By RON GLUCKMAN
The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/home-page
April 7, 2011
The times, he sang long ago, are a-changing. Yet when the world's greatest protest singer steps on stage in the world's biggest no-protest zone, the astonishing thing is that even after half a century, little has changed. The media assail the performer for not raising more of a ruckus, fans cheer songs few really understand, and purists complain about the sound system and ticket prices.
It's almost 50 years to the day since he played his first big show in the Big Apple—as a teenage folkie opening for John Lee Hooker—and Bob Dylan is making his debut on perhaps the last remaining big stage, China. Wearing a spiffy Panama hat, the dapper Mr. Dylan runs through a tight two-hour set that features his always-bewildering mix of lesser-known tracks sprinkled with landmarks like "All Along the Watchtower," "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" and "Like a Rolling Stone."
Long before his April 6 gig in Beijing, the international media was speculating whether he would buck the censors. The government has unleashed a tsunami of censorship that has seen the Internet disrupted and dissidents rounded up. On Sunday, Ai Weiwei, China's most famous artist and a belligerent critic of Beijing, was arrested.
So will the man who crafted such classics as "Blowing in the Wind" and "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" dare criticize China's abysmal human rights record? After all, exactly a year ago, Mr. Dylan's China debut was abruptly cancelled. The word on the street was that the authorities rejected some anti-establishment songs on the set-list.
However, fans who paid stiff ticket prices that topped out at more than $200 are uninterested in the manufactured controversy. They seem uniformly pleased with what Dylan veterans call a consistently entertaining performance by a star known for erratic shows.
"I really like folk music, and early rock," says Tian Zizhang, 21, a university student shopping for resale tickets outside the Worker's Gymnasium with two of her young friends. They snap up three passes for $85 each. "It's a rare chance," she explains.
The crowd is a mixture of young Chinese and middle-aged expats old enough to remember the heyday of America's most iconic singer of the 1960s and 1970s. Dylan discs, while widely available in China, have never been officially released, and many questioned his appeal to a market focused more on club mixes and a range of midstream acts from Air Supply to Madonna.
Yet Mr. Dylan does have a cult following among local musicians. "He's been a huge influence on creative talents in China," says Michael Pettis, an emerging markets expert who teaches finance in Beijing and runs a music label and the punk club D-22 on the side.
Zhou Yunpeng, one of China's biggest folk singers, first heard Mr. Dylan in the early 1990s, while still at college. "I couldn't understand English, so I didn't know what the lyrics meant, but I was immediately attracted to his music," he recalls. "This is most definitely a big deal," he says of Mr. Dylan's shows (also in Shanghai April 8 and Hong Kong April 12-13). "It's second only to the Olympics in importance."
Outside the stadium, one of China's most influential rockers from the 1990s, Zhang Chu, is walking by wearing a floppy hat. "I've been listening to Bob Dylan since about 1988," he volunteers. "His influence is his words. It's great to finally see him.
"Chinese music is becoming more and more about spirit, so more like Dylan music," he adds. "The most important thing tonight was to realize that he still has that essence of the artist. You have to keep true to yourself as an artist."
But for most Chinese, Bob Dylan remains a mystery, so it's unlikely that any pointed remark about the Chinese government would resonate. Near the stadium entrance, a vendor slowly grilling sticks of chicken, squid and lamb can only remember the performer has a B in his name. A guard at the gate knows it is "Baobo Dilun." "But he's not really a big star," he confides. "He's not famous at all."
In great voice, Mr. Dylan plays a spirited 90-minute set without pause or comment, switching from keyboard to guitar, even blowing a bit of his harmonica with astonishing energy for a man who turns 70 next month. He introduces his crack five-piece band, and plays another 30 minutes of crowd-rousing encores: "Like A Rolling Stone," "All Along the Watchtower," and "Forever Young." And then the icon is gone.
Reporters slink off to file headlines like: "Dylan bows to China censors," while fans buzz about seldom-heard material like "Beyond Here Lies Nothin'," "Love Sick," and "Gonna Change My Way Of Thinking," from "Slow Train Coming." Released in 1979 around the time of Mr. Dylan's conversion to Christianity, the lyrics carry just a hint of the old rebelliousness, for any in Beijing who are listening carefully: "I'm gonna change my way of thinking, make myself a different set of rules. Gonna put my best foot forward, stop bein' influenced by fools."
Mr. Gluckman is a Beijing-based writer. Michele Scrimenti contributed to this article.
Dylan works around China’s bosses?
by Terry Mattingly
http://www.getreligion.org/
April 7, 2011
Is there anyone in American popular culture who intrigues and frustrates journalists of a certain age — the Baby Boomer elites — than Bob Dylan? The man is a walking history book, when you combine the landmark events in his life with the confusing but gripping map that is his canon of songwriting.
