In 1974, the Grateful Dead were touring with their gigantic Wall of Sound, and Crosby Stills Nash & Young were touring America, reunited and ready to split up. Yet the expression “Tour ’74” for everyone or almost everyone means only one thing: the 39 concerts that Bob Dylan & The Band held in 21 American cities between January and February. It was their first tour together and Dylan’s first since 1966.
Since '66, Dylan had performed only sporadically, such as the show with The Band on the Isle of Wight in 1969 or the concert for Bangladesh in 1971. He had not done a proper tour. His absence from the scene was not a small one, and not just for him, but for rock as a whole. His return meant a rush for tickets, available through a lottery. It was Dylan's first arena tour, something unimaginable in '66, but normal in '74.
Everyone talked about it with enthusiastic tones, the press covered the tour generously, Rolling Stone he called it the event of the year by publishing a series of funny polaroids taken at the final stage in Los Angeles attended by people like Warren Beatty, Cher, Carole King, Joan Baez. Above all, the double live album was taken from the four concerts in LA Before the Flood in which Dylan and the Band intertwined their respective repertoires.
The 1974 Live Recordings tells a different story, and not only because it is 27 CDs long (and in any case does not include all the concerts of the tour, but only those that were professionally recorded). First of all, the songs from The Band are excluded, since the box set is a catalog operation that serves Sony to extend the rights to this repertoire beyond half a century. And then there is the fact that the music changes, and badly, during the six weeks of the tour.
After two concerts, for example, Dylan puts aside Hero Bluesa piece dating back to around the time of The Freehweelin' Bob Dylan and played three times in 1963. Perhaps he was aware of the existence of his bootlegs to the point of not only playing unreleased ones like this one or Nobody 'Cept Youbut to open the whole tour with Hero Bluesimagining that someone in the audience knew her.
The incredible demand for tickets, the all-consuming commitment (up to five hours on stage a day when there were afternoon and evening shows), the novelty of arenas created the conditions for the musicians to end up partying all out. And you can hear it in the vocals. In the liner notes for the box set, writer and musician Elizabeth Nelson carefully traces the line between Dylan's brash vocal approach on this tour and the deterioration of his voice in the years that followed. At times it's like an Al Pacino version of Dylan, a singer who overwhelms you with his bravado, often mesmerizes you, sometimes goes off the rails. Sometimes he just screams or has a very low voice, as in Just Like a Woman from disc number 11 recorded in Charlotte, North Carolina, which is still a nice concert.
Dylan's mood remains high overall. The fighting spirit of Before the Flood you can find it already in the first concerts of the tour, even if the nervousness is palpable and Dylan seems to play defense rather than attack. In any case there is a great frenzy right from the start. In the previous tours Dylan had never played pieces like All Along the Watchtower, Lay, Lady, Lay, Knocking on Heaven's Doornor obviously the new one Forever Young which is perfected execution after execution. For Watchtower seems to be inspired more by Jimi Hendrix's version than his own. And he rips Lay, Lady, Lay from the territory of the soft-lit love song to give it a slightly more daring reading.
Wedding Songtreat as Forever Young from Planet Wavesis present in six versions and is an intense and emotionally charged song. Nobody 'Cept Yououttakes of Planet Waves officially released only in 1991 in the first box set of Bootleg Seriesyou can hear it in the shows between the first and eighth discs. They are both raw and devotional songs. They demand fiery performances, but they don't quite fit the atmosphere of the tour.
The fireworks come when Dylan performs solo acoustically. It's like he's investigating, not just performing. Gates of Eden And It's Alright, But (I'm Only Bleeding). The chronicles of the time speak of the applause that regularly greeted the latter, which Dylan did alone every night. The passage about “the President of the United States who sometimes has to be naked” was particularly welcome, given that it was in the midst of the Watergate scandal. What is most impressive, however, is how many facets Dylan manages to bring out performance after performance.
The concerts as a whole also undergo a similar evolution over time. In the first ones, the set list is not yet fixed, the performances have the typical moderation of certain country-rock. Listen to Robbie Robertson's guitar: it is remarkable, but it is as if caged. In the middle shows, everyone finally lets loose. The afternoon and evening concerts in Houston, contained in disks 15 and 16, are particularly lively and exciting, with a liberated Robertson. At the end of the second Houston show, Dylan even says a few words to the audience (“I thank you on behalf of myself and the Band, goodnight!”) and the songs speed up until they reach the performances we already knew.
It's easy to understand, even though I heard other even better performances today, why Before the Flood was compiled taking almost only from the four final concerts of the tour, those in Los Angeles (Knocking on Heaven's Doorhere on CD 17, was recorded at Madison Square Garden). The LA concerts are the culmination of everything that came before. But today, fortunately, they no longer have the last word.
From Rolling Stone US.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
