Dylan & The Band Tour --- ". . .the shows run on a razor’s edge of intensity.” | Jeff Slate /The Daily Beast

 “You can argue that this period—the Planet Waves album and the '74 tour—is kind of an official entry point into Dylan's second act as an artist,” says Elizabeth Nelson, who wrote the liner notes for The 1974 Live Recordings. 

“He has become a legend, flown too close to the sun, retreated into domesticity, and now is officially reentering the great public arena, a wizened gladiator. The whole period is one wherein he essentially signs the blood pact of being a public person forever.”

When Bob Dylan ‘Flew Too Close to the Sun’ and Came Out a Rock God

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Bob Dylan’s nostalgia-packed 1974 tour with The Band gets a massive 27-disc box set—and reveals the most impressive reinvention of his career.

Jeff Slate

Updated Sep. 21, 2024 3:51PM EDT / Published Sep. 21, 2024 5:00AM EDT 

In retrospect, Bob Dylan likened his 1974 reunion tour with The Band to Elvis Presley’s “Fat Elvis” period. It was powerful, sure, but it was nostalgia; creatively unsatisfying. And a cash grab. Ultimately, it showed him the way he didn’t want to go forward, as he recalled in 2004 in Chronicles, Vol.1.

Still, 1974 was a landmark year in rock ’n’ roll, and it was Bob Dylan and the Band who kicked it off in January, playing 40 shows during their six-week trek together—a groundbreaking feat in and of itself—often putting on matinee and evening arena shows to satisfy demand.

If, during his Thin Wild Mercury music period in the mid-1960s, Dylan had given songwriting a new vocabulary, and had created the look and attitude of the modern rock star, in 1974 he updated all of that for a new era, for good measure adding a tour that presaged the bloated, arena-filling tours that would become, and remain, a staple of the music business.

Dylan, who’d released a couple of laid-back country-tinged albums and had performed sparingly since his last tour with The Band in 1966, had signed a new record deal with David Geffen’s Asylum Records—leaving the storied Columbia label—and was about to have his first #1 record, Planet Waves, recorded with The Band. 

• Geffen enlisted the legendary promoter Bill Graham to handle the organization of the entire tour, a highly unusual move at the time, with tickets sold via a mail in lottery. 
• Dylan and The Band even traveled cross-country by private plane, a Boeing 720 passenger jet.

“It was a mythical tour, even at the time,” explains Rolling Stone’s David Browne, the author of the new book Talkin' Greenwich Village: The Heady Rise and Slow Fall of America's Bohemian Music Capital, which chronicles the fabled New York City neighborhood, and is particularly strong in how it deals with Dylan during the mid-’70s. “Dylan hadn’t toured in eight years, and, at least to my knowledge, none of it was filmed,” he adds. “Plus, it was the only tour he did with The Band after the ’60s, and it was a greatest hits tour, where Dylan was reintroducing himself to the world. All of those things together have given it this mystique, I think. When you add all those things up, it does give the tour this added allure.”

Of course, these weren’t the trailblazing, amphetamine-enhanced pied pipers of the 1966 tour, where at just about every stop they’d been booed. While everything that was frenetic and swinging about the ’60s was on full display on The 1966 Live Recordings box set, now, eight years later, the grim hangover that was the 1970s was upon everyone, and Dylan and The Band’s music and collective attitude while on the road early that year reflected all the weirdness, darkness and edginess that entailed.

A new box set, The 1974 Live Recordings, which includes 431 songs across 27 CDs, chronicles as much as any fan could (or perhaps should) need to hear from Dylan and The Band’s tour. But while most of the songs included are repeated many times over, it’s hard to imagine anyone getting bored. Because during the six-week run of shows, we get to hear the performers veer from edgy and almost shambolic on the first discs, to worn out but determined in the middle, and, finally, triumphant and maybe even a bit relieved on the last discs. 

The songs, too, metamorphosize. “Rainy Day Women 12 & 35,” “Forever Young” and “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” are all picked apart and put back together again by their author, and here we get to hear that process happening in real time.

The 1974 Live Recordings celebrates the 50th anniversary of Bob Dylan’s return to touring that year.

Legacy Recordings

“A lot of the revelations on here are on the first five to 10 discs,” says Ray Padgett, the author of Pledging My Time: Conversations with Bob Dylan Band Members. “Hearing the trajectory of the playing, and hearing Dylan’s vocals go from nuanced to beautiful to almost shouting practically every word, is fun to follow along show by show.”

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