MILAN – Columbia Records and Legacy Recordings, a catalog division of Sony Music Entertainment, will release Bob Dylan’s “The 1974 Live Recordings” on September 20, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the artist’s return to touring. This collection includes every professionally recorded performance of Dylan’s 1974 tour with The Band and will be available as a 27-CD deluxe box set. The 1974 Live Recordings offers fans 417 previously unreleased Bob Dylan live tracks, including 133 newly mixed from 16-track tape and all surviving soundboard recordings, along with new liner notes by journalist and critic Elizabeth Nelson.
In conjunction with “The 1974 Live Recordings,” Third Man Records has announced the September release of “The 1974 Live Recordings – The Missing Songs From Before the Flood,” a 3-LP set drawn from the same recordings, featuring hand-selected versions of every song Bob Dylan recorded that was not included on the original 1974 live album. Pressed exclusively on colored vinyl. Available through The Vault, Third Man’s direct-to-consumer service.
Bob Dylan’s 1974 tour marked his first live performance in eight years and reunited him with The Band, who had by then become famous in their own right. Bob Dylan and The Band played 30 dates in 42 days, often with two shows a day, setting a new standard for rock concerts in front of an average crowd of 18,500. The energy of the performances was described by Rolling Stone’s Ben Fong-Torres as “white-hot and overwhelming,” while Robert Christgau said that Dylan “went over his old songs like a truck.”
Tour ’74 began on January 3, 1974, at Chicago Stadium with a tense, combative version of “Hero Blues,” a rare acoustic-turned-electric track from the “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” sessions that Dylan performed only a handful of times. Other rarities, such as a completely reimagined “Ballad Of Hollis Brown,” “Song to Woody” (not performed since 1962) and the Planet Waves outtake “Nobody ‘Cept You,” were well received on the tour’s opening nights. The Band’s Robbie Robertson recalled that, during their previous tour together, they had been booed on every stage in Europe, and that what had happened that night in Chicago was very reassuring for them.
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, headlined 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 all but retired from the music scene after a motorcycle accident in 1966, but he was still “widely regarded as the most influential and significant star of the last 10 years in American popular music,” according to The New York Times.
The tour helped set the template for major rock tours, codifying shared experiences such as audience members raising lighters and the flash of lights during highlights like “Like A Rolling Stone.” Many songs, including “All Along The Watchtower” and “Forever Young” and “Most Likely You Go Your Way (and I’ll Go Mine),” were performed live for the first time and became iconic. It was initially recorded with a stereo mix from soundboards on 1/4-inch tape and cassette. By the end of the tour, David Geffen of Asylum Records had commissioned multitrack tape recordings, the standard of the time, for the eventual release of “Before the Flood.”
The 1974 Live Recordings includes all cassettes and 1/4” tapes, and the shows recorded on 16-track tape, newly mixed for this collection.
