Bob Dylan and The Band. “The 1974 Live Recordings.” Columbia Records, 2024. CD.
Reviewed by Annie Burkhart, University of Northern Colorado
“Locating The Band in The 1974 Live Recordings”
Yeah the ole days are gone forever and the new ones aint far behind, the laughter is fading away…
—Bob Dylan, 1974, Planet Waves back cover
On January 3, 1974, 18,500 rock ‘n’ roll converts watched in awe as six men who had betrayed them eight years prior scrambled onto the Chicago Stadium stage. Never has ovation on top of ovation been so bizarrely repaid; without a word or even a gesture of acknowledgement, Bob Dylan and The Band broke into a number that no one recognized. Once Robbie Robertson teased the arena with a twangy false start on guitar, this electric ensemble delivered three-and-a-half minutes of rollicking roots rock, refusing to deliver “Hero Blues” as it was originally recorded. There would be no mistake about it. As in 1966, these behemoths of blues rock still answered to no one.
What transpired over the next six weeks, especially on a musical level, was aggressive, subversive, and defiant. These genre-defying musical giants would not be denied as they were, insisting on defining themselves not by but against their past selves – while also making no promises about who they’d be next time. Across forty shows in twenty-one cities on a tour that might have easily been dismissed as a nostalgia act, The Band and Bob Dylan played career-defining music at critical junctures for both acts. As of 2024, a compellingly curated collection of Tour ’74 has been made (theoretically) available to the public in the form of Bob Dylan and The Band’s 1974 Live Recordings.
Listening to the boxset, fans will hear loud and clear that The Band were holding themselves to an incredibly high standard in 1974, a year often overlooked completely in discussions of the group’s legacy. When Band and Bob fans heard from me last, I was situating The Band’s attitudes about their own legacy in 1974, and I, in essence, concluded – with the knowledge of how they sounded on both Before the Flood (1974) and a bootleg or two – that this tour marked the beginning of the end – a sentiment echoed by rock columnist Elizabeth Nelson in her 1974 Live Recordings liner notes. After listening to all 29 hours of this boxset, however, it’s clear that there’s more to the story. While The Band might have relished this opportunity to retreat into Bob Dylan’s shadow as backing musicians, the magic they created on this tour extended their tenure as performers, rather than marking its imminent decline. You don’t make fifty cumulative hours of music this good, this consistently masterful, in the space of six weeks if you’ve got one foot out the door. The 1974 Live Recordings, for The Band as well as Bob Dylan, show us that while the “good ole days” are indeed gone forever, the “new ones” are going to be a trip.
It’s for all of these reasons that The 1974 Live Recordings has supplanted Before the Flood as the definitive artifact of Tour ’74. While many fairly regard 1974 as a year of transition for Dylan and a period of uncertainty for The Band, they were making revolutionary music on this tour that allowed them – not critics, and not fans – to define their legacies. Nelson’s liner notes remind us that “[t]he audience had gotten personal on the ’66 tour . . . And this was the receipt.” This boxset chronicles how one of the most cohesive, innovative, and self-aware bands in history cooked up fire and technical precision night after night as one of the most polarizing and influential artist of the prior decade stood center stage figuring out the future of music. As MOJO Magazine observed of Dylan in their October 2024 review of the Recordings, he was “gathering the sheaves of his past and setting them ablaze with old friends” (67). The Tour ’74 bonfire rages in this boxset.
