Only a completely non-critical audience, nourished on the watery pap of pop music, could have fallen for such tenth-rate drivel.

If MacColl did indeed say that, and I have no reason to disbelieve the quote from Sing Out!, It is hardly being neutral. It may be of course that he was, as I mentioned earlier, trying to generate friction. If so, I don't know the motivation and it may have been a perfectly valid thing to do at the time.

But this thread is not Ewan MacColl's 50 greatest songs. It is Bob Dylan's. So how about we stick to that?