The idea that the raspy troubadour of ’60s freedom anthems would go to a dictatorship and not sing those anthems is a whole new kind of sellout — even worse than Beyoncé, Mariah and Usher collecting millions to croon to Qaddafi’s family, or Elton John raking in a fortune to serenade gay-bashers at Rush Limbaugh’s fourth wedding.

My response to Dowd and others expressing similar sentiments: Umm … did you guys just forget about the last 45 years or so?

Let’s put aside for a while the fact that “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They’re A-Changin’ ” have long stopped being a regular part of Dylan’s sets. As a big Dylan fan, it irks me when I see people still trying to define his career by his protest songs when in reality he only wrote protest songs for the first three or four years of his now 50-year career. Sure, it’s a testament to the timeless quality of those early songs. No one would deny that “Blowin’ in the Wind” or “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” (which, by the way, he did play in Beijing) or “The Times They’re A-Changin’ ” were and still are powerful songs whose words can still be applied to some aspect of some society somewhere in the world today. However, anybody who’s even just somewhat familiar with Dylan’s career surely must know about his famous shift away from political songs and his rift with the protest movement, which happened back in, oh, 1964. Yes, 1964 — 47 years ago, and just two years after the release of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan”, the album that made him a star on the folk scene and in the protest movement. In 1964, he released “The Times They’re A-Changin’ ” — the last of his protest-song albums — in January and then just seven months later released another album with the ever so slightly obvious title of “Another Side of Bob Dylan”, just in case anyone was missing the point of what they were hearing on that record.

Oh, and remember the hubbub when he went electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival? Yeah, talk about disillusionment. But at least back then Dylan’s folk/protest singer image was still fresh in everyone’s mind, so the feeling of betrayal is at least understandable. But this cry of “sellout” in 2011? It’s been more than four decades, people! Did you miss “Don’t Look Back”, the documentary that followed Dylan on his legendary 1965 England tour where he was called Judas for daring to “sell out” by playing half-acoustic, half-electric sets? Or “No Direction Home”, the 2005 documentary in which Dylan, and those who knew him, pretty much said he didn’t want to be a part of the protest movement.

Look, I like a lot of Dylan’s protest songs. Those were my initial exposure to Dylan back in college in the late 90s. I remember being knocked out by the lyrics and being amazed that these were written decades ago and yet still held such relevance and resonance in my time. I remember being wowed by the dark, dreary tone that permeates most of the songs on “The Times They’re A-Changin’ “, because many albums can make you happily tap your toes, but so few can make you fidget uncomfortably in your seat. I also remember popping “Bringing It All Back Home” into the CD player and then wondering “Where are the acoustic songs?” and skipping through the tracks on “Highway 61 Revisited” searching for a trace of his folk beginnings. But once I accepted the fact that Dylan had stopped writing those “finger-pointing songs” back in the mid-60s and started really exploring more of his later stuff (if you can call songs he started writing five years into a five-decade career “later”), I discovered a different — and in some ways greater — type of brilliance in those songs.

Dylan has gone through so many transformations over the course of his career, and I think that, much more than his explosion onto the scene as a folk/protest icon, is responsible for his remaining relevant as a musician over the decades. If he had simply remained a folk/protest singer, his relevance as a musician would have faded into the background like many of his peers from his folk-singing days. He has been many things in his career, but he hasn’t been a protest singer since the first few years of his career. I can understand someone in 1965 calling him a traitor to his status as an icon of the folk/protest movement, but when you are saying that in 2011, it just makes me scratch my head.

Oh, and while we’re at it, please stop quoting “Your old road is rapidly agin’ / Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand / For the times they are a-changin’ ” as a way to tell people to get the $&*@ out of your way because they disagree with some fabulous new idea to which you pray. Instead, consider that the kids who were singing that line back in the 60s are now the people on the receiving end of such sentiments. For me, therein lies the true brilliance of Dylan’s work. If you are looking for a Dylan song to quote, try looking one album down the list in Dylan’s discography. There you would find that he basically disavowed the black-and-white notions of his protest songs in the less-appreciated-but-perhaps-more-brilliant “My Back Pages“:

Crimson flames tied through my ears
Rollin’ high and mighty traps
Pounced with fire on flaming roads
Using ideas as my maps
“We’ll meet on edges, soon,” said I
Proud ’neath heated brow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now

Half-wracked prejudice leaped forth
“Rip down all hate,” I screamed
Lies that life is black and white
Spoke from my skull. I dreamed
Romantic facts of musketeers
Foundationed deep, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now

Girls’ faces formed the forward path
From phony jealousy
To memorizing politics
Of ancient history
Flung down by corpse evangelists
Unthought of, though, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now

A self-ordained professor’s tongue
Too serious to fool
Spouted out that liberty
Is just equality in school
“Equality,” I spoke the word
As if a wedding vow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now

In a soldier’s stance, I aimed my hand
At the mongrel dogs who teach
Fearing not that I’d become my enemy
In the instant that I preach
My pathway led by confusion boats
Mutiny from stern to bow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now

Yes, my guard stood hard when abstract threats
Too noble to neglect
Deceived me into thinking
I had something to protect
Good and bad, I define these terms
Quite clear, no doubt, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now

Again, this song was written back in 1964. How many years must a man tell you he’s not a protest singer before he’s allowed to not be a protest singer?

