The writer Michael Walker once theorized that the sixties — not the literal decade but the idea or more accurately the vibe — actually ended in 1973. The suggestion was that the era’s halcyon artists finally gave way to a new generation of hard-rocking hedonists like Led Zeppelin and Alice Cooper. But if this thesis is correct, then it’s also true that nostalgia for the sixties commenced almost immediately the following year.
In the summer of 1974, the reunited Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young launched a tour of stadiums in the U.S. and Europe. It started about a month before Richard Nixon resigned the presidency, and the symbolism was obvious and heavy. The jaunt was subsequently dubbed the “Doom” tour, on account of the overblown egos and overabundance of blow backstage. The vibes grew even darker that fall when George Harrison became the first Beatle to tour North America since his former band retired from the road in 1966. Struggling with a failing voice strangled to a weak croak, Harrison famously rewrote the lyrics to “In My Life” to conclude with “in my life / I love God more.” Alas, God could not be reached for comment.
And then there was the golden-oldie revival act that opened the year in January and February, the reteaming that was hyped most of all. Bob Dylan — the prodigal generational spokesman who hadn’t toured regularly in eight long years — was back with his most famous accompanists, the mostly Canadian bar band formerly known as The Hawks, now recognized simply as American music standard-bearers The Band. When they were last seen in 1966, this combo was greeted to nightly hostility by jeering international audiences incensed that their folkie (our folkie) had “gone electric.” Now, back on tour in the new decade, Dylan and The Band were embraced as conquering heroes.
The response was overwhelming: Reports famously alleged that seven percent of the U.S. population (or about 20 million people) applied for tickets. David Geffen, (briefly) Dylan’s new label head, called the tour “the biggest thing of its kind in the history of show business.” Newsweek was more succinct when they put Bob on the cover with the two-word headline, “Dylan’s Back!” God, again, could not be reached for a rebuttal.
Years later, the one thing the participants agreed upon is that this sort of talk amounted to nothing but fertilizer. In the liner notes of the 1985 box set Biograph, Dylan dismissed the tour as an exercise in nostalgia, in which “I was just playing a role … I was playing Bob Dylan, and The Band was playing The Band.” In 1989, he elaborated on this point, telling an interviewer, “We hadn’t made any records. When we were playin’ out there earlier in the era we weren’t drawing crowds like that.” (Bob and The Band actually did put out a new album, Planet Waves, in the middle of the ’74 tour, and it eventually topped the charts. But I take his point. Planet Waves has been unfairly overlooked for decades, even by the guy who made it.) The Band’s guitarist Robbie Robertson echoed Bob’s cynicism about the tour’s worshipful reception to Dylan biographer Howard Sounes, complaining about how “everybody cheered and acted like, Oh, I loved it all along. There was something kind of hypocritical about it.”
These are righteous men. But are they right? A new box set out Friday, The 1974 Live Recordings, can be viewed as a kind of fact-check on the naysayers, both inside and outside Dylan’s inner circle. A sprawling data dump of music, The 1974 Live Recordings collects every known professionally recorded show from the tour, amounting to 431 tracks (all but 14 never before released) spread across 27 discs. This mountain of material attempts to make a small but nevertheless crucial point: The ’74 Tour represented a fascinating crossroads for the musicians in the spotlight. For Dylan, it marked a return to live performance after an extended hiatus, and the beginning of perhaps the most rigorous year-in and year-out tour schedule for any rock star in the past 50 years. For The Band, the tour represented a valedictory moment of triumph just over two years before the original lineup finally folded at The Last Waltz.
Together, these men faced a daunting — if not impossible — task: Live up to the most mythologized rock tour of the sixties, the most mythologized decade in all of rock music. The miracle of The 1974 Live Recordings is that it shows, more often than not, they pulled it off.
Until now, the defining document of Tour ’74 was Before The Flood, the double-live LP mostly recorded at the final shows in mid-February in Los Angeles. Released just four months later in June, Before The Flood was rapturously received by critics. (Robert Christgau called it “the craziest and strongest rock and roll ever recorded.”) But over the years, the album’s reputation has suffered. Subsequent audiences complained about Dylan’s hectoring vocal bark, the overblown arrangements, and the rather stock nature of the tracklist, which sticks mostly to Dylan’s most well-known (some might say tired) greatest hits.
Not all of these criticisms are fair. At the time Before The Flood was released, overfamiliar warhorses like “All Along The Watchtower” and “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” had never been played live before Tour ’74. And the arena-rock bluster of Dylan’s new delivery was in keeping with the times; the very idea of “arena-rock bluster” was still in the process of being invented. (The famous cover image of a sea of lighters held aloft at the L.A. Forum depicts a now-common audience gesture that supposedly never occurred before the Dylan/Band tour.)