Their gutsy and impenitent performance of “Hero Blues” (a number that would be axed from the set fewer than two days later) drives home its lyrics in a way that Dylan’s acoustic number had not. These six musicians attack every measure and every beat with a painstaking accuracy that has rather a violence to it. A period of unadulterated joy for fans of The Band hits around the 1:30 mark, and the group starts doing what they do best: breaking it all the way down. Robertson’s wailing lead guitar slowly crescendos at 1:33, rising to the top as Bob yells to no one (yet everyone) “you need a different kind’a man, babe!” after which all but Bob and Levon Helm go quiet for a measure. Helm keeps driving home that backbeat while elegantly hitting a snare-bass flam and Bob announces who’s replacing everyone’s folk hero: “NAY-POH-lee-uhn BOH-nee-parte!” The bridge breakdown sees The Band performing as soundly and tightly as they have at any point in their career. Robertson and Garth Hudson trade and weave together soaring organ and lead guitar solos as Richard Manuel deftly drifts between lead and rhythm keyboard, hitting the backbeats one moment and the off-beats the next with a simple but confident artistry that’s impressive for this point in his career. And when Rick Danko’s bassline ascends to the top of the mix just before the two-minute mark, even my dog starts paying attention. We’d be hard-pressed to find more gutsy bravado in any juke joint in America than we hear in these first three and a half minutes of Tour ’74.
Candidly, I don’t have the encyclopedic knowledge of Dylan’s live performance history to discuss all 431 tracks of this collection. Instead, I’ll briefly touch on the elephant in the room: that The 1974 Live Recordings was, above all else, a Sony copyright collection. As Sony doesn’t own the rights to any of The Band’s music, not a single recording of an original Band number made it into the boxset. That’s an omission to the tune of 400 more tracks and thus approximately twenty-four more hours of music. Whatever Dylan partisans may say, The Band fans do need to hear all twenty-six performances of “The Shape I’m In.” While The Band shone brightest on this tour when they were, perhaps counterintuitively, not caught in the spotlight, their sets are not an insignificant part of any tour stop. As we flesh out our complete portrait of Tour ’74 with bits and pieces from the archives, we need to remember The Band.
Few of the acclaimed music critics who dropped in on Tour ’74 entered the venue with fair, informed assumptions about The Band’s role on what was principally thought of as a Dylan tour. Even Ralph J. Gleason, whose review of the Oakland shows initially celebrates The Band as having “never played better in person or on record” (86), ends up ultimately misrepresenting what this tour meant to Danko, Helm, Hudson, Manuel, and Robertson in what reads like a backhanded compliment. He opines, “The Band itself has done something only truly great musicians, secure in the knowledge of their own strengths, can do. They have sublimated [sic] themselves to their fellow artist” (89). Though I applaud his flattery in a general sense, I think he misses the point: that The Band needed this chance to stand in Dylan’s shadow, this opportunity to make music in a way that complements their sensibilities both professionally and personally.
The Tour ’74 stop that leaves this Band fan howling at the moon is the January 15th show in Largo, Maryland. The touch of master engineer Rob Frabroni – invited onto Starship One with the rest of the crew by Bob Dylan himself – turned Disc 9 of this boxset to gold. MOJO Magazine’s review admires how Frabroni “helped Dylan and The Band sound pretty mean” by maximizing their mix of the “constantly acerbic voice, the proto-punk wallop, the squealing guitars and psychedelic keyboards.” The best mix of this boxset is, by default, likely to be a Band fan’s favorite.
While it’s hard to find a bad performance on this disc, the first full-group set at the Capital Center is something special. This was only the group’s second test of beginning and ending a set with the same tune. The number they chose was, as Robertson describes it, a “ripping” version of “Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine)” (Testimony 428). The Band and Dylan effortlessly recapture their Blonde on Blonde-era energy for this performance. Pair this with Bob’s vituperative shout-singing and the rhythm section’s “tenterhooks urgency that verged on rage” (Nelson), and it becomes the anthem of Tour ’74. As Danko plucks out a sometimes frantic staccato on electric bass, Helm drives this “hectic freight train” number along with deceptively intricate ride cymbal work and a snare pop that hits the tiniest fraction ahead of every beat.
