portrait of this blog's author - by Stephen Blackman 2008

Saturday, June 25, 2011

My favourite boot site, Big O, have the Bob Dylan Beijing Concert that there was SO much fuss about and it's really worth a try....I will put this over on my Dylan page in good time but for now it's here on Big O

Bob in Beijing @ Big O


 Beijing, China
Workers Gymnasium
April 6, 2011

1. Gonna Change My Way Of Thinking
(Bob on keyboard, Donnie on lap steel)
2. It's All Over Now, Baby Blue (Bob on guitar, Donnie on pedal steel)
3. Beyond Here Lies Nothin' (Bob on guitar, Donnie on trumpet)
4. Tangled Up In Blue
(Bob center stage on harp, Donnie on pedal steel, Stu on acoustic guitar)
5. Honest With Me (Bob on keyboard, Donnie on lap steel)
6. Simple Twist Of Fate (Bob on guitar, Donnie on pedal steel)
7. Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum (Bob on guitar, Donnie on pedal steel)
8. Love Sick (Bob on keyboard, Donnie on electric mandolin)
9. Rollin' And Tumblin' (Bob on keyboard)
10. A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall (Bob on keyboard, Donnie on electric mandolin)
11. Highway 61 Revisited
(Bob on center stage on harp then keyboard, Donnie on lap steel)
12. Spirit On The Water
(Bob on keyboard and harp, Donnie on pedal steel, Tony on standup bass)
13. Thunder On The Mountain (Bob on keyboard, Donnie on lap steel)
14. Ballad Of A Thin Man (Bob center stage on harp, Donnie on lap steel)


(1st encore)
15. Like A Rolling Stone (Bob on keyboard, Donnie on pedal steel)
16. All Along The Watchtower (Bob on keyboard then guitar, Donnie on lap steel)
(2nd encore)
17. Forever Young (Bob on keyboard and harp, Donnie on pedal steel)


 and just to add the 'final' word (sic!) from the Bobster hisself about all that nonsense and I got this from the wonderful DylanNL who should have the Feis 2011 Finsbury gig anyday now unless anyone knows otherwise.........this is the master from Bob Dylan.com

What we would never have believed, did happen Dylan himself (or his management) did react on the Chinese rumors on dylan.com:

"To my fans and followers
Allow me to clarify a couple of things about this so-called China controversy which has been  going on for over a year. First of all, we were never denied permission to play in China. This was all drummed up by a Chinese promoter who was trying to get me to come there after playing Japan and Korea. My guess is that the guy printed up tickets and made promises to certain groups without any agreements being made. We had no intention of playing China at that time, and when it didn't happen most likely the promoter had to save face by issuing statements that the Chinese Ministry had refused permission for me to play there to get himself off the hook. If anybody had bothered to check with the Chinese authorities, it would have been  clear that the Chinese authorities were unaware of the whole thing.

We did go there this year under a different promoter. According to Mojo magazine the concerts were attended mostly by ex-pats and there were a lot of empty seats. Not true. If anybody wants to check with any of the concert-goers they will see that it was mostly Chinese young people that came. Very few ex-pats if any. The ex-pats were mostly in Hong Kong not Beijing. Out of 13,000 seats we sold about 12,000 of them, and the rest of the tickets were given away to orphanages. The Chinese press did tout me as a sixties icon, however, and posted my picture all over the place with Joan Baez, Che Guevara, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. The concert attendees probably wouldn't have known about any of those people. Regardless, they responded enthusiastically to the songs on my last 4 or 5 records. Ask anyone who was there. They were young and my feeling was that they wouldn't have known my early songs anyway.

As far as censorship goes, the Chinese government had asked for the names of the songs that I would be playing. There's no logical answer to that, so we sent them the set lists from the previous 3 months. If there were any songs, verses or lines censored, nobody ever told me  about it and we played all the songs that we intended to play.

Everybody knows by now that there's a gazillion books on me either out or coming out in the near future. So I'm encouraging anybody who's ever met me, heard me or even seen me, to get in on the action and scribble their own book. You never know, somebody might have a great book in them.
" 
Bob Dylan


.............oh! they have a boot from a band called The Beatles too.....I hadn't got this one.........so


The Beatles - Off White

It's from the ubiquitous Philip Cohen who says......"here’s another bootleg of 1968 demos from George Harrison’s house in Esher." - Philip Cohen
Big O says.....
If the Twickenham sessions in 1969 were abrasive, these demos, a year earlier, showed the good natured side of The Beatles with Paul McCartney’s demo of Goodbye (for Mary Hopkin) sounding precious even. With Child Of Nature sung to the tune of Jealous Guy, and a sun-soaked feel to Honey Pie, these tracks are both heart-warming and nostalgic.


 Enjoy! 
I'll be back with more geniuine stuff from the Swappster vaults soon...........there's a Dylan StewART compilation to start with...over on the Bobby page but I'm not yet back in the total swing....


Meanwhile, to paraphrase my beloved Sir Stanley Unwin and The Small Faces Ogden's 
"Stay Cool won't you?"

1 comment:

sealy said...

You are keeping a very high standard of music and related prose here Mr. Swappers. Thanks to you for good reading and good listening