But it’s also true that Dylan, despite the tour adding considerably to his bank account, was tired and burnt out by tour’s end. And bootlegs have confirmed that the concerts from earlier on were more inspired. That’s certainly true of the very first show, played on Jan. 3, 1974, at Chicago Stadium. The musicians went in under-prepared — there were only two days of rehearsal — but aside from some flubbed lyrics in the chorus of “Like A Rolling Stone” you wouldn’t know it from the tape. Perhaps it was a combination of adrenaline and muscle memory, but the playing is fiery from the start of “Hero Blues,” an ultra-rare outtake from the early sixties exhumed for the first two shows of the tour and then never again. Dylan, as always, was irreverent about his own “hero” status, and the rest of the show exhibits a disregard for the crowd-pleasing hits that would come to dominate the tour. No less than three songs from Planet Waves — still two weeks from release — are featured, from future deep cuts (like a delectably crunchy “Tough Mama”) to soon-to-be-classics (the tender “Forever Young”).
(Funny enough, Dylan pretty much dropped the Planet Waves material from the sets once the album was finally released, an act of perversity that can only be described as “Dylanesque.”)
And then there’s an acoustic set, which kicks off with Dylan’s first released original, “Song To Woody,” a throwback that makes Dylan seem both older and younger than his 32 years at time. There’s also “Nobody ‘Cept You,” a heart-rending Planet Waves outtake pointing to the romantic dissolution of Blood On The Tracks, which Dylan would start writing around the time that Before The Flood arrived in stores. Even as the rest of the set calcified later in the tour, Dylan would reserve some of his most interesting song choices and impassioned vocals for the acoustic numbers.
But what’s most apparent from the start is the uniquely combustible dynamic between Dylan and The Band. In the intervening years since the mid-sixties, both parties had moved in mellower directions, drifting toward folk rock and country music. And the music on Planet Waves generally has a laidback feel. When I interviewed Robertson in 2018 about the making of The Band’s debut, 1968’s Music For Big Pink, he talked about leaving his days as a hotshot lead guitarist behind. “I no longer had to prove how hard or loud I could play,” he told me. “I thought, ‘I like that it revolves around this song. It doesn’t revolve around this flashiness, these acrobatics on a guitar neck.’ I thought I’d outgrown that.”
Well, that went out the window in early ’74. As he did in ’66, Dylan drew out the nasty side of The Band, inspiring them to play with barely controlled chaos. And The Band similarly drove Dylan to push his voice and simply rock harder than he ever has, before or since. As Robertson later confessed to Sounes, “we just automatically reverted to a certain attitude toward the songs … it’s fast and aggressive and hard and tough.” For Robertson, that meant revisiting the blazing leads he played on songs like “Just Like Tom Thumb Blues” and “I Don’t Believe You,” which dominate the early shows on the tour. Behind him, Levon Helm — who sat out the original tour with The Hawks out of disgust with all those pissed off folkies — matched Robertson in intensity, playing all over the kit while still keeping the music violently locked in the pocket. Between these men, their fellow compatriots in The Band — Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, and Garth Hudson – minimized the frills and maximized the energy and power.
The electric sets from the first several weeks represent some of the finest music Dylan and The Band ever made together. (The only song that never really worked is “Ballad Of A Thin Man” – that number needs the drama of reacting against a disbelieving audience to fully go over, not the support of an adoring one.) Obsessives looking to chart each micro-step in how these guys gelled will be fascinated by side trips like the afternoon gig from Philadelphia on Jan. 6, in which the lurching tempos and woozy instrumental leads evoke a serious hangover. That concert opens with the tour debut of “Ballad Of Hollis Brown,” the brutal prairie-land murder ballad from The Times They Are A-Changin’ reworked for Tour ’74 as a lethal and relentlessly swinging rock ‘n’ roll indictment of American poverty. For critics who complained about the bourgeois audiences the tour attracted — tickets were priced at $9.50, a then astronomical fee that equates to around 60 bucks today — here was perhaps the most chilling song in Dylan’s catalog, about a man driven to murdering his own wife and children rather than letting them starve to death. And it was delivered via the most bare-bones, gut-level music of the night, played with such unforgiving severity that it nullifies escapism and forces you to not look away.
For me, “Hollis Brown” is Tour ’74 at its very best, and the greatest performance of the song comes from the overall finest gig of the run, the afternoon show from 1/14/74 in Boston. This concert is among the most widely bootlegged Tour ’74 dates for a reason. They play aggressive and speedy not too aggressive and speedy. Robertson’s molten lava leads pour over Dylan’s indignant pleas without melting them. Levon beats his drums like they just cheated him in a card game. It is — to borrow Christgau’s phrase — the craziest and strongest rock and roll you’ll ever hear.
Not everything on The 1974 Live Recordings is so indelible. The ear tires of hearing multiple versions of “Rainy Day Women” and “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” which are played essentially the same way every night. Over time you feel the players settling into a rhythm. You sense their minds are wandering. You understand the confusion that comes with playing songs the public once hated beyond all reason, and now loves beyond all reason. It starts to feel like show business, and these are not people who are at ease with show business.
But also … we’re talking about Bob freaking Dylan here. And Robbie damn Robertson and Levon sweet Jesus Helm and Rick my god Danko and Richard hallelujah Manuel and Garth holy hell Hudson. Can you really have too many recordings of these people playing together? It’s Bob Dylan And The Band! Give me 127 discs and then I’ll consider going my way and letting you go yours.