Bob Dylan’s The 1974 Live Recordings box set is a massive achievement

What a difference eight years makes in the world of rock ‘n’ roll.

When Bob Dylan first toured with The Band in 1966, they were met with critical scorn and consumer agitation as the Minnesota singer-songwriter took his shocking concept of going electric at the Newport Folk Festival the year before to an entirely new level. Across three continents, the group was met with heckles and walk-outs from fans as their plugged-in swagger was deemed heretical by loyalists to Bob’s original folkways. 

The next eight years saw Dylan recede from the spotlight of touring life, opting to give up the road in favor of raising his family and recording such exploratory studio classics as John Wesley Harding, Nashville Skyline, Self Portrait, New Morning and the soundtrack to Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid. But then, in 1973, David Geffen lured Bob away from his longtime home at Columbia Records to his Asylum imprint and, with the help of legendary concert promoter Bill Graham, convinced the Bard to reunite with his boys in The Band for a new album and North American tour. 

The resulting title, 1974’s Planet Waves, was a deep look into Dylan’s personal life and something of a sentimental journey honoring his marriage to Sara Lownds, a union that would begin to disintegrate a year later and chronicled on his 1975 masterpiece Blood On The Tracks. The LP was a modest success, shipping gold and reaching No. 1 on the Billboard album chart. But what really blew up was the tour with his reunited Band mates in support of Planet Waves, where the six men experienced the polar opposite of the reception they received back in ’66. In fact, it’s even been said this ’74 tour set the template for arena rock concerts for decades to come, as Dylan and The Band played 30 dates in 42 days, sometimes doubling up on sets in a single day.

“When we played Madison Square Garden, with the crowd standing and cheering us on, I was very conscious of how on our last tour with Bob, in 1966, the audience had booed us most nights,” guitarist Robbie Robertson detailed in his 2022 memoir Testimony. “All around Europe, Australia, and North America, they’d condemned the music we were making together. Now here we were, playing Bob’s songs hard and direct, the same as before, and the world was accepting it with open arms. We hadn’t given up. We didn’t come around. The world had come around. All we had were those tape recordings from the 1966 tour to go on—we knew that music was real when there were many nonbelievers. We fought a good battle in ’66, but we won the war in ’74.”

The tour is now being celebrated by Dylan’s longtime label Columbia Records and their award-winning Legacy Recordings division with The 1974 Live Recordings, a massive box set that collects all the professionally taped shows from the tour, including the source material for what would become the 1974 live album Before The Flood. There are 417 previously unreleased live tracks spread across 27 compact discs, including 133 cuts that have been newly mixed from 16-track tape as well as every soundboard recording captured for posterity. 

“They couldn’t have known it at the time, but they were on the vanguard of a new way of doing things, a different kind of concert experience,” explains acclaimed music journalist Elizabeth Nelson in her thoughtful liner notes to the box, beautifully aligned alongside historic live images from the tour. “Huge crowds, outdoor stadiums, heady ticket prices, sound systems up to, or maybe not up to, handling all of the attendant sonic requirements and complications. One possibly apocryphal music biz tale goes that Peter Grant, the obstreperous manager of Led Zeppelin, once approached Dylan and told him about his capacity with Zep. Dylan, the story goes, responded, ‘I don’t come to you with my problems.’ But ironically his problems were precisely the same as Peter Grant’s in 1974: how to stage a brutally aggressive rock spectacle at a time when the toll would be borne mostly by the band, and particularly the singer. Dylan’s voice changes all the time, with the seasons: crooner, growler, bluesman or Caruso. But it is possible that the 1974 tour changed it forever. Suppose the sound system wasn’t up to the exertion? You’d soon hear it on the beautifully shopworn performances on Desire. Then, in increasing ways, you’d hear it forevermore.”

Yet one caveat of The 1974 Live Recordings is the fact that Dylan and The Band played a lot of the same songs each night. Billed as a celebration of the Bob songbook, the nightly set included such essentials as “Ballad Of A Thin Man,” “All Along The Watchtower,” “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” and Planet Waves’ most enduring song, “Forever Young.”

All the same, however, was the smattering of songs across the tour that only got played once or twice. Then there were obscure cuts that would be thrown into the setlist on any given date seemingly at Dylan’s whim, pulling from the depths of his then-12-year-old catalog to the delight of hardcore Zimmerman-heads in attendance. 

And it is from those moments that we offer this guide into the deeper recesses of The 1974 Live Recordings, offering a glimpse of what lies within one of this year’s most talked-about catalog titles beyond the 20 versions of “It Ain’t Me, Babe” you gotta sift through.

1. 1. 1. “Hero Blues” – Originally written in 1962 as a short screed against hero worship, this outtake from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan would eventually see its official release on the ninth volume of The Bootleg Series, The Witmark Demos: 1962-1964 in demo form. The ’74 version of “Hero Blues,” however, is transformed into a feral rocker that was only played during the first two tour stops at Chicago Stadium, showcasing the dynamic interplay between Dylan, Robertson, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel, Rick Danko, and Levon Helm at this juncture.

