The 1974 Live Recordings

Bob Dylan’s 1974 Tour marked his first time performing live in eight years and reunited him with The Band – who had become widely renowned in their own right since backing the artist nearly a decade earlier. Booked into arenas for the first time ever, Bob Dylan and The Band performed 30 dates in 42 days (often playing two sets per day) before an average audience of 18,500 – helping set a new standard for what rock concerts could look and sound like. And in front of those crowds, they brought an energy that Rolling Stone’s Ben Fong-Torres described as “searing and soaring, unified and precise…excellent in itself.” Music critic Robert Christgau compared the sound to Bob Dylan “running over his old songs like a truck.”

Tour ‘74 kicked off January 3, 1974, at Chicago Stadium – the largest indoor arena in the world at the time it was built – with a tense and combative rip through ultimate deep-cut “Hero Blues,” an acoustic-gone-electric outtake from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan sessions, that he had scarcely performed before – or since. Additional rarities – like a wildly reinvented “Ballad Of Hollis Brown,” “Song to Woody” (not performed since 1962) and Planet Waves outtake “Nobody ‘Cept You” – would be well received in the tour’s first nights. “We were booed off of every stage in Europe,” The Band’s Robbie Robertson recalled to Newsweek of their previous run together. “What happened tonight in Chicago is so reassuring for us.”

The reception wasn’t the only thing that had changed since Bob Dylan and The Band last toured together in 1966. Since then, The Band had released six LPs, played Woodstock and other famous stages, and recorded a series of historic sessions with Bob Dylan – from The Basement Tapes to Planet Waves. For his part, Bob Dylan had effectively retired from the road altogether following a 1966 motorcycle accident yet was still “widely regarded as the most influential and significant star in the last 10 years of American popular music,” according to The New York Times.

Though they might not have known it at the time, Bob Dylan and The Band were at the vanguard of a new era. Tour ‘74 would help create the template for the major rock tour and codify many of its shared experiences – from the sight of audiences holding up lighters en masse (as captured in the iconic cover image for Before The Flood), to the bright flash of the house lights during a show’s signal moment, in this case their performance of “Like A Rolling Stone.” Likewise, many songs performed live for the first time on Tour ‘74 – “All Along The Watchtower,” “Forever Young” and the show’s eventual opener-and-closer “Most Likely You Go Your Way (and I’ll Go Mine)” – would take on a life of their own.