waves (Columbia, 1974) where Dylan reunited with The Band, sowing the seeds of what would become their joint 1974 Tour.

“Hailstones beatin' on the roof / The bourbon is a hundred proof
It's you and me and the telephone / Our destiny is quite well known…”

During this period the musical group once known as Levon and the Hawks formally became The Band with the release of Music From Big Pink (Capitol, 1968). The Band followed with the releases of The Band (Capitol, 1969), Stage Fright (Capitol, 1970), Cahoots (Capitol, 1971), their much admired Rock Of Ages (Capitol, 1972), and their covers recording Moondog Matinee (Capitol, 1974), before which the group famously appeared at The Summer Jam At Watkins Glen (July 28, 1973) before 600,000 people on the same ticket as The Grateful Dead and The Allman Brothers. Over the next year, group members migrated to Malibu, CA, where Dylan had settled, and dovetailed into recording Dylan’s Planet Waves and planning the 1974 Tour.

Billed as The Bob Dylan and the Band 1974 Tour the schedule was a 40-concert, 30-date, 21-city tour that began on January 3 (in Chicago at Chicago Stadium) and ended on February 14 (in Inglewood at the Forum). Performances took place exclusively in indoor sports arenas. The shows proceeded using a standard setlist formula of an opening six-song Dylan/Band set, a five-song Band set, three more Dylan/Band performances, a five-song Dylan acoustic set, a three- or four-song Band set, and a joint coda.

“Then time will tell / Just who has fell / And who's been left behind
When you go your way and I go mine.”

While the setlists were populated with well-known songs, few remained faithful to the original versions. Dylan's songs were stripped to the studs and rearranged retaining little of their original pathos while substituting equal parts arrogance and anger. The resulting performances revealed a hubristic ferocity not heard in the studio versions, giving these once-comforting songs a jagged, anxious edge. Rather than abandon the music that made him famous, Dylan updated it, a practice he would continue with his 1976 Rolling Thunder Revue and those performances that would become Bob Dylan at Budokan (Columbia, 1978).

The Band's playing was also in flux. What sounded timid in 1966 evolved into a more confident and aggressive approach that they would continue through The Last Waltz (Warner Bros., 1978). Robertson’s guitar playing had grown thick and muscular while the three lead vocalists honed their approach to a shining edge. By the time of this tour, The Band had begun their slow dissolution into history. Before the 1974 tour, the group was coming off a static period where Robertson was experiencing writer’s block, and the band had cut back on their live performances. By the time The Band members made it to Los Angeles and recorded Planet Waves, everyone was ready to take to the road. Before The Flood was the recorded evidence and justification of the 1974 Tour.

“I’d Rather die happy than not die at all…”

Music writers at the time spilled much ink on how Dylan drastically reworked his catalog for this tour. On Before The Flood, this is realized early in his ballad “Lay Lady Lay” from Nashville Skyline (Columbia, 1969). In this molten performance, a tender moment in the studio turns into an arrogant and angry kiss-off five years later. All sweetness is gone. Dylan sings with a maniacal conviction and The Band performs with renewed vigor, bayoneting the emotionally wounded and weak at heart. This change virus infects other Dylan songs. “Ballad Of A Thin Man” is dramatically tightened tautly from the Highway 61 Revisited performance, Dylan sounding like he believes what he wrote. The original dry starkness of “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” is gone. Here is the anthem the song would turn into. More gospel than period West, more rock definition than softer wishful thinking, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”. The delicate “Just Like A Woman” is transformed into a sneering mocking reply to an apology that should never have been made.

“Now she drinks from a bitter cup / I'm trying to get her to give it up.”

Two years previously, The Band released what would become their contribution to this list, Rock of Ages (Capitol, 1972). Recorded between December 28 and December 31, 1971, the Band’s year-end appearance at the Academy of Music in New York City is considered by many the Band’s definitive statement from the stage. The Band carried the momentum from these performances into the next three years until this tour. The Band’s performance with Dylan was beautifully unhinged, reckless, and completely naked. All artifice was stripped away revealing a bleeding veneer that has always been the American darkness. “The Shape I’m In,” “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” and “The Weight” are all here, casting a shadow with their beautiful and lethal gravity.

The performances captured on Before The Flood, when all things were changing for Dylan and the Band, after which nothing would be the same, reach a critical mass by the fourth side of the 2-LP set. Dylan reclaims “All Along The Watchtower” from Jimi Hendrix in a shocking, evolving, incendiary reading seething with animus and indifference. This is Dylan’s most critical performance of this song, spurned on by Robertson’s big-bag-punching lead guitar and Danko-Helm rock solid bottom. Dylan and Robertson are flung into a brimming rock and roll performance of “Highway 61 Revisited.” Robertson sears the song’s harmonic architecture, rearranging its guts to be read in a hot voodoo skillet telling a grave future.

“Like A Rolling Stone” and “Blowin’ In The Wind” close the release, unrepentant. Dylan’s appeal in “Blowin’ In The Wind” descends from its sweet, hopeful beginnings into partisan rancor, one side beating the other to death with their hollow platitudes. It’s the Spring of 1974, the Watergate hearings have started, and America’s support of South Vietnam ended. If there was ever a time for America’s Nobel Laureate of Song to step up and tell America that, “No, everything won’t be alright,” it was now. Bob Dylan and The Band, two prominent 1960s-70s voices, had had enough and they were going to let everyone know with this 1974 Tour.

By Jim Summaria - Wikipedia: Contact us/Photo submission, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5626785

Writer’s note: This was the first Bob Dylan and/or Band recording I became familiar with. While “Mississippi Queen” was still ringing in my ears and “Honky Tonk Women” stirring my loins, Highway 61 Revisited and Music From Big Pink sounded too tame for my explosive adolescent tastes.

With time, what Dylan and The Band taught me was the notion of an average studio band being a beast on stage. Previously familiar with most of these songs, the audience, stagecraft, and kinetic excitement heard on Before The Flood overwhelmed me…and led me to all of the previous music by these two icons. These performances were singular and preparatory for the beginning of the end for The Band and the creation of Dylan’s singular moment of truth, Blood On The Tracks (Columbia, 1975).

Today Dylan is in his eighties and The Band is nearly gone…but how great it has been to live in a world where this talent intersected so historically, informing an entire generation.