The Grand Finale of Bob Dylan's 1974 Comeback Tour with The Band

1974-02-13/4, The Forum, Los Angeles, CA

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“Man this is so fuckin’ funky I think I'm gonna go out of my mind.” — Neil Young

“It was bloody fantastic, the best concert I've ever been to. They had you with six rockers in a row.” — Ringo Starr

"I was so ecstatic and it was so wonderful, I thought I was going to have the baby right then!" — Carole King, eight months pregnant

“I didn’t like the new album. I’m here to hear his old stuff.” — Cheech Marin

“The greatest show I've ever seen.” — Ramblin’ Jack Elliott

“What’re you supposed to think about a Bob Dylan concert? It was predictable.” — Dan Hicks

“Man, it got me fuckin' off!” — David Crosby

“After tonight, how is anybody going to do a concert tour?” — Neil Diamond

Those are all quotes from attendees of Bob Dylan and The Band’s final show of Tour ’74 at Los Angeles’s Forum. There were so many celebrities in the building it’s amazing any regular people could fit in the room. Roger McGuinn couldn’t get a ticket; Jerry Garcia showed up at the box office to find someone else had claimed his. Rolling Stone, which got those on-the-scene quotes, also captured some excellent Polaroids of the celebrity attendees:

LA being a hometown show for most of the musicians, their families were there too. The crew even set up a special green room for everyone’s kids backstage, with electric trains, a miniature pool table, magnetic darts, and a TV (with cable, the news articles excitedly proclaim). Here’s Dylan blowing up balloons for the kids backstage:

There was also a special band-and-crew dinner in between the early and late performances that last night. One last, long quote from Rolling Stone’s Ben Fong-Torres setting the scene:

If you looked hard enough you could trace the grin on Bob Dylan, watching, then politely, clop, clop, applauding a jelly-belly dancer Bill Graham had hired to entertain. He had also clapped for the strolling trio — two violinists and an accordion — that had serenaded during dinner, schmaltzing up to each table with love songs like “Fascination,” “What Now, My Love” and “Somewhere My Love” on this Valentine’s Day.

The scene was the crew dinner, put together by Bill Graham for the 18 employees of his FM Productions. They had been in front of and behind Dylan and the Band — setting up and taking down the stage, sound and lighting through 39 shows in 21 cities since January 3rd in Chicago. Now, at 7:45 PM, the 39th show over only minutes before, they were gathered, along with Bob Dylan and the Band, at the Forum Club, a banquet facility within the Fabulous Forum, home of L.A.’s basketball Lakers and hockey Kings. They were here, in this spread of rooms usually held for big businessmen/season ticket holders, for a quick round of roast beef and congratulations.

Graham kept the back-patting short. One quick speech thanking the crew and “the six great musicians” for doing their jobs so well. And, to each musician, a handshake and a memento: a wooden plaque, in the shape of a guitar, embossed with the signatures of Graham and the FM Productions crew.

And what of the LA shows themselves? You might know them better than you think. Almost the entirety of Before the Flood comes from these three final concerts, despite them taping multiple shows elsewhere (New York, Seattle, Oakland). Levon Helm wrote that the final night in particular was the best show of the whole run. I’m not sure that’s borne out by the tape, but you can understand why it might feel that way to those in the room. Whoever picked the Before the Flood tracklist clearly thought so too.

The live album didn’t, though, include the one new addition in LA, the first full-band song added to the set in ages: “Mr. Tambourine Man.” It’s not a wild reinvention like some other acoustic-to-electric songs on this tour, but Garth Hudson’s accordion is a high point. (I’ve seen some later mentions that this was played at Sara Dylan’s request, though I’m not sure where that info originally came from.)

During the encore of that final show, a giant Valentine’s Day banner unfurled from the ceiling. This was promoter Bill Graham’s idea to surprise the musicians onstage. Wonder what ever happened to that banner. Talk about a collector’s item.

Before the final song of the final night, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Dylan brought out tour promoters Graham and Barry Imhoff for an onstage bow. You can hear the announcement before “Blowin’” below, plus a photo of Graham and Imhoff coming to the stage. Label head David Geffen was pissed Dylan hadn’t thanked him too, so Dylan and Robertson had to go to his office the next day and smooth things over. They offered to organize Geffen’s forthcoming birthday party to make it up to him. Though the détente was short lived; over the summer Dylan ditched Geffen’s label and re-signed with Columbia, where he remains today.

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Well, we made it. The final shows of what they called Tour ’74. I can’t claim I’m quite as exhausted as Bob and The Band were, but it’s close.

Before we move on from 1974 and resume our usual jumping around (fun interview related to Dylan’s ‘80s tours with Tom Petty coming in a couple weeks), I thought I’d share some general takeaways, having listened to god-knows-how-many hours of 1974 tapes and read god-knows-how-many pages of local newspaper reviews.

As I noted in entry number one, these days Tour ’74 is not well-regarded by many people, Dylan included. Now that we’ve taken this journey, we can ask the question, is the tour’s middling reputation fair?

My answer: No—but it is understandable. The primary evidence most people use to judge Tour ’74 is Before the Flood, the live album taken mostly from the LA shows I wrote about up top. Before the Flood presents the most pedestrian side of the tour. All greatest hits, most of them shouted at top volume. To be sure, the tour featured plenty of hits, and plenty of shouting. But there was another side too, one that the live album ignored and has subsequently been overlooked in the narrative. There were deep cuts aplenty sprinkled throughout the shows. As I’ve chronicled, the first half of the tour had much more adventurous setlists than the second half.

