The Bob Dylan and the Band 1974 Tour – sometimes referred to as Tour '74 – was a two-month concert tour staged in arenas during early 1974 that featured Bob Dylan, in his first tour in eight years, performing with his old partners the Band. The tour generated intense fan and media interest and tickets for the shows, available only through mail order, were in great demand. Shows on the concert featured segments with Dylan and the Band together, the Band by themselves, and Dylan by himself. Accounts of the shows emphasized the sometimes drastic rearrangements that Dylan's well-known songs were presented with. A live double album, Before the Flood, was recorded during the tour and released later in the year. In 2024, The 1974 Live Recordings was released, a 27-CD set comprising all known recordings of the tour.
Announcement and itinerary The 40-concert, 30-date, 21-city tour began on January 3, 1974, and ended on February 14, 1974. The tour was one of the largest such undertakings of its era, and took place entirely in indoor sports arenas.
The show reunited Dylan with the Band on stage after the recording of Dylan's Band-backed Planet Waves album, and was the brainchild of David Geffen, who had lured Dylan to his Asylum Records label. Dylan, who by this point in his career had developed a strong interest in his financial position, had been dissatisfied with the terms of his Columbia Records deal. Discussions about a tour took place among Dylan, the Band's guitarist and chief songwriter Robbie Robertson, and Geffen during the summer of 1973. The intent was that Dylan would receive the bulk of the profits from the tour. Promoter Bill Graham then booked a series of dates without telling the venues who the artist would be.
As the Hawks, the then-little-known group had backed Dylan on his last prior full-scale tour, the exhaustive Bob Dylan World Tour 1966, between the releases of Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. Dylan's few public performances in the intervening years had been one-offs like his unannounced guest turn with George Harrison at The Concert for Bangladesh. During this time there had been built up around Dylan, as The New York Times stated, "the legend of a mysterious recluse".
This was a high-profile comeback for both acts; in addition to Dylan's hiatus, the Band had only recently emerged from an eighteen-month interregnum itself, rooted in Robertson's writer's block and keyboardist/second drummer/vocalist Richard Manuel's longstanding alcohol dependence.
News of a tour first came out with a report in The Washington Post in early November 1973 based on a conversation a reporter Tom Zito had with Robertson; it was big news because, as he wrote for the paper, "Bob Dylan, the reclusive songwriter who sparked a generation in the early 1960s ... and, by 1965, had become the single most generative force in rock music, is planning to go on the road for the first time in eight years. Dylan will be accompanied in concert by the Band, the American quintet widely regarded as one of the most important and innovative performing rock ensembles." Or as The New York Times wrote, "Mr. Dylan is widely regarded as the most influential and significant star in the last 10 years of American popular music, and this is his first tour in eight years."
Rehearsals for the tour took place at the Village Recorder in Los Angeles, with final soundchecks taking place at The Forum.
Throughout the tour, Dylan and the Band chartered The Starship, a private jet famously used by Elton John, Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones. Long limousines and large hotel suites were also features of the tour. The traveling road crew for the tour numbered around fifteen people, with local labor augmenting them in each venue.
Ticket sales As Dylan's first full-fledged tour since 1966, the announcement received an enormous amount of coverage from the music and general press. The average ticket price was $8 ($48 adjusted for inflation). Top-dollar tickets were $9.50 (roughly $58 in 2022), considered quite a lot for a rock concert in 1974.
Tickets were sold by mail order, as announced in newspaper advertisements in the various cities, with payment required by certified check or money order for up to four tickets per request. The tickets went "on sale" on December 2, 1973, meaning that was the first day that requests could be postmarked.
There was considerable confusion in some post offices and banks as fans unsure of the process tried to figure it out. The line outside the post office facility Rincon Annex in San Francisco stretched for five blocks when midnight struck. By three days later, there were so many mail requests for shows in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Los Angeles that Graham requested the postal service return them to the senders forthwith.
There was, in the words of one Dylan biographer, "an extravagant level of hype for this tour", with for instance Geffen claiming that it was "the biggest thing of its kind in the history of show business". As part of the attention, Dylan appeared on the cover of Newsweek magazine.
As Geffen said on the eve of the tour's first show, "We're trying to make this whole thing as uncrazy as possible. But the most significant thing of all about this tour has been the overwhelming response to it." Geffen claimed that up to twenty tickets could have been sold for each available seat. Graham estimated that some $92 million worth of ticket orders had been placed ($556 million in 2022). Graham said of the ticket sales process, "It was, uh, rather monumental." Although some hyperbole was involved in some of Geffen's and Graham's statements, there was in fact an intense level of fan and media interest in the tour.
