On a tour hallmarked by the sheer, outsized muscularity of the music, it is a notable irony that the most auspicious moments tend to take place when the blunt instrument is briefly put down. The January 3rd performance of the gorgeous Planet Waves outtake “Nobody ‘Cept You” feels almost painfully vulnerable alongside the bare-knuckle fight that precedes it. A memory song that recalls running through youthful graveyards and all the strange and toxic things stardom has on offer, a meditation on a privacy which once sold cannot be repurchased. The final show on Valentine’s Day contains the best, most exhilarating and most thrillingly exhausted version of “Forever Young” I have ever heard. When Dylan screams the chorus behind The Band’s miles-high commotion, the feeling is of the primal screaming of John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band.
So this is where he took it—the music scene. To a towering place of expert menace. The audiences had gotten personal on the ‘66 tour—“Judas” and all that—and here was the receipt. “I need a dump truck baby to unload my head,” he had sung back then. Now everyone would know how that felt. Robert Christgau — in a rave — compared the ‘74 tour to the MC5, and remarked that The Band “sounds undisciplined, threatening to destroy their headlong momentum by throwing out one foot or elbow too many,” comparing the sound to Dylan “running over his old songs like a truck.”
In a revealing 1978 interview with Jonathan Cott, Dylan diagnoses the problem, if indeed it was a problem. He compares the ‘74 tour with the Elvis ‘69 special. “I fell into the same trap,” he says, referring to the mismatched level of power and finesse. The notch was carved — the ‘74 tour traveled 36 long dates and played to an average of 18,500 ticket buyers — big business. Split the deck anyway you like, but the cards read the same.
For Dylan, the ‘74 tour was a rebirth of a kind, a rough and ready reentry into the troubadour game. Soon he’d be out with the Rolling Thunder Revue. Later Tom Petty, the Dead, a Nobel Prize and a world tour which still barnstorms the whispering bulletin boards of your hometown. For The Band it was the beginning of a slow death — just a few years until The Last Waltz, and a painfully gradual parting of ways.
At a certain juncture on the 1974 campaign, Dylan and The Band made a crucial edit to the setlist. On January 10th in Toronto, they landed on “Most Likely You Go Your Way (and I’ll Go Mine)” as the show opener. That’s the first song preserved by Asylum’s 1974 two-LP account Before the Flood. As an opening gambit, it offers the audience a binary choice: “You say you love me/ And you’re thinkin’ of me/ But you know you could be wrong,” giving the crowd 20 more songs to decide. On January 11th, they made another arguably aggressive change. They started with “Most Likely You Go Your Way (and I’ll Go Mine)”—and ended with it too. At one tour stop, Dylan stipulates like a man ready for a brawl: “We’re ending where we started.” He sounds a little insane. The weird and bruising days of the ‘70s were upon us. What once was first was now also last.
Of the 431 songs stretched over 26 discs, perhaps the most personally rewarding is the last song from the last show — “Blowin’ in the Wind,” I’ll be honest: I’ve never loved the song. It always struck me as light Quaker fare which was made even wispier by the ubiquitous easy-listening 1964 cover by Peter, Paul and Mary. But as the last song on the 1974 tour it transcends into something else. Dylan brings out Bill Graham, the legendary promoter, and thanks him for “all he’s done,” and one had better believe there was subtext in that too. Then they proceed to rip through “Blowin’ in the Wind”—one more time before the whole thing falls apart—with the ecstatic energy of Buddy Holly and Little Richard. There it all is: the origin story, the final will and testament, the ultimate confession and the actual flood. Bringing it all back home, if home was a condemned building on a cursed lot. How many roads must a man walk down? Buy the ticket, take the ride.