Those earlier shows also featured more nuanced singing. By these final LA shows, the band is tight as hell, but Bob is belting every single line of every single song. Meanwhile half of The Band have lost their voices. Richard Manuel sounds rough on “I Shall Be Released,” after having killed it at just about every prior show (he’s also still nursing a broken hand). I liked Before the Flood fine before this deep dive, but listening to so many other tour tapes has now convinced me it was a missed opportunity.

Imagine an alternate version of Before the Flood envisioned more like the Hard Rain live album two years later, one that emphasizes not the tour’s biggest hits but its most dramatic reinventions. “Hero Blues.” “Ballad of Hollis Brown.” “It Ain’t Me Babe” (see, there’s room for some greatest hits too if they’re performed interestingly enough). Throw some of the new Planet Waves songs in there too, which Before the Flood inexcusably didn’t, since many nights Dylan presented those with the most care of anything. “Wedding Song” and “Nobody ‘Cept You” from the acoustic sets, “Something There Is About You” and “Forever Young” from the electric. (I attempted my own version of an alternative Before the Flood last year, but a professional live album would obviously be preferable to a hodgepodge of audience tapes of varying quality.)

Tour ’74 would also be remembered differently with more video footage. One reason Rolling Thunder, both ’75 and ’76 incarnations, is so iconic is that we can see it. Even for those of us who couldn’t attend, or in fact weren’t yet alive, the copious footage helps us imagine what it was like. Despite the attention paid to the visuals on stage—the living-room furniture, the sharp suits, the makeup Dylan wore—there is nothing comparable to watch for Tour ’74. God love the fans who snuck in their 8mm cameras, but most of what little audience footage exists looks terrible. Reading the newspaper reviews, the energy both onstage and in the crowd was electric. I wish there was a way for us to see it for ourselves.

Speaking of those newspaper reviews, I’ve gotten a real kick out of reading them in each local market (shoutout to the newspapers.com archives). There’s what we think about this era now, and there’s what people remarked upon at the time—and they’re not necessarily the same things. So, for one last list before we call it a tour, here are the five things most-often mentioned about the shows in contemporary press coverage:

1. The audience exploding after the “Even the president…” line in “It’s Alright Ma.” This tour fell in the middle of Nixon’s march towards impeachment, and no one in the room missed that lyric’s symbolism. I honestly can’t remember a review that didn’t note this. You can hear it on every tape too. This easily got mentioned more often than anything else in reviews. In fact, the nightly eruptions stuck me so much that, for reasons I can’t quite explain, I created a supercut of them. It’s a fairly insane thing to listen to (much less to make), but you can hear how loud the audience got, each and every night, in one bizarre medley. For true sickos only:

2. Lighters held aloft. I assumed this became a “thing” after the Before the Flood cover immortalized the image, but it was happening from the very first show in Chicago. It quickly became well known enough that newspaper previews of later shows would mention it—don’t forget to bring a lighter or match with you when you go! Bob wrote about the phenomenon in 2016:

   In 1974 I played the first of many shows with the Band—maybe in eight years. We were in a hockey arena in Chicago. There were maybe 18,000 people there. The Band and I hadn’t played publicly together since 1966 where our shows caused a lot of disruption and turmoil—a lot of anger. Now we were in Chicago starting up again. There was no way to predict what was going to happen. At the end of the concert we had played over 25 or 30 songs and we were standing on the stage looking out. The audience was in semi-darkness. All of a sudden, somebody lit a match. And then somebody else lit another match. In short time, there were areas of the arena that were engulfed in matches. Within seconds after that, it looked like the whole arena was in flames and that all the people in the arena had struck matches and were going to burn the place down. The Band and I looked for the nearest stage exit as none of us wanted to go down in flames. It seemed like nothing had changed. If we thought the response was extreme on the earlier tours we played, this was positively apocalyptic. Every one of us on the stage thought that we’d really done it this time—that the fans were going to burn the arena down. Obviously we were wrong.

3. The house lights going on during “Like a Rolling Stone.” This was Bill Graham’s innovation three nights in, and from then on the moment the audience found themselves suddenly lit up reliably turned into some combination of a stage rush and sing-along every night. I suspect the crowd photos like this mostly come from this moment:

   

4. Dylan’s solo-acoustic sets. Now, listening to the tapes, these are often the least interesting parts of the show. Particularly the song the reviews mention most often: “The Times They Are a-Changin’.” Listening today, it truly sounds like him going through the motions most nights. But after all the time away, the image of him looking like how people first saw him and sounding like how people first heard him proved irresistible to critics and fans. Nostalgia is a helluva drug.

5. “It Ain’t Me Babe.” This electric reinvention was remarked upon more than any other new song arrangement. I’m sure many reviewers didn’t know “Hero Blues,” and maybe some not even “Ballad of Hollis Brown” either. So, almost as a contrast with the “The Times They Are a-Changin’” nostalgia factor, reviewers held up this radically altered “It Ain’t Me Babe” as the totemic example of Dylan still pushing forward. As well they should; unlike “The Times,” this is a great arrangement that was done well each and every night.

And that’s it. Tour ’74. What more is there to say? I guess if you want even more Tour ’74 content—and I can’t imagine how that’s possible at this point—check out my aforementioned Before the Flood II compilation. There’s also this selection of fun Tour ’74 ephemera I put together a couple years back, backstage passes and magazine ads and such. And if you fell behind (understandable!) you can find the complete run of this current series here.

Now I’ll return to jumping around Dylan concerts past and present (Bob hits the road again in a few weeks). Thanks to everyone who signed up during this series—I hope you’ll stick around. And, if anyone has ideas for other Dylan tours you’d like to see get the show-by-show treatment at some point, drop ‘em in the comments.

1974-02-13, The Forum, Los Angeles, CA
1974-02-14, The Forum, Los Angeles, CA - early show
1974-02-14, The Forum, Los Angeles, CA - late show

Okay, I’m going to go lie down now.