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Article 1425 of rec.music.dylan:
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>From: [e-mail] (John Howells)
Newsgroups: rec.music.dylan
Subject: Chicago 1/3/74
Summary: the first concert of the 1974 US tour
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Date: 17 Apr 90 15:50:15 GMT
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After a bit of an absence, I'm back with another tape review:

CHICAGO JAN 3, 1974
===================

Hero Blues
Lay Lady Lay
Tough Mama
The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down   -   Dylan on guitar
Stage Fright                          -   Dylan on guitar
Share Your Love With Me               -   Dylan on harmonica
It Ain't Me Babe
All Along The Watchtower
Ballad Of A Thin Man
I Don't Believe You
The Times They Are A-Changin'
Song To Woody
The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carrol
Nobody 'Cept You
It's Alright, Ma
Forever Young
Something There Is About You
Like A Rolling Stone
The Weight                  -   Dylan on harmonica
Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine)


This concert has great historical significance because it was the first
full concert in five years and the first tour in eight. After hearing the
spectacular Philadelphia 1/6/74 concert and parts of the second Chicago
concert 1/4/74, I was really expecting this one to be the best one of all.
Although it's very good and there is much to recommend, I still consider
the Philadelphia concert to be the best I've heard so far. Also, there are
many things happening in this concert that make it unique.

What makes this concert so different from the others? For one thing, Dylan
doesn't leave the stage when The Band launch into their first mini-set and
he plays along with them on "Old Dixie" (rhythm guitar), "Stage Fright"
(guitar again), and "Share Your Love With Me" (harmonica). At the end of
the night, when The Band play their final number "The Weight", Dylan stays
to play harmonica. The effect is to affirm once and for all that Dylan and
The Band are one complete group instead of "the star and his backup band".
This spirit of collaboration is just one of the many pleasant things about
this tape. It helps to know, for instance, that the stage setup was one of
cluttered hominess - complete with couches and floorlamps - giving the
impression of a group of old time friends getting together to sing a few
tunes. This could be a deliberate allusion to the looseness of the
"basement tapes" and an indication of how the tour was originally
envisioned. The fact that the tour eventually ended up a cynical exercise
in media hype and superstar power games shows just how much of a failure
the tour actually was (see "Isis" for a detailed description of the tour
and Dylan's reaction to it :-). Unfortunately, the cluttered stage and
laidback approach were abandoned soon after Chicago, and along with it much
of the charm.

Something else that was lost in later concerts was the unusual material.
Here Dylan performs the relatively unknown "Hero Blues" as the opening
song! Later he performs four new songs in addition to such "cult" tunes as
"I Don't Believe You" and "Song To Woody". The performances are all very
low key as well. "Lay Lady Lay" is sung in a manner closer to the original,
without all the rather goofy swoops and wails of the later versions, and
songs like "Ballad of a Thin Man" are sung with much more feeling for the
original and the lyrics tend to stand out more than usual.

Another thing that comes across on this tape is the idea that this is
actually the final rehearsal for the tour itself. It's obvious that many of
the songs were still being worked out. For instance, Dylan stops "I Don't
Believe You" in the middle of the first verse and starts it over again at a
faster tempo. "You Go Your Way", the encore, is very tentative here, as if
it were performed for the first time ever. Dylan messes up the words a bit
at first, and the arrangement owes more to Blonde on Blonde than the later
versions ever did, but even though I actually prefer the later versions
myself, it's kind of nice to hear the song approached in this manner -
before it became the screaming opener that it would later become.

The sound of the tape is not too bad, as audience recordings go, but it
doesn't match up with the much better sounding Philadelphia tape. Still,
for historical purposes this tape is indispensible. For musical purposes,
this is one of the more interesting concerts of the 1974 tour.


Sound: 6 (slightly better than average audience tape)

Performance: 8 (excellent, but some rough edges still being smoothed out)

--
John Howells
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