The marquee outside the Providence Performance Arts Center.

While in New England celebrating Christmas, we took in a performance of the musical “Wicked” at the Providence Performance Arts Center. The theater was opened in 1928, and everything about it, from the retro marquee out front to the ornate domed ceiling inside, bear proof of its age and history. One word of advice, though: If you go to see a show there in the winter, don’t bundle up too much. They seem to set the heat on full blast, and the seats are so close together that you have little room to put your outer layers of clothes after you shed them. Also, smuggle in your own beverage, unless you feel like paying for a $3.75 bottle of water (and considering the heat and the seeming lack of a water fountain, you’ll probably end up caving in and pony up the cash for it).

As for the show, the performance was outstanding. One amazing set followed another, and an impressive looking dragon hung over the stage the whole time (it wasn’t really part of the show, but was still cool nonetheless). The costumes were equally extravagant. The performers put on a strong display as well. We actually watched two understudies play the role of a couple of the main characters, and nothing about their performance tipped us off to that fact until we got home and read the program.

The musical’s shortcoming, however, lies with its all-too-predictable script. In essence, the story is a prequel and afterword to the “Wizard of Oz” and only touches on Dorothy in a few passing references. Instead, it focuses on the backstory of Elphaba (the Wicked Witch of the West) and Glinda (the Good Witch of the North), roommates at school who become friends and later enemies by the choices they make. However, it flips the roles and makes the traditional villain its heroine — a talented, good-hearted, but misunderstood outcast who takes a stand against an oppressive regime and pays the price. Most of the first half of the musical is a cross between Clueless or Legally Blond (with Glinda playing the Alicia Silverstone/Reese Witherspoon role) and a Kafka novel about state oppression. And as the story progresses, the Land of Oz is increasingly portrayed as a land of corruption, lies, propaganda, and oppression from a government that seems to be part Third Reich and part Bush regime.

While the message of the script — that we should question the actions of our government instead of living in blissful, willful ignorance — is admirable (if not a bit overdone), the way it is delivered leaves something to be desired. The message is hammered home in a blunt fashion that proves to be overly obvious at every turn. The fact that Elphaba is portrayed as just an outcast rather than evil at the outset tips you off right away that something’s not right in Oz, and you keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, and it doesn’t take long to figure out what that not-so-shocking revelation will be — well before it actually happens. The same holds true for most of the other plot twists, and a few minutes after intermission, you can probably figure out how the rest of the story will shake out. A the end, the script undermines the effect of the message it tried so hard to beat into our skulls by forcing a happy ending onto a story that wasn’t headed for one. And this certainly wasn’t done in the absurdist, escapism fashion ala “The Threepenny Opera“. Basically, if the story was portraying the Land of Oz as Nazi Germany, then the ending is telling us that all those who were sent to Auschwitz turned out fine.

Despite the flaws with the script, the performance of the cast and the impressive sets and costumes combined to deliver an entertaining couple of hours. Now, if only they didn’t try so hard to force-feed us a deep message in such a shallow manner …

My rating: 3.5 out of 5

From the article:

“I asked him what his name was and he said, ‘Bob Dylan,’ Buble said. “Now, I’ve seen pictures of Bob Dylan from a long time ago and he didn’t look like Bob Dylan to me at all. He was wearing black sweatpants tucked into black rain boots, and two raincoats with the hood pulled down over his head.

“So I said, ‘OK Bob, what are you doing in Long Branch?’ He said he was touring the country with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp. So now I’m really a little fishy about his story. I did not know what to believe or where he was coming from, or even who he was.

“We see a lot of people on our beat, and I wasn’t sure if he came from one of our hospitals or something,” Buble said.

Read the whole story, with a lot more details, at ABC News.

Now that I think about it, Dylan wasn’t exactly kind to the police force in the New Jersey town 50-some miles to the north of Long Branch in one of his songs:

Meanwhile, far away in another part of town
Rubin Carter and a couple of friends are drivin’ around.
Number one contender for the middleweight crown
Had no idea what kinda shit was about to go down
When a cop pulled him over to the side of the road
Just like the time before and the time before that.
In Paterson that’s just the way things go.
If you’re black you might as well not show up on the street
‘Less you wanna draw the heat.

