Bob Dylan And The Band : 1974 Live Recordings – Album review

Bob Dylan And The Band: The 1974 Live Recordings

(Columbia Records | Legacy Recordings)

CD | DL

Out 20th September 2024

PRE-ORDER HERE

As the United States continued to be gripped by the drama of the Watergate scandal, Bob Dylan finally returned to touring with The Band in 1974 after an 8 year hiatus, providing a very welcome distraction. Columbia now unleash a huge 27 CD set from this momentous tour which produced some electrifying performances and set a new benchmark for arena sized shows. Ian Corbridge gets immersed for Louder Than War.

It’s early 1974 and the United States is still reeling from the Watergate scandal which is reaching new and un-chartered levels of intensity with President Nixon’s tenure hanging by a thread. Meanwhile one the foremost social commentators of the times, Bob Dylan, had made the decision to return to touring at the very start of the new year after a long hiatus of 8 years. This would not only provide a welcome distraction from the supercharged political atmosphere of the times, but would also go a long way to shaping the sound, style and form of bigger arena shows in the future in a way that could not have been anticipated.

Dylan’s long spell in the touring wilderness following his motorcycle accident 1966 had been punctuated only sporadically by various appearances, including Woody Guthrie’s memorial concert in 1968, his full and totally unique performance at the Isle Of Wight Festival in 1969 and his contribution to George Harrison’s benefit Concert For Bangladesh in 1971. When Dylan last toured in 1966 backed by The Band, he was roundly booed following his decision to go electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, an event that was to profoundly impact the reaction to his shows in 1966 as well as send shockwaves throughout the music world. But history now proves that when Dylan returned in 1974, whilst the arrangement of the songs remained as an electrified tour de force, it was the audience who had clearly changed as they had come to accept, respect and fully appreciate this new Dylan.

Dylan’s association with the Band had started back in the mid 60’s as they negotiated a very challenging path through those post Newport electrically charged performances. Even after Dylan ditched any touring plans, this relationship continued as they worked together in the Big Pink in upstate New York, producing what became the legendary Basement Tapes. In the years that followed, The Band had made their own way to the very forefront of the American music scene with a series of influential albums which sold in significant numbers, most notably Music From Big Pink. So, when Dylan was coerced by David Geffen into leaving Columbia for Asylum Records in 1973, albeit a somewhat short-lived relationship, Dylan turned back to The Band to both record new material and then venture out onto his first tour of this new decade.

The Band comprised Robbie Robertson on guitar, Garth Hudson on organ, piano and clavinet, Richard Manuel on piano, organ and drums, Rick Danko on bass and Levon Helm on drums. Suffice to say that by 1974 this immensely talented group of musicians were at the very top of their game and were a band with whom Dylan had a very special chemistry. In essence The Band brought a totally unique and well-grounded approach to rock’n’roll which augmented Dylan’s sound like no other, before or since.

The tour comprised around 40 shows on 30 dates over a 42 day period, often playing two sets per day, and playing to an average audience of around 18,500. It was a tour that would set new precedents for all such arena sized shows that were to follow, including the sight of audiences holding up lighters en masse (as captured in the iconic cover image for Before The Flood), and the bright flash of the house lights during a show’s significant moments, in this case their performance of Like A Rolling Stone.

At the time, this tour was captured for posterity via a double live album Before The Flood, released in June 1974 as Dylan’s very first official live album. It included 21 songs largely taken from towards the end of the tour, of which 14 were Dylans and 7 were led by The Band. Columbia have now plundered the archives to release every single surviving soundboard tape from this tour, presented in a deluxe box set comprising 27 CDs and representing 28 hours of listening pleasure. In all it includes 431 tracks of which 417 have previously been unreleased and 133 recordings newly mixed from 16-track tape. New liner notes by journalist and critic Elizabeth Nelson also accompanies the package alongside exclusive pictures.

For those hoping for complete shows in all their ragged glory, unfortunately the songs led by The Band are not included. But with the wealth of material that The Band played each night that would inevitably have made it an even more unwieldy package, so let’s just enjoy what we have got in all its glory. And we do get performances of 24 Dylan songs which were never represented on Before The Flood.

The announcement in 1973 of a tour by Dylan and The Band across a whole range of US cities was met with huge excitement and unprecedented demand, with an estimated 4% of the US population applying for tickets, so there was little chance of this whole venture not being a success. Meanwhile Dylan and The Band had been recording their first album for Geffen, Planet Waves, which was finally released after the tour had actually started. So Dylan had at least produced quite a bit of new material since those heady days of the early 60’s which could in theory have provided some added interest to new setlists. But of course, Dylan never has played the conventional game when it comes to touring so be careful what you wish for or even expect!