The Band musically manifests the urgency of Dylan’s song about parting ways. On one level, Dylan is singing about parting ways with the audience as they leave the arena after the encore. More deeply, he is singing about the audience parting ways with their idea of who Bob Dylan is. Robertson notes to Fong-Torres in a 1974 interview, “I don’t remember him ever delivering what they believe he delivered, or what they think he’s going to deliver [this time] . . . people have a fictitious past in mind about him” (24). By 1974, Bob and The Band had earned the privilege of revising their respective legacies. With Dylan’s lone troubadour days behind him, The Band were there to set expectations. As British documentary filmmaker Mick Gold notes of The Band just after the conclusion of Tour ’74 that they are “the only group who could warm up the crowd for Abraham Lincoln … [T]hey sang about communities tied together by traditions of loyalty and deference.” While I find that rock writers focus on The Band’s personal humility a bit too enthusiastically in the mid seventies, “loyalty and deference” were certainly chief among their noblest qualities. The Band facilitate Bob’s identity migration, just as they always have – they take a load off Bobby as he decides where to take music next.
If it wasn’t already clear that Tour ’74 was charting new territory for the group, the January 15 performance of “Lay Lady Lay” eliminates any shadow of a doubt. It’s sultry; it’s salacious; no listener is safe. All eyes and ears are on them before the number even starts, as Dylan gives tens of thousands a jump scare by saying a complete sentence (other than “we’ll be right back”) for the first time in twelve days of touring: “Thank you; it’s great to be back in D.C.” Robbie and Bob create a spicy back-and-forth between vocals and lead guitar. Both are feeling powerful and self-assured. Clearly, anyone who jumped on the recent “Bob Dylan is not sexy” train has never heard this performance. As Garth Hudson and the rhythm section issue standard-yet-tight-as-ever backbeats and flourishes, a good time is clearly had by all, and performers and spectators begin to feel at ease, if a tad overexcited.
If “Lay Lady Lay” is a moment of sexual delight, “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” is the morning after. The thrill is brief, and now it’s time to blow this border town. The band settles on something unexpected here – they slow down. Coming down from their “Lay Lady Lay” high, they take their time and devote over six minutes to this number alone. Author and Dylan devotee Paul Prescott drew up a to-die-for infographic for Dylan obsessives:
Every Tour ’74 performance of “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” in ascending order of duration and notes on modifications.
Needless to say, If Prescott sees Dr. Annie, she’ll tell him “thanks a lot.” The January 15 tour stop is only the second time the group plays “Tom Thumb” in full and the only time they’d be this measured in tempo. After a barreling 94 bpm at The Spectrum in Philly on January 7 (another disc of unusually good sound quality), this is an interesting development. What’s notable is that every review I’ve read about this tour notes that the group speeds up from show to show, and slowing this number down to one of the most plodding of its kind to close out the first third of the tour is rather remarkable. It’s as if the wish fulfillment of “Lay Lady Lay” gives them permission to relax. Robertson’s opening lick could be mistaken for rock-reggae, and when Bob sings “howling at the moon,” Robbie howls back on lead guitar without missing a beat. However, this number ultimately belongs to our boys on the keys. In my mind’s eye, I can see Hudson’s spider fingers moving between consoles while Manuel complements his trills and ditties with his signature shoulder shimmy. Behind the colorful organ and piano stands, as always, the tight but funky support of Helm and Danko, driving this carefully timed number home. Dreams realized in the previous song give the musicians a moment to linger in Juarez before high-tailing it home.
Even as Tour ’74 in the mind of most fans serves as a weigh station between more memorable milestones of these artists’ careers, these roots-rock royalty are making sure we know who they are, where they’ve been, and where they’re going. Their updated, straight-ahead interpretation of “I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)” clues us into the musicians’ interior lives. Finding a sound reminiscent of “Loving You (Is Sweeter Than Ever),” a highlight of Rock of Ages-era Band sets, helps this number go down easy. “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” and “Like a Rolling Stone” never get old, as we get an ever-energetic Danko at his vocal best – thin, shouty, and unrestrained—in each chorus. To boot, there are few joys more profound than hearing Richard Manuel on drums, and we get that on “Ballad of Hollis Brown” – a real treat for any fan who adores The Band at their funkiest, which is more often than not The Band at their best.