Wonder what he’ll have to say about this little episode. The man did write “When the Ship Comes In” after being denied a hotel room because of his appearance. Of course, that was 40-some years ago.

There was just one slight problem, as John Robinson, the paper’s editor, pointed out on Twitter:

Cringe-inducing moment: we used a Fender Strat to illustrate Les Paul’s death.

In the paper’s defense, that’s kind of a tough one to catch unless you had someone who knew a Fender Strat from a Les Paul working on your design or copy desk. Heck, I play guitar a little bit, and I would’ve looked right past the promo and not noticed it. To the paper’s credit, they didn’t try to hide the error, since Robinson’s tweet is how I found out about it. And one of the good things about working at a newspaper is that you may have screwed up today, but you get to start with a clean slate tomorrow (and a chance to make all new screwups).

I was literally left speechless. I shudder to think about how this abomination wrecks Dylan’s other masterpieces. Seriously, clowns humping exercise balls? And I love how literal their interpretation of the song was. There’s a line in there about clowns? Let’s put in a troupe of dancing clowns. The song is called “Like a Rolling Stone”? Let’s roll some big exercise balls around. This is the antithesis of Dylan. Ironically, this performance would’ve made an amazing satire of a bad interpretation of a Dylan song, like something you might see on Saturday Night Live. The critics agreed on this butchering of the bard’s work. Well, all except for Rosie O’Donnell and the studio audience on The View, who burst into thunderous applause at the end of the clip above, punctuated by a “Wow!” from Rosie. Wow indeed. I think this response from Craig Ferguson sums it up pretty well:

We took in the Friday night, July 31, performance. With both the plot and the songs being such familiar subject matters, we were able to simply sit back and enjoy, and there was much to like:

• Kate Fisher did a terrific job as Maria, not only in her singing but also with her interpretation of the character, which was pretty similar to Julie Andrew’s portrayal in the movie.
• The von Trapp children, all played by kids from Raleigh, were adorable. The “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” number between Liesl and Rolf was very charming.
• The dance sequence between the captain and Maria, one of my favorite scenes since the first time I saw the movie, was pulled off very well in a small space, and the orchestra’s rendition of “Ländler” was perfect.
• The sets were very well designed, ranging from beautiful backdrops of the Alps to a simple but effective setup for the monastery.



• The biggest and most pleasant surprise of the night was the performance of the of nuns. The chorus wowed the audience time and again, while Suzanne Ishee (right), in her role as Mother Abbess, stole the show, brought down the house, and left a ringing in our ears with her rendition of “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” just before intermission.

I did have a few nitpicking complaints, though most of them are about the differences between the musical and the movie versions rather than about the production of the musical:

• The movie made various plot tweaks, and I feel that those changes resulted in a better story than the original plot of the musical.
  • In the musical, Maria sings “Do Re Mi” to the children basically right after she arrives at the family’s mansion, while in the movie the song doesn’t take place until later on — after she and the children have bonded. The musical’s plot feels more awkward on this point, as you have the children talking about their dislike of governesses one moment but then immediately warming up to Maria through the song.
  • In the movie, the baroness makes Maria confront the fact that she’s in love with the captain, while in the musical, it was Brigitta, the captain’s daughter. The lines, however, just sound too worldly for a 10-year-old, however smart and observant she may be. In addition, having the baroness deliver those lines to Maria, which results in the latter leaving the mansion, adds to the tension between the characters.
• Captain von Trapp in the musical, played by Tom Galantich, lacked the subtle sense of humor that Christopher Plummer injected into the character in the movie. While the character in both versions is strict, Plummer’s version definitely displays a wry wit, even in the early parts of the movie, that makes his later transformation seem more plausible. The captain in the musical,  however, is more or less a humor-less figure and comes off as kind of pompous. As a result, the alteration in his attitude feels forced.
• “No Way to Stop It”, the song performed by Max and the baroness, just didn’t seem to fit. Yes, part of it is probably because that song was removed in the movie version, but the song itself seemed out of place even in the musical, imparting an almost menacing feel and a more contemporary sound in contrast to the sweet and charming nature of the other numbers.

According to undercover.com.au, Bob Dylan has a new album on the way. The site cites Dylan fan site bobdylanisis.com for the news.

Being an avid Dylan fan, this is of course music to my ears. I loved his last studio album, “Modern Times”. As is always the case with Dylan, you just never know what direction he will take with the new album, but as is often the case with Dylan, it’ll be something I enjoy.