Discography / Before the Flood

Before the Flood

A live album credited jointly to Bob Dylan and the Band, released June 20, 1974, on Asylum Records in the US and Island Records in the UK. Documents their joint arena tour that January and February, Dylan's first tour since the hostile 1966 shows and his first live album ever. Most of the recordings come from the Forum in Inglewood, California, on February 13 and 14, 1974, with one track from Madison Square Garden. The tour itself, and the studio album Planet Waves that preceded it, are covered in Northern Lights–Southern Cross (1975); this page covers the live record.

Structure

A double album split by performer: side one and side four are Dylan backed by the Band; side two, and most of side three, are the Band performing on their own; the remainder of side three is Dylan solo and acoustic. No songs from Planet Waves, the studio album that had prompted the tour in the first place, appear on the record.

Personnel

• Bob Dylan: vocals, guitar, harmonica
• Rick Danko: bass, vocals
• Levon Helm: drums, vocals
• Garth Hudson: clavinet
• Richard Manuel: piano, electric piano, drums, organ, vocals
• Robbie Robertson: guitar, vocals

Chart performance

Peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 and No. 8 in the UK. Certified platinum.

Critical standing

Reception was split, then and since. Robert Christgau called it, without qualification, the craziest and strongest rock and roll ever recorded on a live album. Rolling Stone's contemporary review was cooler, finding Dylan's phrasing and the Band's dense arrangements an awkward match on some tracks. Dylan himself later dismissed the whole tour as overblown, saying he felt like he'd been playing a role called Bob Dylan rather than actually performing. It was voted the sixth-best album of 1974 in the Village Voice's Pazz & Jop critics poll.

Notes

The title is thought to reference a Yiddish novel, Farn Mabul, by Sholem Asch, whose son Moses founded Folkways Records; an alternate theory holds it refers to beating an expected flood of bootlegs to market. In 2024, Dylan's Bootleg Series released The 1974 Live Recordings, a larger box set drawing on the full run of shows, including material that never made the original 1974 release.