We must bear in mind, however, that these men were playing a minimum of one show (28 songs) per day, most days over the course of six weeks, so anyone looking for career-defining solos from Danko, Manuel, and Helm are bound to be disappointed. After two years of almost no live gigs, Tour ’74 demanded a lot of the group’s co-lead vocalists – a reality (sadly) spotlighted in Before the Flood. However, for the typically unassuming members of The Band, notoriously bashful about their celebrity, it’s easy to mistake the necessity of slowing down with bowing out and giving up. If we take anything from The 1974 Live Recordings, it should be that The Band did neither. Gold notes in the April 1974 edition of Let It Rock that their
lack of new material might seem predictable after the anxiety of unanswered questions in Cahoots, but I don’t feel their performances can be dismissed as a copout or a lack of nerve. Just as their early work contraindicated widely held views about rock being the music of radical dissent and continual innovation, their last two albums have subverted the idea that rock depends on constant production of significant responses to the present … What The Band expressed … was a faith in rock as a living tradition that can be invoked as well as added to. (5)
This is one of the most astute observations I’ve seen about The Band in the mid-seventies, but I think we do everyone involved an injustice to say that what The Band did in 1974 wasn’t “significant.” It is significant because it’s a “response to the present” that demonstrates an attention to their personal needs as well as the public’s complicated expectations of Bob Dylan. We can’t say The Band sublimated themselves to Dylan on this tour. None of these six men saw himself as any more or less valuable than the others, and that’s why this experiment worked. But The Band did something much more remarkable. They had the courage to stand still.
And why would they want anything more? They had created something beautiful and enduring. Indeed, by 1970, The Band had successfully reenlivened music addressing fin de siècle America to lionize the working class (laborers of color included). Gold captures their singular charm, noting that The Band’s songs “went further than Dylan’s by going beyond metaphor and actually embodying the experiences they were about … Where Dylan used the form and language of country music to mark out some firm ground after the amoral fragmentation of the electric albums, The Band actually enshrined the people and places they’d traveled through” (5). They didn’t need to take it further; there was nowhere else to go. To say, then, that The Band were unremarkable after 1970 because they were deliberate about touring and measured in their output is to fundamentally misunderstand them; they had been like that since the beginning when they backed Ronnie Hawkins as The Hawks, then retreated to Big Pink. They never craved attention; they never chased acclaim – but they didn’t rest on their laurels, either. In 1974, The Band were, quite simply, exactly where they needed to be.
For what it’s worth, I’m not the only one who feels this way. In some glowing Tour ’74 commentary, American historian Nat Hentoff gives The Band their flowers, as they were by his estimation, “far more stimulating than [Dylan]” (Knockin’ 116). While it needn’t be a competition, and I don’t intend to make it one, every recognition of this still-rockin’ group who made timeless music with Dylan in a Woodstock basement counts for a lot. In fact, the best remark I’ve turned up while writing this review is from someone whose name I may never know, in a thread about The 1974 Live Recordings on the Steve Hoffman Music Forums:
Hearing these as just Dylan shows sharpens the focus. It’s funny, because it’s made me appreciate The Band much more for their instrumental ability. Most commentary on this thread has been about Dylan, how the setlist changed, how his vocal delivery developed. What I’m hearing are his call and response bits with Robbie, the timely Danko interjections, Manuel’s bluesy barrelhouse piano, Garth’s arsenal of sounds, and Levon’s backwoods Keith Moon fills.
For me, this is what heaven looks like – conversations in which we give The Band their due ad infinitum. This is exactly the reaction I had hoped to read from fans drawn to The Band through The 1974 Live Recording, fearless remarks that locate The Band, steady and enduring, in moments when we’re apt to lose them.
In loving memory of Eric Garth Hudson, maestro of mana, 1937–2025.
