By the time Dylan decided to charge inflated prices for his initial 1970s live concerts, the post-World War II period of relative economic affluence for large numbers of U.S. white working-class baby-boomers had begun to end, gasoline for U.S. automobiles no longer only cost 30 cents a gallon and the Nixon-Henry Kissinger administration was (despite signing a peace agreement with North Vietnam's government in early 1973--after bombing civilian targets in Hanoi during the Christmas 1972 season, while Joan Baez was visiting there on a peace mission) continuing to prolong the Vietnam War by shipping weapons to its puppet Thieu regime in South Vietnam, in an attempt to prevent a military victory by South Vietnam's National Liberation Front [NLF].
And, in addition, despite signing its 1973 agreement which promised that the U.S. government would pay reparations to the North Vietnamese government for all the destruction and deaths its post-1954 military intervention in Vietnam--in violation of the 1954 Geneva Accords--had caused, the Nixon administration was still refusing to begin paying the reparations it had promised to pay.
Yet, as a result of the late 1960s and early 1970s COINTELPRO and FBI political repression that was authorized by both the Democratic Johnson administration and the GOP Nixon-Kissinger administration, by the time Dylan launched his first mid-1970s live concert tour, 1960s Movement groups that had attempted to create Freedom Now!, Black Power! or a Black Revolution in the USA had generally been either destroyed, forced underground or split-up into competing factions; or else, forced to shift politically into a less revolutionary direction during the 1970s. And, by the mid-1970s, the Movement groups that had worked to create an end to U.S. imperialist military intervention overseas and to create a democratized affluent society in the USA, in which U.S. working-class youth of all racial backgrounds would be free of 9-to-5 wage slavery in the 1970s, had generally suffered a similar fate, to some degree.
In addition, by the mid-1970s, many Movement people and post-World War II baby-boomers had begun to realize that U.S. hip capitalists (like Rolling Stone magazine publisher Jann Wenner, etc.) were apparently ripping-off and marketing for personal, individual profit much of the hip counter-culture and hip lifestyle alternative ideas that had been developed collectively by hip Movement, underground newspaper journalists and counter-cultural people of all racial backgrounds during the 1960s.
So what 1970s Movement folks like me considered most culturally distasteful about what Dylan appeared to be up to during his initial 1970s live concert tour was that--despite the early 1960s protest and topical folk songs he had written--the now over-thirty-year-old Dylan seemed to have turned into just another ageing, money-grubbing, hip capitalist entertainer who was into crass commercialism.
And in the 1970s, Dylan seemed to be now using his celebrity and media-reinforced hype to rip-off more money from the U.S. youth market of music fans, by now charging more for his live rock concert tickets than any U.S. rock star had previously charged. Instead of, for example, just doing a series of live concerts in the USA, on a non-profit basis, in which U.S. music fans could obtain concert tickets for free, or for only a minimal ticket price.
