Bob Dylan was washed up and irrelevant – then one electrifying tour saved his career
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As the Timothée Chalamet-starring Bob Dylan biopic ‘A Complete Unknown’ hits cinemas, Stevie Chick revisits a moment in time where the musician teetered on insignificance... until a single tour in 1974 with The Band cemented the Tambourine Man’s place in music history.
![[Bob Dylan performs live on stage with Robbie Robertson of The Band at Madison Square Garden, New York as part of his 1974 Tour Of America on 30 January 1974]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2024/09/13/11/GettyImages-96203378.jpg)
Bob Dylan’s “Never Ending Tour” began in 1988, and – save for a pandemic-enforced break in 2020, after which it was renamed the “Rough And Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour” – has trundled onwards for 36 years, with no sign of stopping. Indeed, his Bobness will have performed 52 shows this year alone come December.
![[Bob Dylan and The Band touring in Chicago, 1974 (Left to right: Rick Danko, Robbie Robertson, Bob Dylan, Levon Helm)]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2024/09/13/09/Bob_Dylan_and_The_Band_-_1974.jpg)
It wasn’t always this way. The 1974 Live Recordings, a mammoth new 27-disc box set, transports listeners back half a century, presenting a very different Bob Dylan: younger, leaner, and perhaps more than a little desperate. Back then, he had recently parted ways with both longtime manager Albert Grossman and longtime label Columbia Records, which had signed him a dozen years earlier when he was just another folkie haunting Greenwich Village coffee houses. He’d only performed onstage a handful of times since his notorious 1966 motorcycle accident, favouring domestic life with his wife Sara and their four children.
![[Musician Bob Dylan belts out a tune as members of The Band (Robbie Robertson, partially hidden left, and Garth Hudson, background center) accompany him, during a concert in Los Angeles on 15 February 1974]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2024/07/09/23/Music_Dylan_The_Band_04615.jpg)
His last album of new material, the soundtrack to Peckinpah western Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid (in which he also starred), had been accused by critics of “wilful badness”, with Rolling Stone’s Jon Landau declaring Dylan “the least significant” rock figure of the Seventies. It seems unthinkable now, but in 1973 Dylan seemed washed-up and in danger of becoming yesterday’s man.
![[Bob Dylan performs at the Isle of Wight Pop Festival in 1969, fresh off working with The Band at The Big Pink]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2023/12/07/10/newFile-2.jpg)
