Twenty years later Dylan, the former Bob Zimmerman from Hibbing, Minnesota, who had been bar mitzvahed no less, turned his back onanother part of his identity, and became a Christian. Nonetheless, Sing Out! unceremoniously removed Dylanfrom its pantheon of folk heroes-and Dylan never looked back. Not to mention-hold onto your dulcimers-Appalachian ballad singer, Alameda Riddle. And guess who came to his defense? Johnny Cash, that’swho. Pete Seeger picked up his ax and threatenedto cut the mike cables.

Then in 1965 all hell broke loose at Newport when he traded his Gibson acousticfor a Fender Stratocaster and blasted out Maggie’s Farm with the backingof Paul Butterfield’s Blues Band. Dylan, once the hero of Sing Out! for reviving the art of protest songsfor a new generation, was just as vociferously condemned for turning inward andessentially moving from protest to poetry. First it was the formereditor of Sing Out!, Irwin Silber, who accused Dylan of selling out-by shifting from his Guthriesque persona and socially conscious protest songs towriting personal songs like Mr. Perlowin, Dylan has been down this road before,accused of selling out, of betraying his audience, his songs and his ideals, ofnot just compromising his principles but abandoning them altogether. To which Dylan calmly replied, “Man, I don’t believe you.” You may recall the famous scene captured in Martin Scorcese’s documentary No Direction Home of one irate British fan at the1966 Royal Albert Hall concert screaming at Dylan from the audience, “Judas!”presumably in response to Bob having gone electric at Newport the year beforeand now taking his new act on the road. Perlowin indicating howdisappointed in Bob he was and implicitly, by extension, me for not jumping on the Dylan as Judas bandwagon. When I replied with enthusiasm to Mike’s initial email and said, “Bravo for Pepsi”-for some lovely previously unseen early photos of Boband a perfect pitch soundtrack of Forever Young (sung by another artist), I received a follow-up phone message from Mr.

Again,it was not exactly the erstwhile troubadour of Masters of War and TheLonesome Death of Hattie Carroll. Then there was Victoria’s ecret, with images of Bob as the coolest looking Dirty Old Man cutting tolingerie-clad nubile models young enough to be his granddaughters who were dancing and prancing to his erotic song, To Make You Feel My Love. And before Kaiser the samehymn to social change was picked up by a Canadian bank, but mercifully nevermade it south of the border.

You may recall his previous forays into commercial song licensing: The Times, They Are a’ Changing was used as the sound track for a Kaiser Permanente commercial with the caption, “Be Your Own Cause”-not exactly the message we aging boomer former hippies and radicals associate with one of the classic protest songs of the modern era. The reason for Armageddon is inthe one-line text of message: “Bob Dylan appears in the new Pepsi commercial! “There was no Aesop’s Fable moral at the bottom, but it was clear enough without it: Bob Dylan has sold out (again). I got the following email from one of my column’s correspondents, pedal steel guitarist Mike Perlowin, with a one-line subject :It’s Over The World Has Come to an End.

Music pub pepsi