Bob Dylan completists will have a lot to celebrate on Sept. 20, when Columbia/Legacy unveil the 27-CD boxed set The 1974 Live Recordings. The collection, which sports 417 previously unreleased tracks, chronicles Dylan’s tour that year with longtime collaborators the Band.
The lead single, a version of “Forever Young” taped Feb. 9, 1974, in Seattle, is out now. A separate release, The 1974 Live Recordings – The Missing Songs From Before the Flood, will also be available from Third Man Records and will serve as a companion to the 1974 live album Before the Flood.
Dylan took an eight-year break from the road before the arena tour chronicled here, which found he and the Band debuting such material as “All Along the Watchtower” and “Most Likely You Go Your Way (and I’ll Go Mine).” They also offered up new takes on “Ballad of Hollis Brown” and dusted off tracks such as “Song to Woody,” which Dylan himself hasn’t played since 1962.
The tour was an outgrowth of Dylan and the Band’s 1974 studio album Planet Waves. Its format generally began with the musicians performing six songs together, followed by the Band alone, Dylan alone for an acoustic set and a combined finale. Contemporary reviews were strong, although both Dylan and the Band’s Levon Helm took a dimmer view of the experience afterwards, with the latter writing in his 1993 autobiography that it “was damn good for our pocketbooks, but it just wasn’t a very passionate trip for any of us.”
