More Than Life Itself

Tim Riley reviews a new 27-disc box set of live recordings by Bob Dylan and the Band.

By Tim RileyDecember 22, 2024

• Music

PEOPLE FORGET HOW worn down the youth movement felt in early January 1974, when Bob Dylan launched his comeback tour with the Band at Chicago Stadium. The Watergate hearings of the summer before had exposed both hack skulduggery and its subsequent cover-up following President Richard Nixon’s landslide win against his anti-war opponent, Senator George McGovern, in 1972. Spiro Agnew resigned under a cloud of extortion, bribery, and tax evasion charges, and Chief Justice Warren Burger swore in Gerald R. Ford as the new vice president in December 1973. But even as his co-conspirators marched off to jail, Nixon remained in office. After nearly a decade of teach-ins, be-ins, marches, riots, assassinations, protests, Woodstock, and the Kent State murders, the Vietnam War ground on, impervious to protest. Rock fans speculated wildly about the Next Big Thing, and whether hitting 30 meant you couldn’t be trusted anymore. The rock press harassed each former member of the Beatles for reunion quotes, and the Rolling Stones released “Angie,” a desultory single that signaled a shift from cultural to careerist authority.

The hits that January included Ringo Starr’s “You’re Sixteen” and Barbra Streisand’s “The Way We Were.” Dylan’s latest album, Planet Waves—released when he was 32—came out alongside Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark, and the comparison made it sound underwhelming for reasons that don’t make much sense anymore (perhaps because the album’s best-known number, “Forever Young,” has since been used as 2010s drama Parenthood’s soft-core TV theme song). Today, Planet Waves scans as tough and vital, with moments of despair (“Going, Going, Gone”) next to breezy treasures like “Tough Mama” and “You Angel You.” Like most Dylan albums, it captures a patchy exuberance, couching flashes of brilliance amid murky lyrics. “I love you more than life itself,” he sings in “Wedding Song,” which is overstated even for Dylan.

Word spread quickly that the shows outran amphetamines; the set list centered around tracks from Bringing It All Back Home (1965), Highway 61 Revisited (1965), and Blonde on Blonde (1966) and included both a solo Dylan acoustic spot and another segment featuring the Band’s own material (including one of its prize Dylan covers, “I Shall Be Released”). Dylan hadn’t mounted a formal tour since 1966, when he scorched stages across the US and UK with most of these same players before they recorded as “The Band.” The cultists in his audience swore up and down that hard-to-find bootlegs from those UK shows contained the greatest music of his career. This tour plowed right through even those exaggerated expectations to yield one of the great double live albums released that summer (Before the Flood). Newsweek’s January 14 cover blared “Dylan’s Back!” but even that missed the bigger story.

Few rockers from the 1960s had yet proven how to carry their authority forward into the new decade. Once more, Dylan changed the context: coming from almost anybody else, these 1965–66 numbers might have sounded like oldies. The previous fall, the Who opened its Quadrophenia shows with “I Can’t Explain” from 1965, which somehow gained a new ripeness. But in a parallel world, imagine the Beatles hitting the stage and playing “Day Tripper” and “Ticket to Ride” and “Paperback Writer.” Without the right attitude, people might have accused them of skating. The tone of Dylan’s attack boosted his status as a rock figure who could turn gaffes like Self Portrait (1970) into asterisks. The songs had new emotional gleam, and turned this live comeback tartly poetic.

Dylan, on the other hand, lunged into these once-familiar songs with something like inspired regret, as if they had always carried more secrets than even he could throw open at first. These new arrangements snagged everything as glorious garage-band tussle, Robbie Robertson’s guitar fighting for space between Richard Manuel’s scrapyard piano and Garth Hudson’s moody organ. Dylan’s vocal attack surged with an irritable exasperation, but also righteous anger, his trademark contempt for the establishment’s superficiality and hypocrisy, and a renewed commitment: a grown man singing songs he had written as a rock grad student that plumbed new revelations. Like Robertson told Barney Hoskyns, Dylan returned to his core catalog “as if he could ‘drill these songs into people.’”

So for Sony to issue 27 discs of every professionally recorded concert, with varying sound quality, solidifies this 40-gig jaunt as a blazing feat in Dylan’s oeuvre, a roaring back to form that barely made sense at the time but has only grown in stature.

In 2012, the Who released Live at Hull 1970, which took place the night after the Live at Leeds gig, and while the set was nearly identical to Leeds and the energy high, the band hit something on the latter that sounded shocking even to them; Hull could never replace it (technical problems long prevented its release). Consider how we might assess things if the deluxe version of Live at Leeds spanned 27 discs covering that whole season of gigs? You’d hear the ensemble ebbing and swelling, leaning into songs one night and backing off the next, responding to the audience as the listeners fed off their energy. Any given night on a tour does not “represent” the entire set of dates.

