Fifty years ago this week, Bob Dylan and the Band launched their landmark Before the Flood reunion tour with a pair of shows at Chicago Stadium. Dylan had been off the road for eight very long years at this point, and demand to see his return was so intense that promoters received 5.5 million ticket requests via a cumbersome mail-order system. To put that in perspective, that was four percent of the entire population of America.
The last time that Dylan and the Band hit the road, they were met with choruses of boos many nights by enraged folk purists that hated seeing their hero playing with an electric band. At England’s Manchester Free Trade Hall, one fan famously screamed out “Judas!” before the final encore. Speaking to Rolling Stone’s Mikal Gilmore in 2012, nearly half a century after the incident, Dylan was still grumbling about it.
“Judas, the most hated name in human history!” he said. “If you think you’ve been called a bad name, try to work your way out from under that. Yeah, and for what? For playing an electric guitar? As if that is in some kind of way equitable to betraying our Lord and delivering him up to be crucified. All those evil motherfuckers can rot in hell.”
There were very few of those “evil motherfuckers” when he returned to the road in 1974. The 1966 tour took on a mythical status very shortly after it ended, and bootleg recordings spread to fans all across the globe. Folk purists became an endangered species once the psychedelia movement began in 1967. Dylan was tucked away in Woodstock by then, raising his young kids, cutting the occasional album, and not even contemplating any sort of tour. His former bandmates, meanwhile, dubbed themselves the Band and quickly became one of the most acclaimed acts in rock.
When rumors began flying that Dylan and the Band were contemplating a reunion tour in late 1973, many Americans were desperate for anything that could transport them back to an earlier time, even if just for a couple of hours. The pointless Vietnam War was sputtering to an end, the naked criminality of the Nixon administration was in the news every day thanks to the Watergate hearings, and the Arab oil embargo caused massive lines at gas stations nationwide.