Knowing my interest in all things Bob Dylan, a friend sent me an article recently penned by Maureen Dowd, columnist for the New York Times. It had to do with the maestro’s recent (and unprecedented) appearance in China, but it was far from an encomium. Dowd took Bob Dylan sharply to task for caving in to the Communist authorities, apparently agreeing to their demands not to sing any of his best-known anti-war and counter-cultural anthems from the sixties: “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” etc. How unlike the courageous young Dylan, she opined, who walked off the Ed Sullivan Show when the censors told him he couldn’t sing “Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues,” a rather biting satire of the right-wing extremist group. Then again, she went on, didn’t Dylan himself, in his much-lauded autobiography Chronicles Vol. I, not admit that he was never much for the sixties counter-culture and that he never sought to be the voice of a generation? Wasn’t this latest episode not just one more indication that the “real” Dylan was but a conventional entertainer, willing to go along with anyone or adopt any style in order to make money?