1974 Live Recordings

Columbia Records and Legacy Recordings, the catalog division of Sony Music Entertainment, will release "Bob Dylan & The Band : The 1974 Live Recordings" on Friday, September 20th, 2024, celebrating the 50th anniversary of Bob Dylan's return to touring that year. Featuring all professionally recorded shows from the artist's 1974 performances backed by The Band, the collection will be available as a deluxe box set across 27 CDs. "The 1974 Live Recordings" offers fans 417 previously unreleased Bob Dylan live tracks, including 133 recordings newly mixed from 16 track tape, and every single surviving soundboard recording, 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 + 1 x 7" set culled 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, the set will be available through The Vault, Third Man's direct to customer mail order service.

Bob Dylan's 1974 Tour marked his 1st time touring live in 8 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 1st time ever, Bob Dylan & The Band performed 30 dates in 42 days, often playing 2 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".

The tour kicked off January 3rd, 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 1st 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 & The Band last toured together in 1966. Since then, The Band had released 6 LP's, 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 & The Band were at the vanguard of a new era. The tour 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, "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.

At the outset, the tour was captured on a stereo soundboard mix, on both 1/4" tape and cassette. By tour's end, Asylum Records' David Geffen had commissioned recordings on multitrack tape, the standard at the time, for eventual release on "Before The Flood". "The 1974 Live Recordings" includes it all, the cassettes and 1/4" tapes, and the shows that were recorded on 16 track tape, newly mixed for this collection.