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 (11)

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.  

Publicity Clerkin' At New American Library Revisited (10)

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.

Publicity Clerkin' At New American Library Revisited (9)

During the same 1970s period when, in my 20's, I was living near the pre-gentrified Brooklyn waterfront in Red Hook and working as a publicity clerk at New American Library, the by-then over 30-year-old Bob "Dylan" Zimmerman--after having pretty much stopped performing any live concert tours within U.S. imperialist society (while the U.S. war machine's attack on Vietnam escalated) when some of his early 1960s initial fans booed him at his 1965 and 1966 live concerts, for seeming to become more commercially-oriented and less Movement-oriented than he had previously been--began his new career as a "never-ending tour" performer.

Not surprisingly, by the time Dylan began performing live again and began his "never-ending tour," Establishment corporate media magazines (like the then-CIA-linked Washington Post Company's Newsweek magaine--which had published an unflattering article about Dylan over a decade before, when his songs were reflecting the concerns of U.S. New Left Movement groups) no longer viewed Dylan as being an anti-Establishment artist.

So in the 1970s the U.S. Establishment promoted Dylan's initial 1970s "comeback tour" by putting his photo on the cover of Newsweek magazine; and, at the same time, Newsweek published a flattering article about Dylan which publicized his initial 1970s live concert tour.

Between 1966 and his initial mid-1970s U.S. concert tour, Dylan could be seen performing live on television in front of Johnny Cash's tv show audience. But--aside from performing at a live concert paying tribute to Woody Guthrie at Carnegie Hall in January 1968 (after Woody's death in 1967), performing before a large audience at the Isle of Wight festival in the UK in 1969 and performing live at the 1971 Bangladesh benefit concert that George Harrison arranged--U.S. music fans had not been able to see Dylan performing live in front of them.

And between 1966 and his initial 1970s "never-ending concert tour" performance, the only new protest folk song Dyland had written that reflected a political issue that concerned most Movement people was the "George Jackson" song. But Dylan's "George Jackson" song was only written after one of the corporate media conglomerate book publishing subsidiaries had previously published George Jackson's Soledad Brother book, only after George Jackson's brother, Jonathan Jackson had been killed and Angela Davis had been arrested, and only after George Jackson was killed.

In addition, Dylan had only written the "George Jackson" song after the A.J. Weberman-led Dylan Liberation Front/Rock Liberation Front (which ex-Beatles member John Lennon supported for awhile) and Abbie Hoffman began criticizing Dylan for not writing new protest songs anymore and characterizing Dylan as a "cultural rip-off artist" who had personally enriched himself by ripping off the 1960s Movement counter-culture and collaborating with the U.S. establishment's CBS media conglomerate's hip capitalist Columbia Records subsidiary.

And only after A.J. Weberman's critique of Dylan's post-1966 political/artistic shift and money-making began to appear in publications like the East Village Other underground newspaper, the Yipster Times, the Village Voice, and even Rolling Stone magazine, as well as being increasingly discussed over some NYC radio stations like WBAI, did Dylan write and record the "George Jackson" song.

So because Dylan didn't write any song and release his record related to George Jackson's unjust imprisonment until after George Jackson was already killed, some Movement music fans speculated that Dylan mainly wrote the "George Jackson" song to try to minimize the growing number of people who were starting to agree with A.J. Weberman's early 1970s East Village Other articles, which were then-arguing that Dylan had sold out politically and artistically to the U.S. corporate Establishment.