Dylan 這次來港前，上星期也首次在中國演出。適逢中國政府「綁架」了藝術家艾未未（沒有指控罪名，不算拘捕），Dylan 如期在工人體育館演出，次日《金融時報》報導的首頁插圖的標題說，他在北京的演唱會不能唱出令官方尷尬的歌，四月八日的社論（註一）更帶點揶揄地說，他不 談政治，只唱一曲「沒有殺傷力」的"Gonna Change My Way of Thinking"（「要改變我的想法」），社論還舉出一九六三年 Dylan因為某電視台對他的一首歌曲的歌詞有意見而拒絕出現該台，暗示他今天經已「適應思想」及妥協，「雖然有些人會認為不該期望 Dylan先生做出西方政治和商業體系也不能成功做到的事，但看見抗爭音樂之祖父『隨風而盪』也是有點令人失落。」NYT, Blowin’ in the Idiot Wind
Dylan 心裡想的是什麼，大概他自己也不會說出來，就讓大家在音樂和歌詞中找答案。"Gonna Change My Way of Thinking"其實來自他一九七九年信奉基督教「重生」專輯 "Slow Train Coming"，歌詞其實也不是逆來順受地改變思維或者「被河蟹」，反而是看到了世間不平事，歌者不要再跟風，主動地「自己定出規則」，決定相信 耶穌，其實並不是那麼負面。
筆者當年「發現」Dylan，也是由於這張"Slow Train Coming"專輯，和其主要細碟歌曲"Gotta Serve Somebody"，歌詞中說「可以是魔鬼，可以是主，但你一定要服侍一些人」，這就是說，做人必須作選擇，你站在哪一邊。這要求挑選自己立場的 思維，對筆者當年年少性格初定時，的確是有很深的影響：要選擇企在那個立場，做些什麼；不做應該做的，就是助紂為虐。
始終，只要 Dylan在北京可以唱出被揶揄為「隨風而盪」的"Blowing In The Wind"，其實已經是一個很清晰的抗議聲音：「有些人要生存多少年，才能被釋放獲得自由？一個人能轉過頭去多少次，假裝他視而不見？」六十年代 反越戰和黑人民權運動的聲音，今天已是叫中國政權釋放艾未未、劉曉波等的呼喊。聽得到的，就像身邊的風，必定知道；要自己聽不到的，也是像風一般，就讓它 吹走。
Before Dylan was allowed to have his first concert in China on Wednesday at the Worker’s Gymnasium in Beijing, he ignored his own warning in “Subterranean Homesick Blues” — “Better stay away from those that carry around a fire hose” — and let the government pre-approve his set.
Iconic songs of revolution like “The Times They Are a-Changin,’ ” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” wouldn’t have been an appropriate soundtrack for the 2,000 Chinese apparatchiks in the audience taking a relaxing break from repression.
Spooked by the surge of democracy sweeping the Middle East, China is conducting the harshest crackdown on artists, lawyers, writers and dissidents in a decade. It is censoring (or “harmonizing,” as it euphemizes) the Internet and dispatching the secret police to arrest willy-nilly, including Ai Weiwei, the famous artist and architect of the Bird’s Nest, Beijing’s Olympic stadium.
Dylan said nothing about Weiwei’s detention, didn’t offer a reprise of “Hurricane,” his song about “the man the authorities came to blame for something that he never done.” He sang his censored set, took his pile of Communist cash and left.
“The Times They Are Not a-Changin’,” noted The Financial Times under a picture of the grizzled 69-year-old on stage in a Panama hat.
“Imagine if the Tea Party in Idaho said to him, ‘You’re not allowed to play whatever,’ you’d get a very different response,” said an outraged Sophie Richardson of Human Rights Watch.
A 22-year-old Dylan did walk off “The Ed Sullivan Show” when CBS censors told him he couldn’t sing “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues.”
But he’s the first to admit he cashes in.
David Hajdu, the New Republic music critic, says the singer has always shown a tension between “not wanting to be a leader and wanting to be a celebrity.”
In Hajdu’s book, “Positively 4th Street,” Dylan is quoted saying that critics who charged that he’d sold out to rock ’n’ roll had it backward.
“I never saw myself as a folksinger,” he said. “They called me that if they wanted to. I didn’t care. I latched on, when I got to New York City, because I saw (what) a huge audience there was. I knew I wasn’t going to stay there. I knew it wasn’t my thing. ... I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.”
“Folk music,” he concluded, “is a bunch of fat people.”
He can’t really betray the spirit of the ’60s because he never had it. In his memoir, “Chronicles,” he stressed that he had no interest in being an anti-establishment Pied Piper and that all the “cultural mumbo jumbo” imprisoned his soul and made him nauseated.
“I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of,” he said.
He wrote that he wanted to have a house with a white picket fence and pink roses in back, live in East Hampton with his wife and pack of kids, eat Cheerios and go to the Rainbow Room and see Frank Sinatra Jr. perform.
“Whatever the counterculture was, I’d seen enough of it,” he wrote. He complained of being “anointed as the Big Bubba of Rebellion, High Priest of Protest, the Czar of Dissent."
Performing his message songs came to feel “like carrying a package of heavy rotting meat,” he wrote.
Hajdu told me that Dylan has distanced himself from his protest songs because “he’s probably aware of the kind of careerism that’s apparent in that work.” Dylan employed propaganda to get successful but knows those songs are “too rigidly polemical” to be his best work.
“Maybe the Chinese bureaucrats are better music critics than we give them credit for,” Hajdu said, adding that Dylan was now “an old-school touring pro” like Frank Sinatra Sr.
Sean Wilentz, the Princeton professor who wrote “Bob Dylan in America,” said that the Chinese were “trying to guard the audience from some figure who hasn’t existed in 40 years. He’s been frozen in aspic in 1963 but he’s not the guy in the work shirt and blue jeans singing ‘Masters of War.’ ”
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