BEIJING, April 6, (Agencies): Counter-culture legend Bob Dylan made his long-awaited China debut Wednesday, finally getting approval to bring his charged songs of protest and struggle to a nation bent on quelling dissent.
Dylan played the Worker’s Gymnasium in central Beijing before heading to Shanghai on Friday and Hong Kong for two more shows next week — commemorating his first major performance on April 11, 1961 in New York, promoters said.
After Dylan was reportedly banned from playing here last year, China’s culture ministry said last month he could perform, but only “strictly according to an approved programme” — which means his songs will be vetted by censors.
Dylan is best known for the politically-inspired songs of his early career, including “The Times They Are A-Changin’” and his anti-war anthem “Blowin’ in the Wind”.
Wearing a grey panama hat and black suit, he switched between playing guitar, keyboards and harmonica in a blues-heavy set, getting especially loud cheers for his protest song “Hard Rain”.
“Bob Dylan is very famous in China, especially among music fans — his albums have been on sale here for years,” Zhou Yan, a spokeswoman for the promoters of the Beijing and Shanghai shows, told AFP.

Lukewarm
But for most of the show, the audience — mostly young Chinese and expatriates in their 50s — gave a lukewarm response and only about 80 percent of the seats were filled.
State media are widely covering Dylan’s concerts, with the current edition of the influential Lifeweek magazine running a cover story on the soon-to-be 70-year-old singer entitled “The Answer Is Still Blowin’ in the Wind”.
The article follows Dylan’s career as a folk singer influenced by Woody Guthrie and continues through his influential role in the American civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam war era in the 1960s.
“Bob Dylan is playing in Beijing, an iconic voice of dissent in a nation that values harmony,” the English-language Global Times said in its take on the singer’s appearance.
“The subject of Dylan’s songs, from drugs to racial equality to human dignity to war, are not on the radar of the average Chinese person.”
An eight-page article on Dylan in the Beijing News on Wednesday documented the singer’s failed attempt to perform here last year, while naming other “counter-culture” rock bands who have been banned in China.
Chinese authorities are widely presumed to be squeamish about Western rock and its counter-culture references to politics and sex.

Also:
TORONTO: Former French rock star Bertrand Cantat has landed a controversial live theater gig in Montreal after serving four years in prison for the 2003 beating death of his actress girlfriend.
The former lead singer of the French rock band Noir Desir is to play a singer in a classical Greek play at Le Theater du Nouveau Monde in May 2012.
“We are aware that Bernard Cantat is a controversial figure, but we believe that he has paid for what he did,” Lorraine Pintal, the theater’s director, told La Presse newspaper on Tuesday.
News of Cantat’s hire brought immediate condemnation from womens’ rights groups.
“We are quite perplexed about this choice,” Manon Monastesse, director of a consortium of 37 women’s shelters in Quebec, told the Canadian Press news service.
Cantat was released from prison in 2008 after serving half of an eight-year sentence for manslaughter. He maintained that the fatal blow that cost popular actress Marie Trintignant her life had been an accident.