Having said that Dylan did pull out a few rarities along the way, more so in the earlier shows on the tour. The first night opened with Hero Blues, an acoustic-gone-electric outtake from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan sessions, a very rare outing for this obscure song. Other interesting takes included a reinvented Ballad Of Hollis Brown, Song to Woody (not performed since 1962) and Planet Waves outtake Nobody ‘Cept You. Whilst the set list did vary somewhat, it did settle down into a more consistent pattern by the tours end with focus being directed more towards Dylan’s more well-known songs from the 60’s.

Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine) emerged as a frequent set opener and closer later in the tour and shows up as a wild rhythmic ride, drawing on the talents of the stellar band members, especially Robbie’s guitar runs and Levon’s syncopated drum patterns. Lay Lady Lay is gloriously uplifting and surely has never sounded as good as it did on this tour. And whilst Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues is a suitably melancholy arrangement, Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 is every bit the party animal it was always mean to be when it first appeared on Blonde On Blonde.

Dylans committed vocals on It Ain’t Me Babe leave you in no doubt that he means every bit of the sentiment within the lyrics, whilst both Ballad Of A Thin Man and All Along The Watchtower have a driving energy and an undeniable sense of urgency that has clearly been fuelled by Dylan’s collaboration with The Band over such an extended period.

The majority of songs performed on the tour are presented by Dylan in a style which even casual fans will easily recognize, whilst attaining a totally unprecedented degree of intensity compared with the original recordings that perhaps no one could have predicted. We must remember that this is still relatively early in the context of Dylan’s career to date, and we are nowhere near the point where it takes a little while to work out what song he is starting to perform.

Notably, the harmonious jingle jangle of Mr. Tambourine Man is still at the forefront of the arrangement and Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door is performed in a suitably heartfelt way. Of course, all this changed in the subsequent Rolling Thunder Revue tour when reinvention became the norm, even from show to show. But having said all this, as you make your way through this tour, there is little doubt that a number of the songs did evolve, if only through the sheer incendiary force of The Band behind them, not to mention Dylan’s ever-increasing investment in the songs.

Each show featured an acoustic set, normally at the start of the second half and these performances seem to shine through on this extensive collection, with Dylan feeling so at ease with his performances as he harks back to the early days. There also seems to be a very strong sense of appreciation from the gathered masses to this section of each show. Commonly this would include songs like She Belongs To Me, The Times They Are A’Changin’, Gates Of Eden, It’s All Over Now Baby Blue, Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right, and a very tender sounding Just Like A Woman.

And just as the audience are completely absorbed by Dylans’ performance of these songs in their stripped down fashion, at the point in It’s Alright Ma I’m Only Bleeding when Dylan spits out “but even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked” they respond with a cacophonous roar which is perhaps not unexpected given the political climate that surrounds them at the time. Prophetic words indeed which were written so many years earlier.

This would usually be followed by some of the golden nuggets from Dylan’s catalogue including a very impassioned and uplifting Forever Young, perhaps the ultimate hymn to childhood innocence, and a rowdy and a hard rocking Highway 61 Revisited which sets off like an out of control freight train. Maggie’s Farm is presented in a similar rumbustious fashion. As for the classic Like A Rolling Stone, well just as it became a truly iconic songs on those legendary and controversial shows back in 1966 when Dylan committed to “play it fucking loud”, the versions here are once again truly anthemic.

The tour and this package closes with a huge, overpowering and audibly furious version of Blowin’ In The Wind, the likes of which I don’t recall hearing either before or since. A great celebratory moment for a tour which was hugely anticipated and rapturously received, defining a new era for Bob Dylan and large rock shows in general.

The quality of the recordings inevitably varies throughout the entire set mainly because of the way it was captured. At the outset, the shows were recorded on a stereo soundboard mix, on both 1⁄4” tape and cassette and there is some inevitable hiss throughout some of these shows. By tour’s end, Asylum Records’ David Geffen had commissioned recordings on multi-track tape, the standard at the time, for eventual release on Before the Flood. That original live album was comprised of songs mainly from the later shows which shine through as the best recordings within the package, especially for the acoustic sets which featured each night, but that does not in any way belittle the value of the earlier shows which continually demonstrate what a tight nit and incendiary outfit they were on stage.

This 1974 tour was a truly dynamic celebration of all that had gone before, almost as if a stepping stone for Dylan to venture forward into new, exciting and most definitely unchartered waters. The marriage of poetry and supercharged electric power was in full swing like never before. That next step forward would be the legendary Rolling Thunder Revue tour which is another story altogether.

As Dylan says before the opening song on the final performance, “We’re glad to be here” and on the evidence of the performances it was obvious that they were through the sheer energy, commitment and ferocity in which the shows were delivered. Little doubt also from the crowd reaction that they were glad to be there. You just need to decide for yourself whether you have the stamina to dive into this very deep pool of recordings of Bob Dylan and The Band tearing a few walls down as they navigate their way around a politically unstable USA. Trust me, it’s worth it.

You can pre-order the collection here.

You can find Bob Dylan on Facebook, X (Twitter) and his website.

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All words by Ian Corbridge. You can find more of his writing at his author profile here.