Bob Dylan performed in Beijing Wednesday night. Photo: AFP
After a year of rumors, finger pointing and conspiracy theories, it finally happened. Bob Dylan, the man who shook the music and political establishment folk half a century ago, played Beijing’s Workers’ Gymansium on Wednesday, marking his China debut with a near- packed house.
Ever since hints of the tour dates surfaced last year, the media has salivated over Dylan’s arrival, focusing mainly on the thunder rather than the lightning. Journalistic daydreams about Dylan resuscitating political leanings with opinions on subjects ranging from Ai Weiwei to Chinese youth were echoed by respected outlets such as the BBC and Reuters.
Tangled up in Beijing
Seasoned reporters might have guessed that an old hand like Dylan would play it by the book in the event, sticking to his Ministry of Culture-approved set list and, apart from introducing his band, saying practically nothing during a two-hour, monologue-free performance.”His people are not even letting photographers get close,” Li Bin, a spokesman for promoters Live Nation, told the Global Times the day of the show. “They’re concerned about image rights.”
Perhaps Dylan’s management had forgotten where they were; An hour prior to the show, vendors outside Worker’s Stadium were busy hocking pirated T-shirts, lyric sheets and postcards, all marked with the – assuredly unlicensed – familiar visage. Dylan.
“Yeah, I know who Bob Dylan is,” said one T-vendor, looking at Dylan’s portrait outside the Gymnasium gate in hat and pencil-thin moustache. “He’s from France.”
For many of those in the acoustic nightmare that is Worker’s Stadium, Dylan might as well have been French. But even as the muddy bass and rack toms rattled the (relatively) cheap seats and drowned out much of Dylan’s already frail diction, the legend delivered a set evenly split between his early catalog and latest decade’s material.
Slow-going in the wind
Performing with his long-time musicians, including bassist Tony Gardiner, Charlie Sexton on lead and Donnie Herron on pedal steel, the guitar-heavy quintet saw Dylan fluidly bouncing from organ on opener “Gonna Change My Way of Thinking” to guitar for “Beyond Here Lies Nothin.’”
However, even a soulful rendition of the widely covered “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” saw the crowd seemingly adrift in sub-cheer, a common syndrome of concertgoers looking only for the classics.
“What are these songs? They all sound the same,” complained a middle-aged man within earshot and apparently tone-deaf. “I don’t recognize anything. Where’s ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’?”
It wasn’t until Dylan jumped to ‘Tangled Up In Blue’ from 1975 classic Blood on the Tracks that saw the first (slight) rise out of the audience. The mild gravel in Dylan’s ripened vocals has since turned to boulders, which brought new life to the tune, while Dylan’s dirty harmonica brought those in the VIP section to their feet.
The stands lulled again during “Simple Twist of Fate” and a gritty blues rendition of “Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum” and soon Dylan had to bring out the defibrillator: “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” which resulted in a faint echo of a sing-a-long.
From this point on, the list was triumphant – organ solo on “Highway 61 Revisited,” upright bass for “Spirit On The Water” and a supernatural rendition of “Ballad Of A Thin Man” filled with lilting organ and harmonica, which the crowd answered with its first heartfelt salvo of praise.
Paying for tix
“This is probably the last time he’ll ever come to Beijing, and it’s the message he wants to leave behind,” said 29-year-old Gin Liu of encore “Forever Young” after the show. “It’s a way to tell everyone here that Dylan’s spirit will remain forever young.”
But outside, things seemed different with many locals are left at the gate due to high ticket prices. Beijing folk musician Maizi, known for his own Dylanesque poetic verse and raw acoustic guitar. walked from his home nearby with the hope he could sneak in but the cheapest price a scalper could offer was 550 yuan.
“Dylan’s music is humble and honest, and the folk he plays has roots in the people, the music of the working classes,”
Maizi noted. “But then, look at his ticket prices. It seems like those people who love him the most can’t afford to see him.”
For those who had the cash, the music transcended politics and sensitivity. “Does he really need to represent anything?” asked Coco, a hardcore 60s music lover who shelled out nearly 2,000 yuan for VIP tickets. “The times they are a-changing, anyway. He represents good music, how about that?”
