Historic 1974 reunion tour is released online along with thousands of rare rock, folk and jazz concerts
Bob Dylan and The Band in historic reunion tour 1974 (photo Jim Summaria creative commons)
Wolfgang’s Vault has released four concerts from the 1974 tour of Bob Dylan and The Band that are free to listen to on the web or on an iPhone with their WVIP membership.
In 1974 Bob Dylan, the voice of the sixties generation, had been laying low in Woodstock New York since 1967. His albums after the motorcycle accident had been different, not the “wild mercury” sound of Highway 61 and Bringing It All Back Home.
The Band had been touring since their creation in West Saugerties at Big Pink in 1968. By 1973 The Band was running out of steam. Their muse had left them due to creative exhaustion and substance abuse.
When Dylan and the The Band went back on tour in the winter of 1974 it was the big concert of the year. The genius who moved folk music and rock music forever in one step back on the road with his first band, excepting Paul Butterfield who actually appeared at Woodstock. This was the only tour band Dylan had used.
The show was a mixture of Dylan with The Band reprising 1966, Dylan alone doing acoustic songs like It’s All Right Ma I’m Only Bleeding, and The Band rocking out their hits like Stage Fright and Up on Cripple Creek. While The Band held to their well known arrangements, Dylan took the opportunity to upset fans by working new arrangements of most of his material. Some still hate Dylan’s performances to this day. Tough luck for them since they miss another great set of Dylan material. Maybe you want him to go back to the 60s but Dylan was moving on. Check out It Ain’t Me from Oakland.
Then for The Times They Are A Changing in NYC he goes back to an acoustic version.
There are four concerts in the series available online: (spread across seven sessions)
Jan 31, 1974 Madison Square Garden, NYC, Set 1 and 2
Feb 11, 1974, Oakland Coliseum Stadium, Oakland, CA, Late Show
Feb 14, 1974, Los Angeles Forum, LA, CA, Early and Late Show Sets 1 and 2
These concerts present a broader range of material compared with the concerts on the two CD set Before The Flood Live (Amazon.ca)
For more history of the concerts, check out Wolfgang’s Vault and Wikipedia.
Sound Quality
The recordings are off the sound board at the concert halls. That means pristine quality in terms of mixing but there are parts of songs missing. Sometimes the instruments might be slightly out of balance. At the end of Like a Rolling Stone, Garth Hudson’s organ sounds more like Bach than Dylan when he opens the low stops.
In the popular Band song The Weight, the singer is somewhat back in the mix. Sometimes the piano is front and centre or the guitar player gets to loud. What’s not missing is the excitement of the live concert and interaction between the musicians and the audience.
If you listen to the songs on the Internet, Wolfgang’s Vault is delivering 96kbps which is a compressed, lossy signal. Cough up $50 a year for WVIP and you will hear 192kbps which is markedly better. These concerts are not available for download.
Other concerts can be purchased for amounts varying from $10 to $30. Some of the purchase selections seem bad values. Four Bonnie Raitt songs for $5 seems steep but then WVIP members only pay $3.50. Membership has its privileges. Downloads are at 192kbs and some bit rates.
Considering these historic concerts are generally not available anywhere else, sound quality is more than acceptable.
Wolfgang’s Vault
When Wolodia “Wolfgang” Grajonca escaped Nazi Europe he re-made himself as Bill Graham, rock promoter extraordinaire. Bill Graham was “The” rock promoter who put the famous and the unknowns on stage for his customers delight.
Before concerts were a get rich quick scheme, Bill Graham was putting The Beatles, Bruce Springsteen, and The Allman Brothers on stage. It was easy for him to promote the big names but who would put James Cotton or Muddy Waters on the same bill so people could appreciate where the music came from.
Graham saved thousands of those sound board recordings and since 2002 his estate has been putting them on line at Wolfgang’s Vault.
There are so many concerts to listen to you could start now and still be at it ten years from now. Like jazz? How about rare concerts with Miles Davies, Freddie Hubbard, Stan Getz and hundreds of other classic jazz musicians.
The genres represented in spades on Wolfgangs’s Vault include:
* Bluegrass
* Blues
* Country
* Folk
* Funk
* Hard Rock/Metal
* Indie Rock
* Jazz
* Latin
* New Wave
* Pop
* Prog Rock
* Punk
* R&B
* Reggae/World
* Rock
* Soft Rock
* Southern Rock
Copyright
Wolfgang’s Vault has gotten all the publishing clearances to broadcast the concerts so it’s not real bootleg.
Can you stream the concerts to your computer and save them? Wolfgang’s Vault says no: the concerts are copyright.
Do people stream music to their hard drives and keep a copy? Yes and there is nothing I or anyone else can do to stop it. When you can stream them any time you want, why bother?
How They Make Money
Wolfgang’s Vault makes money by selling you concerts and music memorabilia and through annual WVIP subscriptions. $4 a month for all the rock, folk, and jazz music I need seems cheap.
As I finished writing this story, the Oakland Feb 11, 1974 concert, that had been playing since I started writing, finished. I think I’ll listen to the NYC concert over lunch.
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