The tour generated intense fan and media interest and tickets for the shows, available only through mail order, were in great demand.

[4][5] Dylan, who by this point in his career had developed a strong interest in his financial position,[6] had been dissatisfied with the terms of his Columbia Records deal.

[4][5] Discussions about a tour took place among Dylan, the Band's guitarist and chief songwriter Robbie Robertson, and Geffen during the summer of 1973.

Dylan's few public performances in the prior years had been one-offs like his unannounced guest turn with George Harrison at The Concert for Bangladesh.

[3] This was a high-profile comeback for both acts;[4] in addition to Dylan's hiatus, the Band had only recently emerged from an eighteen-month interregnum itself,[3] rooted in Robertson's writer's block and keyboardist/second drummer/vocalist Richard Manuel's longstanding alcohol dependence.

News of a tour first came out with a report in The Washington Post in early November 1973 based on a conversation a reporter Tom Zito had with Robertson; it was big news because, as he wrote for the paper, "Bob Dylan, the reclusive songwriter who sparked a generation in the early 1960s ... and, by 1965, had become the single most generative force in rock music, is planning to go on the road for the first time in eight years.

Dylan will be accompanied in concert by the Band, the American quintet widely regarded as one of the most important and innovative performing rock ensembles.

[3] Throughout the tour, Dylan and the Band chartered The Starship, a private jet famously used by Elton John, Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones.

[3] The line outside the post office facility Rincon Annex in San Francisco stretched for five blocks when midnight struck.

[5] There was, in the words of one Dylan biographer, "an extravagant level of hype for this tour", with for instance Geffen claiming that it was "the biggest thing of its kind in the history of show business".

"[5] Although some hyperbole was involved in some of Geffen's and Graham's statements, there was in fact an intense level of fan and media interest in the tour.

[3] In some cases alternative newspapers ran classified listings of people offering sexual favors in exchange for tickets.

Promotional activities in each city were greatly restricted, with no television cameras allowed in the hall, no backstage passes for press or celebrities, and no local radio station appearances.

Driven by Levon Helm's syncopated, contrapuntal drumming, Dylan's songs (exemplified by a Jimi Hendrix-influenced take on "All Along the Watchtower") were re-arranged and sung with a ferocity not found on the originals, while Garth Hudson's experiments with the Lowery String Symphonizer (an early synthesizer embedded in the Lowery H25-3 organ that was adapted from the Freeman string symphonizer) further enriched the Band's timbral palette.

[14] As Ben Fong-Torres wrote at the time, Dylan was "putting new italics into old songs — 'Ya say yer lookin' for someone' ... 'It still ain't me, babe'".

Helm later recalled, "I sometimes had a funny sensation: that we were acting out the roles of Bob Dylan and the Band, and the audience was paying to see what they'd missed many years before.

During the final show of the tour, which took place on Valentine's Day, Dylan broke from the standard setlist to play Sara's favorite song, "Mr. Tambourine Man".

The final shows at the Los Angeles Forum drew a number of fellow musicians and celebrities, including Carole King, Ringo Starr, Joan Baez, Jack Nicholson, and Warren Beatty.

Robert Christgau referred to the tour arrangements as both crazy and strong and wrote that "But while the Band sounds undisciplined, threatening to destroy their headlong momentum by throwing out one foot or elbow too many, they never abandon their enormous technical ability.

"[6] The Rolling Stone Record Guide subsequently wrote that in the shows of Tour '74, "Dylan reinterprets all of his old material drastically, singing the lyrics as though they mean nothing at all or something very different from what we've always understood them to signify.

[22] And some of Dylan and the Band's tour revenue was lost when the artists – against the advice of Levon Helm – invested it in tax shelter schemes that went bad a few years later.

[22] Helm echoed those sentiments, writing in his autobiography: "The tour was damn good for our pocketbooks, but it just wasn't a very passionate trip for any of us.

"[13] The live album Before the Flood was released in June 1974, and contained a representative sample of the tour, drawn from shows in New York City and Los Angeles.