50 years ago, 20 June 1974, Bob Dylan and The Band released their double live album Before the Flood, peaking at number 3 on the U.S. Billboard 200 and going Platinum in the U.S. In addition to being Dylan’s first live album, the music was a compilation of Dylan’s greatest hits.

Stephen Thomas Erlewine of All Music comments “Dylan reworks, rearranges, reinterprets these songs in ways that are still disarming, years after its initial release. He could only have performed interpretations this radical with a group as sympathetic, knowing of his traits as the band, whose own recordings here are respites from the storm. And this is a storm — the sound of a great rocker, surprising his band and audience by tearing through his greatest songs in a manner that might not be comforting, but it guarantees it to be one of the best live albums of its time. Ever, maybe.”

Tom Nolan with Rolling Stone notes that “Throughout Bob Dylan‘s performances on this in-concert album there is evident an effort to match the material — nearly all from much earlier in his career — with a suitable style of delivery, a vocal stance which can express in a later year the brilliant and sometimes malevolent energy contained by these pieces when they were first created.”

The album was high energy, something that Dylan and the Band were not known for, but it brought a side to their music that, up till then, no one had experienced.

Source:  All Music. The Rolling Stone Album Guide. Graphic: Album Cover Before the Flood, copyright Columbia Records.