TRI In The News

Dylan Performance Missed Opportunity

From The Observer Reporter
Original article available here.

Whether it's plugging in an electric guitar at a folk festival, briefly taking up the banner of evangelical Christianity, tearing apart and reassembling his own classics or appearing in a television ad for Victoria's Secret, Bob Dylan has a talent for confounding both fans and detractors alike.

And, just a month shy of his 70th birthday, he seems to have lost none of his ability to rile 'em up.

After making his first-ever appearances in China and Vietnam in recent days, Dylan was denounced by the organization Human Rights Watch and New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, among others, for playing what they termed a government-sanctioned set that left out politically-charged anthems like "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They are a-Changin.'"

John Whitehead, a civil liberties advocate, complained that "to play only a government-approved song list notably lacking in any of his trademark protest songs is significant on many levels - morally, spiritually and politically - not only for what it says about him but for what it says about the rest of us."

But this dismay about Dylan not performing any of his "trademark protest songs" assumes they are immovable parts of his sets, in the same way that Paul McCartney always plays "Yesterday" or Simon and Garfunkel never leave "Bridge Over Troubled Water" untouched. Anyone who has attended a Dylan concert on his 23-year "Never Ending Tour" knows that his shows can be highly unpredictable. He's played "Tangled Up in Blue," one of the highlights of his 1970s output, as if it were ripped from the ZZ Top catalog, and has stubbornly ignored some of his best-known work in favor of obscurities. Anyone who goes to a Dylan show expecting a greatest-hits extravaganza is bound to be disappointed.

Besides, Dylan himself has always chafed at being a political or moral leader. During the 1960s, as he wrote in his autobiography, "Chronicles," "I was sick of the way my lyrics had been extrapolated, their meanings subverted into polemics and that I had been anointed as the Big Bubba of Rebellion, High Priest of Protest, the Czar of Dissent, the Duke of Disobedience, Leader of the Freeloaders, Kaiser of Apostasy, Archbishop of Anarchy, the Big Cheese."

He went on to say, "I was not a spokesman for anything or anybody ... I was only a musician."

It should be noted that when Dylan appeared at Consol Energy Park in 2006 and 2009, he took a pass on "Blowin' in the Wind," "Masters of War," "Chimes of Freedom" and most of his other 1960s protest tunes. One assumes that this was not because of an edict from North Franklin supervisors.

Perhaps Dylan missed an opportunity to appease both sides in Vietnam and China - slipping some of his protest tunes into his set, but rendering them so unrecognizable that no one would have known.