1974 Live Recordings & Shadow Kingdom Document the Life of America’s Greatest Troubadour

THE 1974 LIVE RECORDINGS. Bob Dylan. Sony Legacy.

A lot of people can’t stand touring, but to me it’s like breathing. I do it because I’m driven to do it.

Bob Dylan

Bob is a prisoner, of his fame and fortune. When he says, “I’m anyone who lives in a vault,” he means himself. He is a real poet who lives the poems that he sings. A low of people who hold Dylan in their dream baskets think the songs are a confection — that they are cute and sweet the way Rod McKuen is. But everything I’ve seen convinces me that Bob is the real thing, that he is no joke, that he has no answers, that he is a poet, that he is trapped most of the time.

Michael McClure.”The Poet’s Poet.” Rolling Stone Magazine; 1974.

Bob Dylan has literally been on the road continuously for the last 50 years. And these two live sets recently released by Sony chronicle some of that journey, chronicling two “returns” of sorts. 

First off, we have the Live 74 set. This box compiles a retrospective of the most anticipated tour in rock history. Back in 1960s, Dylan ruled the rock world. And then on July 29 1966, the 25-year-old rock icon crashed his motorcycle in upstate New York. Surviving this near-death experience, Dylan turned to the solace of a quiet family life,  eschewing the stage lights and live performances. 

Things would stay this way for eight full years, until the late rock and roll impresario Bill Graham coaxed Dylan out of his self-imposed retirement to do a whirlwind tour of the United States. For the 40 date tour schedule, Dylan enlisted Robbie Robertson and The Band to back him. The Band  had toured the world with Dylan in 1966, and they knew both the material and Dylan’s personality intimately. Accordingly, Robertson and crew provided thunderous accompaniment to a classic set-list featuring a montage of Dylan’s greatest hits. 

A half century later, the tautly remastered Live 74 allows us to revisit the concerts that ended Dylan’s hiatus and launched him on the path of his never-ending tour.  These 1974 concerts followed much the same model that Dylan employed in 1966 when he was initially backed by The Hawks/The Band. Each tour featured both electric and acoustic segments, with Dylan’s  1974 concert sets interspersed by a set where the band performed their own classic compositions alone on stage. 

The music that makes up the Deluxe Edition of this box set is awe-striking in its enormity, featuring 417 previously unreleased recordings spanning 27 CDs. Fans accustomed to the Before the Flood record that has previously served as the time-marker for this tour will be shocked at their good fortune, because now we have actual sound board recordings of material that had only been previously available on bootlegs.

Moreover, by building the box from each individual show on the tour, Sony gives Dylan’s fan base the real-time opportunity to see how the singer reinterpreted himself on an nightly basis in the Winter months of 1974: Even though these song sets look largely the same, Dylan’s performance differs slightly every night as he feeds himself by what the moment spontaneously created. Songs like “Hero Blues,” “Nobody ‘Cept You,” “Song to Woody,”  “To Ramona,” and “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” serve to shed a new light on this period in Dylan’s career and also collectively show us how his artistic road eventually led to the free-style jamboree that the Rolling Thunder Revue would become  just 18 months later.

The songs he performed on tour in 1974 from the highly anticipated Planet Waves record are central to the “gold” here, as Dylan’s vocal brims with sweet passion on songs like “Tough Mama,” “Wedding Song,” and “Something There is About You.” In the background, The Band cooks: With Robbie Robertson’s guttural guitar and Rick Danko’s bass framing Levon Helm’s ever-steady drum-line. Garth Hudson and Richard Manual round-out the ensemble on keyboards, collectively creating a sound that has become synonymous with “Dylan’s electric period.” As Ed Ward wrote in the Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, the ensemble was “the only rock group good enough to be called simply The Band.”

This fact is best exemplified on the blazing electrified version of “Hollis Brown” (Disc 14). Here, Dylan pays homage to his mentor John Lee Hooker with a souped-high punishing version of his forgotten classic from the 1963 Times A-Changin’ album – Robertson’s guitar crying in splashes and then melding into the half-throb of Helm’s drum-line with a pure seamlessness. The package is indispensable for this recording alone.

At the time, Dylan’s 1974 tour was a one of a kind stadium extravaganza that set the rock world on its ear, with huge standing-room crowds feeding off a storm-like energy.  The concerts brought other artists to bear witness to the tempest. One who sat enthralled was Beat poet Michael McClure, who subsequently wrote an essay called “The Poet’s Poet” for Rolling Stone.

In his March 14, 1974 piece, McClure spotlighted the January 6 show in Philadelphia (Discs 3 & 4):

“The Philadelphia concert made the Masonic Auditorium of San Francisco 1965 seem like a jam session in a small nightclub……The lights went down accompanied by a burst of enthusiasm from the 19,000 living souls…Bob Dylan almost ran onstage and began playing without a pause while the audience was still cheering their enthusiasm. There were two thoughts that someone had imparted to me. One was that Bob was doing his old songs as rock for the new rock generation who did not know him well. The second was that Dylan was in danger of disappearing into his own creation; that as one of the founders of the giant rock scene he had spawned so many followers, imitators, and Dylan-influenced groups and movements that he stood in danger of blending in among his own offspring and hybrids — ending up in the public eye as another surviving folk-rocker.”

And then McClure illuminates the fangs of the razor’s edge that shines through these recordings: “Dylan a grown man . . . a young man still, but a man. The elfish lightness of foot is gone and the perfection of timing is replaced by sureness; the nasal boy’s voice replaced by a man’s voice…”

 The Soundtrack to a Poet’s Life and Times

SHADOW KINGDOM. Bob Dylan. Sony Legacy.

Shadow Kingdom is the second live set we look at. This compact 14 song show was recorded in the Spring of 2021 in Santa Monica at the height of COVID and literally brought the reclusive poet back to the stage from the throes of the pandemic. Released as a video-streaming only event, the show reconnected Dylan to a world hungry for some specter of hope amid this global onslaught of death.

Shadow Kingdom reeks of intimacy as we come to interact with the 80-year-old bard now taking a look back at some long-forgotten classics from his catalog. Shadow Kingdom was filmed in black and white by Alma Har’el. The masked musicians backing him included  T-Bone Burnett on guitar, with Don Was featured on stand-up bass. The sound they conjure is  a mix of creepy and eerie – the sound of mist wafting over graveyard bones at dawn.

The set-list is everything you’d never expect from a subscription streaming event meant to build a fever stream among the fan base. The set includes: “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” “Most Likely You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine,” “Queen Jane Approximately,” “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight,” “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” “Tombstone Blues,”  “To Be Alone with You,” “What Was It You Wanted,” “Forever Young,” “The Wicked Messenger,” “Watching the River Flow,” “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue” and the new haunting instrumental “Sierra’s Theme”  which recalls the much under-appreciated “Final Theme” from Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid. In the end, many of Dylan’s best songs are screenplays set to music, and “Sierra’s Theme” sounds like the soundtrack to a poet’s life and times.

Dylan obviously feels close to these particular songs and that fact is apparent  in the poignancy of the delivery and in the intimate setting he’s created. This is a new Dylan we’re hearing in Shadow Kingdom – almost cabaret Dylan. It’s the face of an unknown traveling musician who plays honky-tonks and whorehouse ballrooms, guitar chords haloed in cigar smoke, drenched in the sweet sorrow of turgid old memories.

And in the end, this is the face of a musician refusing to lose hope amid all the death that frames his days. Instead, he sings on, fully aware that one day he’ll paint himself one more grand masterpiece.

by John Aiello