1. 1. 2. “Tough Mama” – One of four official Planet Waves tracks selected for these concerts, the rugged “Tough Mama” only lasted through the first three dates before falling off the setlist for the remainder of the tour. But not without leaving its mark as one of the jaunt’s most robust performances, possibly the closest The Band sounded to themselves while working for Bob at the time. Dylan would revisit the song in 1997 while out in support of Time Out Of Mind, and it would continue to rotate through his sets until 2009, according to Setlist.fm.

1. 1. 3. “Ballad Of Hollis Brown” – One of the starkest songs Dylan ever wrote, this flatpicking,  Appalachian-style ballad tells the fictional tale of a South Dakota farmer so overcome with poverty he kills his wife, five children, and then himself. Dylan and The Band played a ferocious electric version of “Hollis” pretty much for the majority of the ’74 tour, each performance coming off more frayed and desperate than the one before it. By the time they get to the Valentine’s Day evening closing show in Inglewood, CA, it’s become so raw it spills blood on the stage.

1. 1. 4. “Wedding Song” – This Planet Waves highlight stuck around for six performances on the ’74 tour, a highlight of Dylan’s acoustic portion of the show that extols his appreciation for his wife, Sara, in what’s been called one last attempt to reconcile their struggling marriage. The intensity in Bob’s voice as he performs the song, especially on the Feb. 11th afternoon show in Oakland, CA, is particularly striking in its heartfelt terseness.

1. 1. 5. “Nobody ’Cept You” – This was originally recorded as the final song on Planet Waves, but was replaced by “Wedding Song” instead. But where the studio version of “Nobody ’Cept You,” which would turn up in 1991 on the first installment of the Bob Dylan Bootleg Series, was cluttered up by wah-wah guitar and a displaced shuffle, the song received an acoustic reboot on the road in ’74. During the eight times the tune was performed by Dylan during the acoustic part of the show, the sincerity in its simplicity transformed it into something that could’ve been recorded during the pre-electric days.

1. 1. 6. “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry” – Dylan and The Band only performed this bluesy romp from 1965’s groundbreaking Highway 61 Revisited once on the ’74 tour. But that one time they broke it out, on January 9, 1974, at the Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, Canada, the six men played it with such a ragged swagger it remains one of the great touchstone performances of the tour.

1. 1. 7. “Song To Woody” – This ode to Dylan’s sonic forefather was one of two originals featured on Bob’s eponymous debut album for Columbia Records in 1962. He would play the song famously at such early gigs as his 1961 stints at the Gaslight Cafe and Carnegie Chapter Hall in 1961. But by the time he selected it to play on the ’74 tour, he hadn’t performed it live since his Gerdes Folk City days in 1962. Performed only twice during the trek, “Song To Woody” no doubt bookends the inclusion of “Hero Blues” on the setlist, especially opening night in Chicago, in terms of that yin and yang of hero worship.

1. 1. 8. “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” – Though famously part of the electric side of his 1965 LP Bringing It All Back Home, “Love Minus Zero/No Limit,” the musical equation for unlimited love, always seemed like it was more at home on the acoustic side of the album. Dylan must’ve felt the same way, which is perhaps why he chose to perform it, albeit only the one time on February 13, 1974, at The Forum in Inglewood, CA, as part of a spirited unplugged portion of the concert sandwiched between “The Times They Are A-Changin’” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”—perhaps where it’s always belonged in his songbook.

1. 1. 9. “To Ramona” – Originally recorded for Dylan’s fourth album, 1964’s Another Side Of Bob Dylan, it’s long been said that this song—which was completed by Bob during a trip to the small Greek village of Vernilya—was about fellow American folk original Joan Baez. Adding to the mystery is Joan herself, who wrote about how Dylan would sometimes call her “Ramona” in her 1987 autobiography And A Voice To Sing With. It was also one of the selections Dylan and The Band played during their performance at the 1969 Isle of Wight festival. He only performed the song once on the ’74 tour during his acoustic set at Philadelphia’s The Spectrum during the January 6th afternoon show, its lilting waltz as arresting as it was the day it was set to tape.

1. 1. 10. “Mr. Tambourine Man” – One of the most talked-about performances on The 1974 Live Recordings is the raucous version of “Blowin’ In The Wind” with which Dylan and The Band closed out the final show of the tour on Valentine’s Day at The Forum in Inglewood, CA. However, another Bob standard was electrified that evening in “Mr. Tambourine Man,” which he only broke out one other time on this tour, playing an acoustic rendition on January 6th at the Philadelphia Spectrum. The February 14th version, meanwhile, is brilliantly amplified with a subtle nod to the Byrds version as Dylan duets with Garth Hudson’s otherworldly accordion.  However you may have felt about “Mr. Tambourine Man” in the past, listening to this rock take on the ’60s standard will make even the biggest Bob snob second guess their smugness towards one of his most popular tracks.