January 1974: My raccoon had hepatitis 

The era of modern rock concerts kicked off on January 3, 1974 when Bob Dylan, backed by the Band, hit the road. 

First, there was the hype. Dylan’s first major concert tour since 1966, 40 concerts in 30 days (some weekend shows offered a matinee and evening performance) in 21 cities. Every show a sellout, with total gross receipts of $5 million ($27 million today), enough to entice Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young to reform and tour later that year. (Which is to say that summer – native Minnesotan Dylan and the mostly Canadian Band seemed okay with being in Chicago, Montreal and Toronto in January).

 

The Dylan tour played out entirely in sports arenas with a top dollar ticket of $9.50 – roughly $53 today – purchased through mail order only. It also marked one of the first times the stage lighting was scripted to sync lighting effects with certain lyrics or musical passages. 

At the end of the first show in Chicago, people held lit matches and lighters aloft. “The Band and I looked for the nearest stage exit as none of us wanted to go down in flames,” Dylan said later. “If we thought the response was extreme on the earlier tours we played, this was positively apocalyptic. Obviously, we were wrong. We misinterpreted and misunderstood the reaction of the crowd. What we believed to be disapproval was actually a grand appreciative gesture.” Today it’s done mostly with cell phone flashlights.  

Star-struck Rolling Stone magazine conducted an exit interview of celebrities leaving the final show of the tour in Los Angeles and breathlessly reported on the reactions of Cher, Warren Beatty and Cheech Marin (yeah, he was a celebrity back then). Not in attendance, and no doubt unimpressed, was noted rock-hater Woody Allen. In Annie Hall, when Rolling Stone reporter Shelly Duvall asks Allen if he caught Dylan at the Garden, his stammering reply is “No, I couldn’t make it. My raccoon had hepatitis.” 

On January 16 Dylan played the Charlotte (NC) Coliseum, ending the show just as Johnny Carson began his monologue – each night a self-contained time capsule – which covered the rising prices of meat, Euell Gibbons (a Carson punchline for years) and the continuing unwinding of the 18-minute stretch of erased silence on the White House tapes. Carson, and by extension all America, understands that the Nixon presidency is clearly on the ropes. When Dylan sings, “Even the president of the United States must have to stand naked sometimes” from “It’s Alright Ma,” it gets the biggest cheer of the night.

 

One of Carson’s guests is William Peter Blatty, author of The Exorcist, who solemnly tells us the “elitist New York” critics don’t understand the movie and pumps the box office even more – the film came out a few weeks ago and most theatres still have long ticket lines – claiming that between 5 and 10 people faint at every showing and “we have smelling salts handy all the time.” Blatty plays an audio tape of a reportedly real exorcism, which sounds a lot like the demon in the movie. “That’s a bad case of the croup,” says Carson. 

In another few years, AM radio would be badly in need of an exorcism as it drifted more towards disco and soft rock. The top ten records of January 1974 are a still relatively eclectic group. 

THE JOKER –•– The Steve Miller Band

SHOW AND TELL –•– Al Wilson

TIME IN A BOTTLE –•– Jim Croce (ABC)    

SMOKIN’ IN THE BOY’S ROOM –•– Brownsville Station

I’VE GOT TO USE MY IMAGINATION –•– Gladys Knight and the Pips

YOU’RE SIXTEEN –•– Ringo Starr

THE WAY WE WERE –•– Barbra Streisand

NEVER, NEVER GONNA GIVE YA UP –•– Barry White

LIVING FOR THE CITY –•– Stevie Wonder

LEAVE ME ALONE –•– Helen Reddy 

Steve Miller was an FM heavyweight in the late 60s; “The Joker” was a transitional record that introduced him to a new audience and opened the door for his riff-heavy, production-polished rock-pop songs like “Take the Money and Run” and “Jet Airliner” that ruled the AM airwaves from 1976 to 1978. Ringo was 33 when he recorded “You’re Sixteen,” a cover of a 1960 hit by Johnny Burnette, and we’ll assume his intention was an innocent cash-in on the growing nostalgia for 50s rock. In 2017, a Breitbart editor used the song during a CNN interview to defend Roy Moore, who was running for the Senate in Alabama even after several women came forward with stories about him dating underage girls as an adult. For many reasons, you’ll probably never hear “You’re Sixteen” on the radio again, but the biggest may be that it’s just an awful song with no musical merit.