Bob Dylan and The Band – The 1974 Live Recordings

This box set is for Dylan’s obsessives: 417 tracks across 27 CDs of every surviving soundboard recording (and multi-tracks of later shows for a live album) of Dylan’s legendary 1974 comeback tour backed by The Band. Until now, the tour was captured on the live album Before The Flood – a double LP released in the summer of 1974 just a few months after the tour ended. There are also bootlegs of the shows from audience tapes. I am a longtime fan of Before The Flood but have never heard the audience tapes.

Dylan had toured with The Band in the mid-60s, but by the end of 1966, he was burned out from being the “voice of his generation,” blowback from going electric, a motorcycle accident, getting married, and having a young family. It all kept him off the road. He was musically active, releasing seven studio albums during this period.

Unlike Before The Flood, The 1974 Live Recordings does not include any of The Band’s material. At each show, The Band performed a set of their songs (they were a pretty big deal on their own in 1974). This is an unfortunate omission – at the very least, they could have included a one-CD best of The Band with Dylan 1974 – I assume it is a licensing issue.

This box set will take me a few months to digest. Fortunately, I have Ray Pagett’s Subtack, Flagging Down the Double E, which has a great piece called “A Show-By-Show Listening Guide to Bob Dylan’s Massive ‘1974 Live Recordings’ Box Set” to help guide me.

My initial impressions are:

• I love the acoustic sets
• Dylan’s voice is in top form – he sings in several voices depending on the song
• The Band is a fantastic backup band for Dylan
• Great setlists – it shifts – songs come and go, and the order changes – it is a nice cross-section of his career to that point – includes hits and deep cuts
• These are not pristine audiophile recordings – they sound better than an audience tape from the period, but not as good as an intentional live recording that was multi-tracked – plus, technology has advanced so that contemporary soundboard recordings (like what you find on Nugs.net) sound great – we are now spoiled. These performances are so good that they are worth a little muddiness and an occasional haphazard stereo mix. An exception is the solo acoustic sets – the simplicity of guitar voice (and occasional harmonica) is fairly treated by the soundboard tapes*.

*From the box set’s liner notes:

“The promoters realized this tour would be worth documenting, so many of the shows were officially recorded via a stereo soundboard mix, on both ¼” tape and cassette. By the end of the tour, Asylum Records recorded the proceedings on multitrack tape, which was the standard at the time for live recording that would be released as an album. This box includes all of those cassettes and ¼” tapes. Additionally, it includes the shows that were recorded on 16-track tape, which have been newly mixed for this collection. It was decided not to include the audience tapes that circulate as bootlegs because of their vastly inferior sound quality. Also, a note about the stereo soundboard tapes – soundboards, by their very nature, are not an optimal way to listen to a live show. These tapes were not mixed for audience consumption, and little can be done to change that. However, the recording quality is such that we felt we should include them as a document of this once-in-a-lifetime event.”

Given the breadth of this box set, I will not be giving a formal review now. However, having this critical milestone in Dylan’s career fully documented is excellent for diehard fans like me.

A 20-song sampler is available on streaming services, but if you want the whole thing, you must buy the CD box (a vinyl version would be absurd). Fortunately, it is reasonably priced – the CD box is a mere $130 – currently even less on Amazon, but I prefer to support local independent record stores even if I have to pay more.