As he approaches his 70th birthday, and after half a century of public performance, you’d think that Bob Dylan held no more surprises under that funny little hat of his. But Dylan’s decision to play in China, and particularly allowing the songs he played to be censored by the Chinese government, has found Dylan at the centre of the biggest controversy since his protest songs of the 1960s.
The fact that Dylan did not perform the anthemic Blowin’ In The Wind and Times They Are a-Changin, particularly in the wake of the imprisonment of Ai Wei Wei, shocked many fans of the man still regarded as the world’s premier protest singer.
But then one reason why Dylan attracts such a devoted following is the very contrary nature of the man - since he burst on the scene in 1962, Dylan has gone his own wayward way. In 1965 he outraged the folk fraternity by playing electric; in 1969, he espoused country & western music and in 1979 his conversion to “born again” Christianity was front-page news.
Introduced at Live Aid in 1985 as “one of America’s great voices of freedom”, Dylan is still capable of enraging as much as he delights. Critics looking at his Chinese set list could argue that Dylan was censored by the Chinese government; as a fan of over 40 years, I prefer to think it is just Bob going his own singular way… again.
To me, Dylan has always suggested freedom and liberation in his best work, one example of which was apparent in Beijing: A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall speaks of “the executioner’s face [as] always well hidden”. Another song he performed, Ballad Of A Thin Man remains the classic example of 60s alienation, where something is happening, but the hapless Mr Jones doesn’t know what it is.
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Critics singling out his China visit miss out the fact that Dylan has been touring constantly, around 100 shows a year, since 1988, there are few countries on the planet he hasn’t visited! His set lists change for every concert, no two nights are ever the same.
Dylan has never used the concert stage as a platform for political oratory. The audience who went were there to witness a legend, one of only a handful which rock & roll can legitimately claim. One of his closing songs in Beijing was All Along The Watchtower, the opening line rings down the decades and which, you could argue Dylan, subliminally addressed to his Chinese audience: “There must be some way out of here…”
(Patrick Humphries is co-editor of a new edition of Robert Shelton’s classic Dylan biography No Direction Home (Omnibus Press, £19.95)