50th-anniversary avalanche of live recordings

In the liner notes to his 1985 box Biograph, Bob Dylan said, “I was playing Bob Dylan and The Band was playing The Band. It was all sort of mindless.”

Dylan was talking about his 1974 tour with The Band, a tour that put him on the cover of Newsweek, resulted in his first official live album, and found him for six weeks basking in huzzahs exploding from stadiums full of fans.

The 1974 Live Recordings Bob Dylan and The Band

It’s also the tour whose 50th anniversary Columbia Records is now commemorating with The 1974 Live Recordings. At 27 discs and 29 hours, it smashes (by nine discs and 10 hours) the former Dylan bulk record set in 2015 by the deluxe edition of The Cutting Edge 1965–1966: The Bootleg Series Vol. 12. It’s so cumbersome that it feels almost like an act of corporate covert aggression. “You nuts want everything that we recorded on Dylan in ’74? OK, we’ll give you everything! Now, dig your way out from under that!”

The box documents Dylan’s portions (omitting The Band-without-Dylan portions) of 26 of the 40 shows, beginning at the beginning (Chicago, Jan. 3) and ending at the end (Inglewood, Calif., Valentine’s Day). With The Band doing its ramshackle best to reach the cheap seats and an adrenalized Dylan over-projecting throughout (“But she breaks just like a little gurl-hurl-hurl-hurl!”), the energy—even during the solo-acoustic sets—never flags.

But it left a bad taste in Dylan’s mouth. “The only thing people talked about was energy this, energy that,” he said in ’85. “The greatest praise we got on that tour was ‘incredible energy, man.’ It would make me want to puke.”

If Dylan himself found the experience nauseating, why would anyone else want to immerse himself in it, especially when he could listen to Dylan’s entire noncompilation studio output from 1962 to 2016? For most fans, Columbia’s 20-track sampler or Third Man Records’ 24-track The Missing Songs From Before the Flood will suffice.

Fanatics, however, will find details to savor: Dylan botching a lyric in “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” Dylan delivering a “Ballad of Hollis Brown” that comes on like gangbusters, Dylan unveiling songs from the then-new Planet Waves only to dial them back midtour to make way for classics, Robbie Robertson and Garth Hudson enlivening the songs’ nooks and crannies. And it’s always a thrill hearing the Watergate-primed crowds erupt when, in “It’s Alright, Ma,” Dylan sings, “Even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked!”

As a metaphor for no president’s being above the law, it’s a line that always rings true.