Bob Dylan has announced details of a new box set called ‘The 1974 Live Recordings’ – a compilation of his arena performances across the year.
The project is a new 431-track collection of his performances with The Band, which is set to be released via Columbia and Legacy Recordings across 27 discs.
Set to arrive on September 20, the deluxe box set features 417 previously-unreleased performances, as well as newly-mixed recordings and liner notes written by journalist and critic Elizabeth Nelson.
The release marks 50 years since the iconic singer-songwriter returned to touring that year, and in conjunction with the box set, Third Man Records has also announced the upcoming release of ‘The 1974 Live Recordings – The Missing Songs From Before the Flood’. This is a 3-LP set culled from the same recordings, featuring hand-selected versions of every song Bob Dylan recorded that was not included on the original 1974 live album.
Today, to mark the announcement, a never-before-released version of ‘Forever Young’ has been shared. It was recorded live in Seattle on February 9, 1974. Check it out below.
The 1974 tour marked Dylan’s first time hitting the road again in eight years, and also saw him reunite with The Band – who had performed with him nearly a decade earlier.
“Booked into arenas for the first time ever, Bob Dylan and The Band performed 30 dates in 42 days (often playing two sets per day) before an average audience of 18,500 – helping set a new standard for what rock concerts could look and sound like,” explains a press release.
“Tour ‘74 kicked off January 3, 1974, at Chicago Stadium – the largest indoor arena in the world at the time it was built – with a tense and combative rip through ultimate deep-cut ‘Hero Blues’, an acoustic-gone-electric outtake from ‘The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan sessions, that he had scarcely performed before-or since.”
The tour also saw them break out other rarities like the re-imagined ‘Ballad Of Hollis Brown’, ‘Song To Woody’ – which hadn’t been performed since 1962 – and ‘Planet Waves’ outtake ‘Nobody ‘Cept You’, and marked his first time back since he largely retired from touring after a 1966 motorcycle accident.
“Though they might not have known it at the time, Bob Dylan and The Band were at the vanguard of a new era,” the press release added. “Tour ‘74 would help create the template for the major rock tour, and codify many of its shared experiences – from the sight of audiences holding up lighters en masse, to the bright flash of the house lights during a show’s signal moment, in this case their performance of ‘Like A Rolling Stone’.
“Likewise many songs performed live for the first time on Tour ‘74 – ‘All Along The Watchtower’, ‘Forever Young’ and the show’s eventual opener-and-closer ‘Most Likely You Go Your Way (and I’ll Go Mine)’ – would take on a life of their own.”
You can pre-order the box set and check out the full 431 tracklisting here.
Just last month, the singer and songwriting legend kicked off the ‘Outlaw Music Festival Tour’ with a typically unpredictable setlist of ‘50s blues and country covers and deep cuts.
The opening night included versions of Willie Dixon’s ‘My Babe’, Chuck Berry’s ‘Little Queenie’ and Hank Williams’ ‘Cold, Cold Heart’, as well as four separate songs from his own 2012 album ‘Tempest’, including ‘Long And Wasted Years’ and ‘Scarlet Town’.
His instincts to keep fans guessing made headlines again earlier this year, when a fan heckled him in March, shouting, “Play something we know!”
At the Fort Lauderdale show, the musician looked her in the eye and immediately launched into a new arrangement of his 1971 track ‘When I Paint My Masterpiece’ in which he sang the lyrics to the tune of Irving Berlin’s ‘Puttin’ On The Ritz’.
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