Like many live recordings, Dylan assembled this one mostly from the last several nights. (In his Substack newsletter Flagging Down the Double E’s, Ray Padgett assembled a lively commentary on each show and how they make sense as a traveling arc.) So for hardcore fans, this surge and flow tosses up many fine moments, and usual wild pitches: “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry” only on January 9 in Toronto; “Nobody ’Cept You,” a Planet Waves outtake, shows up a couple times for the acoustic set, arguing for that album’s skillful editing. In a rare sentimental move, he plays “Song to Woody [Guthrie]” exactly twice, the only original number he included from his 1962 debut.

Dylan honored Robertson with a deathless description of his guitar playing, dubbing him “the only mathematical guitar genius I’ve ever run into who doesn’t offend my intestinal nervousness with his rearguard sound”—another way of saying, “He knows better than to upstage the Mighty Bob.” Robertson succeeded mostly through indirection: weaseling phrases into unlikely places and using solos to explore his riffs instead of carving out new tensions. Multiplying the misdirection of Dylan’s lyrics, this elevated the material beyond what most others could; the secret to Dylan’s covert strategies was to play some secret game of your own.

Robertson’s lead playing has always been uneven, and generally overrated. He’s not a virtuoso, and he find his space in material mostly because he ornaments a lot of Dylan’s vocal tics with wayward gestures of his own. It’s more fun to listen to Robertson behind Dylan’s singing than when he takes a formal solo. Part of Robertson’s charm early on lay in his fellowship with outliers like George Harrison: he didn’t play the guitar hero. His band had two keyboards, and Hudson emerged as the ensemble’s major soloist on organ and synthesizers, a strong rival to Stevie Wonder. With three lead vocalists (Levon Helm, Rick Danko, and Manuel), this provided plenty of variety. The idea that Eric Clapton wanted to “join” the Band says a lot: he heard open spaces to fill, and he wanted a better context to solo inside of than Cream’s verbosity. Robertson could lay down a serious groove with rhythmic patterns and then jump into the fray when his breaks came around: he had courage and nerve but not a lot of showboating in his blood. This worked in his favor, especially with Dylan.

On the second night (January 4), Dylan starts strumming the chords to “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” and Robertson sends up some fine harmonic flares. But throughout the song, the latter commentary contains more wit than his formal solo. Three nights later, the same number takes on a country feel—Robertson’s lead-in sounds more professional, and his concluding comments feel more grounded. This is how musicians “break a song in,” vary the mood and pace from night to night according to the personalities onstage and the energy flowing up from the crowd. Another highlight: “It Takes a Lot to Laugh,” played only in Toronto, where Dylan huffs a harmonic solo trying to find a new thread to trace. Ray Padgett dismisses Robertson solos by omission, claiming that “even when other parts of the shows go through the motions, his harmonica playing never does.”

These shows famously featured a set from the Band doing their own stuff before Dylan’s acoustic set. And in omitting these segments, this overwhelming package might otherwise earn that hoary term “definitive.” Because of rights conflicts with the Band’s Capitol contract, Sony couldn’t negotiate any Band material onto this box, which will forever mar its historical accuracy: theses were joint shows, not just Dylan sets. And the Band’s Dylan material (usually “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” “I Shall Be Released,” and their Robertson-penned hits “Up on Cripple Creek” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”) often gave new purchase to perfectly standard plots. Manuel’s fretful falsetto on “Released,” especially, counted as a highlight. Within a few shows, the set list gelled with an opening collaboration, a Band set, then Dylan, then a break, then a couple more Band-alone numbers, then a collaborative finale where the wheels flew off.

Most concertgoers knew the core of this repertoire from one of the early bootlegs, a double album called Looking Back, which culled live tracks from the 1966 UK shows, including the Manchester Free Trade Hall evening when a folkie cried out “Judas” in agony. That recording was hard to come by, got discussed in hushed tones, and remains a prized possession among those who still own a copy. It had samizdat integrity even as Dylan skipped Woodstock and accepted an honorary degree from Princeton University. And his chemistry with these players held continuous and abiding surprises. (Rumors spread that it was acid onstage at all times.)

The 1974 tour lasted just over a month and quickly broke all records for ticket requests before it even began. Like a lot of Dylan moves, it grew much larger in the imagination both during and after he closed in Inglewood, California. The largest, Madison Square Garden, held roughly 20,000 people. Taylor Swift’s 2023–24 Eras Tour routinely sold out 70,000–80,000 per night. These days, these halls look medium-sized; at the time, few others could dream of filling them.

