Bob Dylan was washed up and irrelevant – then one electrifying tour saved his career

Bob Dylan’s “Never Ending Tour” began in 1988, and – save for a pandemic-enforced break in 2020, after which it was renamed the “Rough And Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour” – has trundled onwards for 36 years, with no sign of stopping. Indeed, his Bobness will have performed 52 shows this year alone come December.

But while this is an impressive feat for an 83-year-old, the content of these shows divides opinion: some nights offer searing revisits of classics like “Desolation Row” or “Don’t Think Twice”; on others, Dylan rearranges his career-defining songs to the point where even seasoned Bob-watchers can’t recognise them. “Fans who come to hear live-action reenactments of the favourite records of their youth tend to be disappointed,” The New Yorker’s Alex Ross observed as far back as 1999. Perhaps Dylan has grown tired of playing his biggest hits: familiarity, after all, breeds contempt.

It wasn’t always this way. The 1974 Live Recordings, a mammoth new 27-disc box set, transports listeners back half a century, presenting a very different Bob Dylan: younger, leaner, and perhaps more than a little desperate. Back then, he had recently parted ways with both longtime manager Albert Grossman and longtime label Columbia Records, which had signed him a dozen years earlier when he was just another folkie haunting Greenwich Village coffee houses. He’d only performed onstage a handful of times since his notorious 1966 motorcycle accident, favouring domestic life with his wife Sara and their four children.

His last album of new material, the soundtrack to Peckinpah western Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid (in which he also starred), had been accused by critics of “wilful badness”, with Rolling Stone’s Jon Landau declaring Dylan “the least significant” rock figure of the Seventies. It seems unthinkable now, but in 1973 Dylan seemed washed-up and in danger of becoming yesterday’s man.

Salvation came in the form of David Geffen, one of the most transformative figures of the Seventies music industry, who offered him a contract with his new record label, Asylum. Geffen expected Dylan to sing for his supper, however – even he couldn’t revitalise the Tambourine Man’s career if the Tambourine Man wasn’t willing to tour.

A chance meeting with guitarist Robbie Robertson in the summer of 1973 was the final nudge that sent Dylan back on the road. They shared a long history – Robertson’s garage-band The Hawks had backed Dylan on his controversial “electric” tour eight years earlier. Those shows in 1965, when earnest folkies screamed “Judas!” as Bob played rock’n’roll, cemented Dylan as a cultural phenomenon and generational figurehead – but, as he later told Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner, the pressures of the road “wore me down… I was on drugs, just to keep going”.

After his motorcycle crash in 1966, two months after his world tour ended with a headline show at London’s Royal Albert Hall, Dylan retreated to Woodstock in upstate New York. The former Hawks followed and in the basement of an ugly old house they’d rented and christened “Big Pink”, they jammed together with Dylan on covers, standards, folk songs, and new music of their own.

Outside the walls of Big Pink, the world was turning on and tuning in to the summer of love – but in the basement, they were tapping into rock’n’roll’s roots, into country and folk traditions. These sessions at Big Pink shaped what became Dylan’s next musical evolution, evidenced by the acclaimed, country-influenced albums John Wesley Harding (1967) and Nashville Skyline (1969).

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Robertson and the ex-Hawks, meanwhile, renamed themselves “The Band”. Four Canadians – Robertson, bassist/vocalist Rick Danko, keyboardist Garth Hudson and pianist/vocalist Richard Manuel – and one American (drummer/vocalist Levon Helm), their unique vision of Americana blossomed on homespun, deeply soulful albums like 1968’s Music From Big Pink and 1969’s The Band.

But by 1973, The Band were lost amid their own turmoil. Though still a reliably thrilling stage act, that life was killing them via exhaustion, drug abuse and Manuel’s alcoholism. Robertson, their chief songwriter, was also navigating a debilitating writer’s block.

The Band needed redemption as badly as Dylan, and all involved hoped renewing their working relationship might invite lightning to strike once more. They entered LA’s Village Recorders in November 1973 and taped Dylan’s 14th album Planet Waves – his first for Asylum – over a whirlwind three days. It would prove Dylan’s best-received album in years, and “Forever Young”, written about his children, remains one of his most loved songs. Still, despite the album’s success, everyone knew that the road was where Dylan would truly affirm his renaissance.

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The world of the rock’n’roll concert had changed immeasurably since Dylan had quit eight years earlier. It was now a sleek, multi-million-dollar industry, and new technology finally ensured musicians could be heard over screaming fandom. Geffen, Dylan and The Band hooked up with the hippy era’s premier impresario, Bill Graham, to book the 40-date jaunt across sports arenas across the US and Canada. Tickets were priced between $6 and $9.50 ($39-$60 in 2024 money – someone tell Oasis) and available only through mail-order. Demand overwhelmed the US Mail postal service and easily outpaced supply – over 20 million applied for 651,000 tickets – and the tour quickly became the highest-grossing at that point in history.

