Posted on 05/13/2011 5:39:33 AM PDT by Mr. Blonde
Allow me to clarify a couple of things about this so-called China controversy which has been going on for over a year. First of all, we were never denied permission to play in China. This was all drummed up by a Chinese promoter who was trying to get me to come there after playing Japan and Korea. My guess is that the guy printed up tickets and made promises to certain groups without any agreements being made. We had no intention of playing China at that time, and when it didn't happen most likely the promoter had to save face by issuing statements that the Chinese Ministry had refused permission for me to play there to get himself off the hook. If anybody had bothered to check with the Chinese authorities, it would have been clear that the Chinese authorities were unaware of the whole thing.
We did go there this year under a different promoter. According to Mojo magazine the concerts were attended mostly by ex-pats and there were a lot of empty seats. Not true. If anybody wants to check with any of the concert-goers they will see that it was mostly Chinese young people that came. Very few ex-pats if any. The ex-pats were mostly in Hong Kong not Beijing. Out of 13,000 seats we sold about 12,000 of them, and the rest of the tickets were given away to orphanages. The Chinese press did tout me as a sixties icon, however, and posted my picture all over the place with Joan Baez, Che Guevara, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. The concert attendees probably wouldn't have known about any of those people. Regardless, they responded enthusiastically to the songs on my last 4 or 5 records. Ask anyone who was there. They were young and my feeling was that they wouldn't have known my early songs anyway.
As far as censorship goes, the Chinese government had asked for the names of the songs that I would be playing. There's no logical answer to that, so we sent them the set lists from the previous 3 months. If there were any songs, verses or lines censored, nobody ever told me about it and we played all the songs that we intended to play.
Everybody knows by now that there's a gazillion books on me either out or coming out in the near future. So I'm encouraging anybody who's ever met me, heard me or even seen me, to get in on the action and scribble their own book. You never know, somebody might have a great book in them.
Didn’t know that, thanks for telling me. Don’t quite see how it is relevant to a discussion about Dylan.
Maybe, good point.
His career as a folk singer writing protest songs lasted all of about a year. Outside of Hurricane they are all on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (May 1963) and The Times They Are A’Changin’ (Jan. 1964). After that there was a marked turn away from political themes or songs about injustice within his music. I think that is often forgotten and it is strange since that work still overshadows his other work which is both much larger and much better.
His role as a countercultural icon wasn’t one he asked for and he was never at the marches and so on like Joan Baez.
Rock PING
Rock PING
So you are just making it up, we do know that Bob Dylan’s favorite politician in the 60s was Goldwater, but you, we don’t know anything about at all.
I guess the “Dylan can’t sing” line has worn off, and the latest is “Dylan is a blood thirsty Communist.”
The vagueness of that childish post is very convincing that you are just making things up, which of course you are, you can’t just do that kind of thing here, go find a source that you can post.
You seem bitter and envious that some jobs I have had have occasionally put me in the same room or within earshot of some well-known people. I guess next time I can secretly record their conversations on my cell phone to satisfy you.
All of those people are so far to the left, but none if them realize
it, just like fish don’t know they’re wet. Why is that so hard to believe?
“His role as a countercultural icon wasn’t one he asked for and he was never at the marches and so on like Joan Baez.”
Never at the anti-war marches, anyhow. I think he wanted to be Elvis, not Che. Some of that crappy folk crowd never forgave him for it, and at the time he was looked at as a traitor to the revolution when he embraced the rock.
Freegards
LOL, no I’m annoyed that a liar is trying to pass off fake information about a public figure on the internet.
Go get a source.
I am the source.
Easy to prove me wrong: just show the denunciation, in speech, song, or deed, of the dictatorship in Cuba, ever, in the last 40 years.
You are worse off and more idiotic than you even appeared at first.
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