Sunday, June 26, 2022

Publicity Clerkin' At New American Library Revisited (13)

 A final response of mine to hearing about Dylan's initial 1970s "comeback tour" was to take a Long Island Railroad train out to the Nassau Coliseum, on the evening that Dylan was performing live on Long Island and charging the inflated concert ticket price, to see if any Yipster Times readers or Dylan Liberation Front/Rock Liberation Front supporters--who also felt that some hip capitalists were individually enriching themselves by being involved in youth cultural rip-off activity and collaboration with music industry media conglomerates that economically exploited and politically manipulated U.S. music fans and the U.S. youth market--would be protesting there.

But when I arrived outside the Nassau Colisuem, as mostly white middle-class and white upper middle-class suburbanite post-1966 Dylan fans were walking towards and through the concert arena's doors, the only sign of any protest I noticed was a Yipster Times writer named Aron passing out a leaflet in the arena's parking lot.

The leaflet included a photocopied image of a check from CBS to Bob Dylan for $80,000 [equal to around $482,000 in 2022]; which seemed to indicate that in the mid-1970s Dylan was apparently collecting over 10 times as much money each month from the CBS media conglomerate as the vast majority of mid-1970s freaks and U.S. music fans were able to earn in a year, at whatever menial, straight 9-to-5 wage enslavement job (like the publicity clerk job at New American Library that I then had) they were trapped in during the mid-1970s.

And the leaflet the Yipster Times writer was attempting to distribute pointed out that, with that kind of money already passing into Dylan's 1970s bank account from CBS on a regular basis, there was no economic justification, other than hip capitalist individual greed, for Dylan to be charging his fans so much money for tickets to his initial live concerts in the mid-1970s.

After I said a few words of encouragement to the Yipster Times writer when he handed me the leaflet, he, alone, continued to hand out his leaflets to as many of the post-1966 Dylan fans as he could encounter, before they marched into the Nassau Coliseum.

Standing alone myself in front of the entrance to the Nassau Coliseum, I observed, for awhile, how the suburban music fans reacted when they were handed the leaflet.  And I noticed that Aron wasn't receiving much of a response, one way or the other, from the music fans who accepted the leaflets he handed to them.

So I concluded that the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island was too far from Manhattan neighborhoods like the Lower East Side and the Upper West Side for there to be any chance that any protest would develop outside or inside the live Dylan concert on Long Island to express dissatisfaction with the inflated ticket prices Dylan was now charging his music fans.

So when the number of young music fans heading into the Dylan concert began to decrease, I began the long walk alone from the Nassau Coliseum to the Long Island Railroad station to catch the train that would take me back to Brooklyn.  And on the train, I re-read the leaflet the Yipster Times writer had handed me in the Nassau Colisuem parking lot.

But when Dylan performed live in Manhatttan's Madison Square Garden a few days later, some counter-cultural Movement people apparently did appear in larger numbers outside Madison Square Garden to express their dissatisfaction with the ticket prices Dylan was charging for his "comeback tour" performance there. 

Publicity Clerkin' At New American Library Revisited: Conclusion

In 1970 the "titles of current interest" of books whose paperback editions the New American Library [NAL] firm was then interested...