Going Show-By-Show Through Bob Dylan's 1974 Comeback Tour with The Band

1974-01-03, Chicago Stadium, Chicago IL

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Photo by Jim Summaria via Wikimedia Commons

Bob Dylan and The Band’s 1974 comeback tour started nothing like Before the Flood. 

That live album, the best-known representation of what was simply christened Tour ’74, is all hits. Wall-to-wall. Even the Band tunes are almost all widely-beloved classics. 

The very first song they performed on Tour ’74, though, was not a hit. It was the deepest cut they performed across all 40 shows. You could argue it’s the deepest cut Bob Dylan has played ever. And that song was…“Hero Blues,” a Freewheelin’ outtake he’d barely played live even in his folk era. It’s a shock he even remembered it existed a decade-plus later.

Here is a shaky video of that moment, the very obscure very first song on Tour ’74:

Compare that to the original version. Right from the tour’s first moments, he’s unleashing an acoustic-to-electric reinvention as dramatic as “I Don’t Believe You” in 1966. It used to go like that…

“Hero Blues” does not appear on Before the Flood. That album largely represents the other side of the tour: Giant, crowd-pleasing singalongs in faceless corporate arenas. It bummed Dylan out. “I think I was just playing a role on that tour,” he told Cameron Crowe years later. “I was playing Bob Dylan and The Band were playing The Band. It was all sort of mindless. The only thing people talked about was energy this, energy that. The highest compliments were things like, 'Wow, lotta energy, man.' It had become absurd."

But I think there’s more to Tour ’74 than bad corporate-rock vibes. So, for its 50th anniversary this month, and in tribute to the recent passing of Robbie Robertson (almost as pivotal a force in making this tour happen as Dylan himself), I’m going to be diving deep. Way deep.

Like I did with Rolling Thunder a couple years back, the next year’s tour where he rebelled hard against this megastar mode of travel, I’ll be going show-by-show on each date’s anniversary. One-half of them (like this one) will be free. One-half (like tomorrow’s) will be for paid subscribers only. All will, of course, come with the recordings.

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My goal is to go deeper than the big-picture stories you read about elsewhere: The limos, the private jets, the burnout. I want to explore what actually happened at every show. I’ll be going off tapes as well as contemporary press reports and photos. What was the scene like in the room? What songs changed from night to night? What did Bob and the Band do during the daytime hours? (That is, when they weren’t playing shows then too; this tour features a number of two-show dates, afternoon and evening shows each running two-plus hours. No wonder they felt burnt out.)

First up: Chicago!