Bob Dylan & The Band
The 1974 Live Recordings
COLUMBIA/LEGACY
For Dylanologists and hardcore fans of the awesome meeting of the minds that was Bob with The Band in 1974, the date January 6 signifies either the fourth show of their joined-together arena tour, or the fourth disc of Columbia/Legacy’s, 27-disc, 431-song document initially pared down to two albums via 1974’s Before the Flood. That same date and disc represents an evening out between a six-year-old me and his saxophone-playing father who made live concerts “their thing” when the elder Amorosi wasn’t playing jazz standards in area nightclubs. I won’t bore you with autobiography, save to say that my non-drinking/non-drug-doing dad had to keep putting his “no” hand up when it came to passing joints and wine sacks while the rustic, rock-out rush of “It Ain’t Me, Babe” nearly blew me from my dad’s grasp.
Considering the heaving force and forward motion of re-done early classics like “Babe” and the garrulously galloping “Most Likely You Go Your Way (and I’ll Go Mine),” repeated over and over within the body of The 1974 Live Recordings with The Band as his divining rod, this tour was truly the flashpoint of the Dylan-gone-electric explosion (I can’t listen to the studio original of “Most Likely” after having lived with Before the Flood’s hard-curving concert version). Without using any of The Band's catalog (it’s a Dylan box, therefore subject to Sony’s big-money Bob buyout), the focus of this 1974 collection is how Robbie Robertson & Co. helped forge a rich, rough-and-tumble backing for the Bard of the 20th century. For over two dozen discs, this is all Dylan’s show despite the tour’s original booking.
Dotting around the expansive landscape of its discs, the first thing you notice is how loud, proud, and bravura-filled Dylan’s scuffed vocals are throughout, and how aggressively frenetic the whole tour was when bundled together. Though you could hear a similar guttural breadth and buoyancy on the live recordings documenting his Rolling Thunder Revue a year later, these 1974 shows were the first time that Dylan hit the arena touring circuit. Determinedly, Dylan the singer opens up the intimacy of slow-stewing epics (“Knockin’ on Heaven's Door”) and pensive romancers (“Lay Lady Lay”), gathers steam, and lets rip, boisterously. Despite having The Band with him—his musical team behind the freshly released, enthusiastically received Planet Waves—Dylan highlighted a fleeting few of its tracks, including a tender-but-toughened “Forever Young” (great at every gig), the seemingly throwaway gunslinging blues of “Tough Mama,” and the rambling “Something There Is About You.”
Instead, what Dylan and The Band repeat—heartily, too—are multiple loose, nerve-jangling expressions of “All Along the Watchtower,” dangerously driving takes on “Ballad of a Thin Man,” and warm, rounder versions of his earliest folkies such as “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” and “Song to Woody.” The still-anthemic “Blowin’ in the Wind” manages genuine lift and soaring, then, as opposed to how he downplays its grace and guile at present, while the early-dawning “Hero Blues” is tense and sexy. No matter where and when Dylan did “Just Like a Woman,” he all but cowls and croons it, acoustic guitar in hand, Elvis-esque quaver in his throat.
Everything throughout 1974 is muscular, cluster-fucked, and gummy—delicate too, if you take the time and listen to its repetitions in such a gorgeous new mix of professional recordings, bootleg cassettes, and soundboard captures—especially at the end of the tour, on Valentine’s Day at The Forum in Inglewood, when Dylan chews through “She Belongs to Me” and hollers above the blur of “Forever Young” and “Maggie’s Farm.” By its sheer mass, The 1974 Live Recordings is Dylan’s finest concert document. Split into separate pieces, too, this is a set of moments that no rock and roll fan (let alone that of Dylan or The Band) could ever forget.