That’s why it is big news when agrees to take his road tour that never ends to Beijing, where the Communist authorities insisted that he play by their rules when picking songs for his set list. Now there’s a tug of war could have been an amazing subject for musical, cultural, political and, yes, theological commentary, in large part since this man’s songs many-layered songs are packed with subtle themes as well as baseball-bat-to-the-head commentary.
This is what the Washington Post served up at the top of its report from the front lines:[1]
BEIJING — Rock music icon Bob Dylan avoided controversy on Wednesday in his first-ever appearance in Communist-led China, eschewing the 1960s protest anthems that defined a generation and sticking to a song list that government censors say they preapproved, before a crowd of about 5,000 people in a Soviet-era stadium.
Keeping with his custom, Dylan never spoke to the crowd other than to introduce his five-member band in his raspy voice. And his set list — which mixed some of his newer songs alongside classics made unrecognizable by altered tempos — was devoid of any numbers that might carry even the whiff of anti-government overtones.
In Taiwan on Sunday, opening this spring Asian tour, Dylan played “Desolation Row” as the eighth song in his set and ended with an encore performance of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” whose lyrics became synonymous with the antiwar and civil rights protest movements. But in China, where the censors from the government's Culture Ministry carefully vet every line of a song before determining whether a foreign act can play here, those two songs disappeared from the repertoire. In Beijing, Dylan sang “Love Sick” in the place of “Desolation Row,” and he ended his nearly two-hour set with the innocent-sounding “Forever Young.”
There was no “Times They Are a-Changin’ ” in China. And definitely no “Chimes of Freedom.”
OK, let me confess that I am a minor-league Dylan fan. I’m not a fanatic who named his children after the guy, but I have been paying close attention for several decades. Anyway, the first question that popped into my head after reading the top of this story was, methinks, rather logical: So what was the opening song of this rather symbolic show? I mean, Dylan has a history of sending signals with the first words out of his mouth (think about that HBO special with Tom Petty years ago, when Dylan opened with “In the Garden”).
I mean, I assume that the Post reporter was there, right?
Luckily, there are websites out there that sweat the details on this type of question. The following set list looks short, for a Dylan show, but the opening number seems like a logical choice — that is, if one assumes that Dylan may have framed his thoughts about politics, faith and freedom in a less obvious way.
In other words, he opened with “Gonna Change My Way of Thinking.” Thus, it appears that the first words out of his mouth were these:
Gonna change my way of thinking, make myself a different set of rules
Gonna change my way of thinking, make myself a different set of rules
Gonna put my good foot forward, and stop being influenced by fools.
So much oppression, can’t keep track of it no more
So much oppression, can’t keep track of it no more
Sons becoming husbands to their mothers, and old men turning young daughters into whores.
Stripes on your shoulders, stripes on your back and on your hands
Stripes on your shoulders, stripes on your back and on your hands
Swords piercing your side, blood and water flowing through the land.
There’s quite a bit going on there in this song from his gospel classic “Slow Train Coming,” not the least of which is that “stripes” reference to torture and religious oppression. Perhaps a message for the millions of believers in the underground church in China, including the saints in prisons? And who would the “fools” be, in this case?
Then, if he sang the song straight (always a question with Dylan), he later would have added:
You can mislead a man, you can take ahold of his heart with your eyes
You can mislead a man, you can take ahold of his heart with your eyes
But there’s only one authority, and that’s the authority on high.
Did the principalities and powers in the Chinese government parse that one carefully?
Then again, there is a chance that Dylan used some of the new lyrics from the version of this song that appeared on the tremendous 2008 “Gotta Serve Somebody” disc in which gospel music greats performed many of his classics. In that version, Dylan joins up with the great Mavis Staples and, in part, belts out this message. This would not comfort the business lords of the new China.
Jesus is coming, he’s coming back to gather his jewels
Jesus is coming, he’s coming back to gather his jewels
We live by the golden rule, whoever’s got the gold rules.
Anyway, it does not appear that Dylan went silent in China. It appears that he did not perform some of the obvious political songs that the Post team would have recognized and, thus, considered important. However, it seems that Ron Gluckman and the team at the Wall Street Journal was paying attention, with that final reference to the opening declaration in “Gonna Change My Way of Thinking.” Kudos, for not missing the obvious!
SETLIST
1.Gonna Change My Way Of Thinking
2.It's All Over Now, Baby Blue
3.Beyond The Horizon
4.Tangled Up In Blue
5.Honest With Me
6.Simple Twist Of Fate
7.Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum
8.Love Sick
9.Rollin' And Tumblin'
(Elmore James cover)
10.A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall
11.Highway 61 Revisited
12.Spirit On The Water
13.Thunder On The Mountain
14.Ballad Of A Thin Man
15.Like A Rolling Stone
Encore:
16.All Along The Watchtower
17.Forever Young
Link:
[1]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-times-they-are-a-censored-bob-dylan-makes-first-appearance-in-china/2011/04/06/AFHNv8qC_print.html
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