The tour began on 3 January 1974 at Chicago Stadium, with Dylan pleasing his die-hard fans by opening with “Hero Blues”, an obscurio he’d demoed in 1963 but wouldn’t release until 2010. Soon after, the performers established the format that the tour would stick to: Dylan opening with a batch of his songs, backed by The Band; a short set by The Band alone; another short Dylan and The Band set; an acoustic Dylan set; another The Band set; and a final joint encore.

On the evidence of the newly released The 1974 Live Recordings, and Before the Flood, the concert album released in June 1974, the performances were electrifying. The Band played Dylan’s songs with a kinetic fury – Robertson firing off poetic, accusatory twangs while Helm’s drums powered the songs at a breathless pelt beyond the studio versions. They gave the songs the muscle necessary to fill the cavernous rooms Dylan now found himself playing. The years playing as their own unit had seen The Band grow in confidence, and they more than held their own against their old friend.

Dylan, meanwhile, seemed to relish playing his old songs again (only “Forever Young” off Planet Waves, the album they were ostensibly touring, was a constant on the setlist). There is no better version of “Like A Rolling Stone” than that on Before the Flood, where the song is performed as a wild riot of spite, wit, passion, and outrage.

These performances were appropriately celebratory for the reunion of a generation and the man who’d defined them. The years in-between had been gruelling, thanks not least to the Vietnam War (winding down, but still a quagmire) and Watergate (revving up, but yet to claim Nixon’s scalp). Dylan had returned. He’d risen again, his songs – full of wisdom, emotion, scathing humour, and life – as vivid as ever.

The tour was a validation for that generation’s belief in Dylan, and for Dylan and The Band’s belief in themselves. Years later, Robertson told Uncut’s Barney Hoskyns that the tour proved the risks they’d taken in 1965 “hadn’t been crazy… It was not incredibly different from what we’d done with Bob before... this kind of dynamics. We’d come way down when the singing came in, and when the solos started, we’d go screaming off into the skies”.

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The critics were mostly rapturous. “That can’t possibly be Bob Dylan, looking just like he did in the good old days: skinny, curly hair, black suede boots, blue jeans, the whole bit,” wrote NME’s Barbara Charone, of that magical opening night in Chicago. Robert Christgau, the influential “dean of American rock criticism”, described 28 January’s set at New York’s Nassau Coliseum as “a triumph”, and Before the Flood as “the craziest and strongest rock and roll ever recorded”. Likewise, Melody Maker’s Chris Charlesworth called the show at New York’s Madison Square Garden “the best concert New York is likely to get this year or next”.

For all this glory, however, the tour would prove a last hurrah for Dylan and The Band as a working partnership. “It was the most magical tour,” Dylan’s assistant Arthur Rosato told Bob biographer Clinton Heylin. “But it was personalities. By the end of that tour there was a little separation.” In the years that followed, the same demons that had plagued The Band in 1973 resurfaced with a vengeance.

Robertson left after a grand, all-star farewell show in 1976, filmed by Martin Scorsese in The Last Waltz. His erstwhile bandmates reformed without him in 1983 and continued to tour until Danko’s death in 1999, even after Manuel hung himself following a March 1986 show in Florida. Robertson’s death in 2023 leaves Hudson the only surviving member of The Band.

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Dylan continues on, however. He followed Planet Waves and the reunion tour with 1975’s Blood On The Tracks, one of his most-acclaimed albums. His critical stock waned and waxed over the following decades, as he made some of his worst records alongside some pretty great ones. Throughout it all, he’s remained a legend, a solid box office draw, thanks in part to that 1974 tour, which established the Bobfather as an artist with an infinite capacity to regenerate himself, and a songbook that will never not resonate with the generation it spoke to, and the subsequent generations that discover it.

Five decades on, Bob’s still touring, with 10 UK dates in November to conclude this year’s leg of his eternal road trip. There’s no telling which Bob will arrive onstage that final show at the Royal Albert Hall, how he’ll render those beloved songs – or how the faithful will feel about it the morning after. The magic of those 1974 shows now seems beyond his reach, but that tour and his remarkable rebirth taught us anything it’s that we should never write Bob Dylan off.

‘Bob Dylan and The Band: The 1974 Live Recordings’ is out on 20 September via Columbia & Legacy Recordings