By the time it was announced that Dylan was going to do his Newsweek magazine-publicized first 1970s live concert tour in various U.S. cities, at venues like Madison Square Garden in Manhattan and at the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island, I had read Anthony Scaduto's earlier 1970s biography of Dylan, which had portrayed Dylan in a much less flattering way than nearly all of the many other biographical books about Dylan--written during the decades after he seemed to become one of the U.S. media conglomerates and U.S. Establishment's "court rock musicians" and "court singer-songwriter and court rock star aristocrats."
So I was not totally surprised when I heard that the apparently "on-the-make" careerist singer-songwriter who--who in his early 20's, during the early 1960s--had implied, in his writings and in the song lyrics of his, which Broadside magazine frequently published, that, like Woody Guthrie, he wasn't into money-making, was going to now require the U.S. music fans who wished to see him perform live again to pay an individual U.S. ticket price that was higher than U.S. music fans had then ever previously paid to see a live concert by any other 1960s or early 1970s U.S. folksinger, folk or rock singer-songwriter, folk group or rock group.
There was some speculation at the time that one of the reasons Dylan was requiring U.S. music fans to pay so much money for a ticket to one of his "comeback tour" live concerts--which were held not too long after the October 1973 Middle East War (in which the Egyptian government attempted to regain control of the Sinai Peninsula territory of Egypt that the Israeli military had illegally begun occupying following its surprise attack on Egypt which began the June 1967 Middle East War; and the Syrian government attempted to regain control of Syria's Golan Heights territory that Israeli's military also began illegally occupying in June 1967)--in order to provide the Zionist movement's regime in Palestine with some extra private funding to help pay for the cost of its October 1973 war actions.
And because there had also been some indication or speculation, during the early 1970s, that Dylan had become more sympathetic to the politics of the Zionist right-wing extremist JDL group--which Brooklyn's right-wing extremist Zionist Rabbi Kahane then led--and that Dylan falsely regarded the anti-imperialist, left-wing Black Panther Party [BPP] as "anti-semitic" (because the BPP supported the Palestinian people's national liberation struggle), a few Movement people did feel there was some actual basis for assuming Dylan's motive for his initial mid-1970s live concert tour was to raise funds for the Zionist groups or the Israeli government.
By the early 1980s--despite Dylan disillusioning some more of his audience members, after he seemed to identify himself as some kind of "born again" Christian for awhile--Dylan's more open support for the Zionist movement's state of Israel became more evident after he wrote and recorded his pro-Zionist "Neighborhood Bully" song during the months following the Israeli war machine's June 1982 invasion and accupation of Lebanon.
And by the 21st-century, Dylan's decision to give a live concert in Tel Aviv, despite the call by Palestinian solidarity movement activists for him to express support for their anti-apartheid BDS campaign, by refusing to perform there, seemed to make it even more obvious where Dylan's political sympathies lay, with respect to supporting or opposing the Palestinian national liberation movement's struggle in the Middle East.
But when I was publicity-clerkin' for New American Library in the 1970s while Dylan was making his U.S. corporate media-promoted initial "comeback tour," the fact that Dylan had apparently been sent to Zionist movement-oriented summer camps as an early teenager and--unlike most U.S. anti-imperialist left and Black Liberation Movement activists of the late 1960s--had apparently not begun to oppose Israeli militarism and support the Palestinian liberation movement, was not generally realized or known by most of the Movement people who felt Dylan had pretty much sold out to the hip capitalist Corporate Establishment by the mid-1970s.