There were problems in a few cities with tickets being held back by local promoters and then sold for much higher prices. There were also reports of counterfeit tickets in circulation as well. In some cases alternative newspapers ran classified listings of people offering sexual favors in exchange for tickets.
The show
The opening show took place on January 3, 1974 at Chicago Stadium. It had a capacity audience of 18,500. The first song performed was a reworking of "Hero Blues", a previously unreleased song that Dylan had recorded back in the early 1960s. Over the course of two hours, Dylan and the Band performed alternating sets broken down into three categories: Dylan performing his own songs backed by the Band, Dylan's solo acoustic set, and the Band's performances of their own songs. Although Dylan played harmonica during a rendition of Bobby Bland's "Share Your Love with Me" sung by Manuel, the Band elected not to include Dylan in their subsequent group performances in a meeting after the show.
Beginning with the next concert, the tour took on a standard formula: an opening six-song Dylan/Band set, a five-song Band set, three more Dylan/Band performances, a five-song Dylan acoustic set, a three- to four-song Band set, and a joint finale.
Promotional activities in each city were greatly restricted, with no television cameras allowed in the hall, no backstage passes for press or celebrities, and no local radio station appearances. Audience age range for the shows ranged from teenagers to the grey-haired, but most were in their twenties or thirties. Dylan's stage patter during the shows was generally minimal, sticking to brief mentions of the city they were playing in or other mentions of the intermission.
While virtually all the songs in the shows were familiar and many were familiar from progressive rock radio airplay, few of them sounded similar to their original versions. Driven by Levon Helm's syncopated, contrapuntal drumming, Dylan's songs (exemplified by a Jimi Hendrix-influenced take on "All Along the Watchtower") were re-arranged and sung with a ferocity not found on the originals, while Garth Hudson's experiments with the Lowery String Symphonizer (an early synthesizer embedded in the Lowery H25-3 organ that was adapted from the Freeman string symphonizer) further enriched the Band's timbral palette.
The tour represented the beginning of Dylan's effort to come to terms with the material that had made him famous by heavily rearranging that material, a project that would continue with the 1975–76 Rolling Thunder Revue and the 1978 shows that went into his Bob Dylan at Budokan album. As Ben Fong-Torres wrote at the time, Dylan was "putting new italics into old songs — Ya say yer lookin' for someone ... 'It still ain't me, babe.
The Band's playing was more aggressive than it had been when they had recorded with Dylan and more akin to that of their famed 1966 live shows with Dylan, something that Robertson would later acknowledge was a tendency of theirs. Helm later noted that this was the very thing they had been booed for during those shows back then. In any case, the Band had a reputation for being at its best in concert, and received plaudits for their playing on these shows.
"Most Likely You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine", a lesser-known track from Blonde on Blonde, was a showpiece number for the new arrangements and was highlighted as show opener or closer (as well as being the single released from the subsequent live album). Even though the set list was mostly static, the Band kept their interest going by making changes to how they played each song as they went along.
At the beginning of the tour, a few songs from Planet Waves were performed in concert; however, as the tour wore on, these songs gradually disappeared from the setlist. By the end, only "Forever Young" would remain. Songs like "Hero Blues" and "Nobody 'Cept You" were also performed at some of the earlier shows, but such idiosyncratic choices would eventually disappear as well. Dylan's older, celebrated compositions were already heavily favored, but as the tour wore on, they would completely dominate the shows.
Dylan and the Band were very aware of the nostalgic atmosphere surrounding the tour, even as they recast Dylan's back catalog in dramatic, new arrangements. Helm later recalled, "I sometimes had a funny sensation: that we were acting out the roles of Bob Dylan and the Band, and the audience was paying to see what they'd missed many years before."
However, there were moments where contemporary events did connect with the proceedings: when the tour was going on, the Watergate scandal was dominating the headlines. One of the most popular songs during the shows was "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)"; performed during Dylan's solo acoustic sets, it never failed to elicit cheers when Dylan got to the words, "Even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked." (This reaction can be heard very explicitly on the recording of the song that appears on Before the Flood.) In some cases fans held lighters aloft during the concert, an early instance of this practice among rock audiences, and a photograph of one of these instances became the cover for the Before the Flood live album.
In Atlanta, Dylan and the Band visited notable fan and governor of the state Jimmy Carter at the Georgia Governor's Mansion, with an enjoyable stay capped by Rosalynn Carter preparing breakfast for them. The visit was reported on February 28, 1974's Rolling Stone.