By opening and closing with “Most Likely You Go Your Way (and I’ll Go Mine),” Dylan hit upon this Blonde on Blonde track as an unlikely standard. In its original 1966 version, it lacked punch, came across almost like a lazy put-down—even “Don’t Think Twice, It's All Right” seemed to grin through its teeth. “Mine” stacks up one-liners for a vengeful assault, but on the studio version, it’s all understated, derision by subtext (“You say you got some other kind of lover / And yes, I believe you do”).

Here the song explodes into something much darker. Dylan plunged into a new sweep and drama that set off bombs inside these familiar songs, and they hit everybody differently, not just because everybody had grown older, but also because the lyrics still had more to say, more threats to deliver, and metaphors that had only curdled over time. “It Ain’t Me Babe,” once doubled as a cousin to “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” as a farewell to his folkie purists. Here it sounds like more than a warning, a gleeful run at an old argument Dylan had somehow won during his absence and now celebrated in a victory lap.

“Ballad of a Thin Man,” from 1965, lurches forward like a dirge, a distant takedown about the generation gap that only grew more bitter with time. And a 1964 standout, “I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met),” traces the earlier arrangement while turning into a completely different song. Most curious come the clown cars all souped up for revenge and curt dismissal: “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” flies from its orgiastic attic like a crazed bat, suddenly a new war cry—less a call to party than a new demand for dignity, purpose, and direction. And “Highway 61 Revisited” turns into a commentary on the evening itself: critiquing the system while making scads of money, isn’t this how it’s always been?

Dylan glares through his custom Wayfarer shades as one more deflection, a mask of ambivalence fronting all this indignation. Nixon was still the president, a mortal enemy, and many in the audience had either returned from Vietnam or had seen a family member return forever changed. That war affronted any self-respecting citizen’s moral dignity, and the 1971 Pentagon Papers proved both shocking and a stillborn confirmation of everybody’s worst suspicions.

Here came the civil rights prodigy waving a different flag: he had written several protest anthems (“The Times They Are a-Changin’” makes these sets, along with “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” but he also wrote “Chimes of Freedom” and “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” which he sang minutes before Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech on the National Mall). But by the dawn of 1974, a presidential resignation seemed remote even though Nixon lost support hourly. (Only George Bush Sr., chair of the Republican National Committee, held out until after Nixon resigned.) During “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” promoter Bill Graham arranged to have the lights suddenly go red, white, and blue, and the words Dylan spat at Lyndon Johnson (“Even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked!”) now pointed squarely at war criminal Nixon.

Here was the great reveal: when that fan shouted “Judas!” in 1966, everybody knew it came from someone who considered Dylan’s electric move a betrayal, a sellout, and a sop to commercialism. And by 1974, Dylan had proved everybody wrong, not just because his rock ’n’ roll had a hilarious resolve, and implacable silliness, but because songs like “Maggie’s Farm” and “Highway 61” and “Like a Rolling Stone” proved far more political than even “Hattie Carroll” or “Only a Pawn in Their Game” or “Masters of War” ever could. His crotchety voice, so unruly in folk, turned strangely oracular in rock ’n’ roll, and his electric albums reached more listeners, changed more minds, and conveyed far more revulsion with society’s ills.

Near the final act, before the last leg of songs, everybody held up a lighter or a match in tribute, which became the tour’s indelible album cover. I can’t remember ever being in an audience where this had happened before, and as a crowd member it went beyond tribute, as if we couldn’t thank Dylan enough for his songs, his presence, and his return, even though question marks still hung over the evening: does this mean rock has grown up, or might die away? The rest of Dylan’s career mocks that question; in 2022’s The Philosophy of Modern Song, Dylan sounded as small as his songs were huge.

But 50 years ago, nearing my 14th birthday and looking around me at that crowd, I knew everyone who held a match aloft held up a prayer: that we would end this war, this presidency, that we would keep battering at the older generation’s smug idea of itself, end this era of American misanthropy. The music had already carried us so far that it would help us find a better place together. You couldn’t miss it, and you can still hear it in the way these players whip through “Like a Rolling Stone,” as if chasing something both forbidding and irresistible. Dylan’s piercing attack flows not so much from anger as from sheer naked passion, confronting the world’s outrages through the communion of a rock concert, and reassuring one another that vibes this enduring counted for something bigger than the music. On that tour, Dylan’s return heralded a different kind of rock star (middle-aged, soldiering on, blistering past all previous assumptions and templates), and the style itself never sounded so sturdy, or impetuously righteous.