Back in the late oughts, Bob Dylan decided to do a theme-based old-time-radio-type radio show. It’s commercial-free and after listening to three shows, I had previously heard only one of the songs. I like almost all the songs he plays. Lots of American roots music, blues, old-timey country, big-band, novelty songs, and even some reggae.
And most of the music is made for travelin’.
The show spanned 2006-2009. He chooses a theme, and then plays records based on that theme. With some descriptions, trivia, history, etc. on each song or artist.
Weather, Jail, Dogs, Mothers, Coffee, Divorce……….
He even plays voicemails from Tom Waits, and other assorted goodies.
It’s something you can put on for an hour, and ease your travelin’ troubles.
101 episodes in all.
Some links to where you can listen:
podcasts.apple.com/...
open.spotify.com/…
podbay.fm/…
www.listennotes.com/…
There’s even a 2-cd set of some of the songs he has played: www.amazon.com/…
This is a letter Bob got, where he explains what he’s aiming to do with his show:
“The mail car’s pullin’ into the station now. That means we have to check our email. This email comes from Christine Rydell………she writes ‘Dear Theme Time, here is my question: Do you really pull all the selections from your own personal collection, or is that just a tale-tale?’
“Well you know Christine, these are all my own records. I keep them in various places. I like to hear music wherever I am. I wish I got more letters like this one, though. Sometimes we get a lot of people makin’ requests. I got nothin’ against requests. But sometimes I get the feelin’ that people are just requesting records from their own collections. I never understood that. I mean if you got the record, you don’t need me to play it. One of the things we try to do at Theme Time Radio Hour, is shine the light on folks that don’t get a lot of radio play. We’re not gonna play the songs you hear everywhere else. Maybe once in a while we will, but the point is, if you want to hear your record collection, play your records. And if you wanna hear your collection on the radio, git yourself a radio show………..that’s what I did.
Here’s a review of the show from a musician and writer, Damon Krukowski:
BOB DYLAN’S THEME TIME RADIO HOUR
BOB DYLAN KNOWS a lot of songs. His own extensive—and wordy—catalogue aside, the covers he performed live between 1988 and 2000 alone take up nine CDs. This is nothing new—Dylan has been absorbing everyone else’s repertoire since before his 1962 debut album, Bob Dylan, which combined songs and arrangements he had learned from Eric von Schmidt, Dave Van Ronk, and others. In the oral history of the folk revival Baby, Let Me Follow You Down, von Schmidt describes a typical visit from Dylan back in the day: “He wasn’t much interested in playing; he wanted to listen. So I played. . . . It was something, the way he was soaking up material in those days—like a sponge and a half. Later somebody said, ‘Hey, Bob’s put one of your songs on his album.’”
Since May, Dylan has been using his preternatural memory in a new way, as DJ for a show on XM Satellite Radio,
Theme Time Radio Hour with Your Host Bob Dylan. Once a week, he draws on his wide and deep knowledge of American pop music for a show based around a theme such as weather, mothers, drinking, baseball, coffee. He introduces and comments on every track he plays, and he frequently quotes a line or two from the lyrics, which makes the fragment suddenly
sound like a Dylan song. Is it because of his wry rasp that these words sound like his own? Or maybe we are witnessing the sponge and a half in action: He might well be soaking up new material before our ears, collecting words and phrases and rhymes that will later reappear in his own music.
But on display in the XM show is not just Dylan the magpie who has stolen everyone’s riffs—there’s also Dylan the archivist and even theorist of Americana. This is Dylan as successor to Harry Smith, whose landmark three-volume Anthology of American Folk Music, issued in 1952, helped shape the folk revival, including Dylan’s own early songwriting. In Greil Marcus’s vivid phrase, the anthology projected an “old, weird America” into the Eisenhower years—an America that had all but ceased to exist, in Smith’s own reckoning, by 1932, the cutoff date for the recordings he included.
[….]
Probably the best description of the music on the show comes from Dylan’s memoir, Chronicles, Volume One (2004). Miserable during the New Orleans recording sessions for his 1989 album, Oh Mercy, Dylan consoled himself with the radio, which, he recalls, “filled me with inner peace and serenity and would upend all my frustration.” The music was exactly what Dylan plays on Theme Time Radio Hour: “Mostly early rhythm and blues and rural South gospel music . . . Wynonie Harris, Roy Brown, Ivory Joe Hunter, Little Walter, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Chuck Willis, all the greats. . . . There was a country radio station, too, that came on early, before daylight, that played all the ’50s songs, a lot of Western Swing stuff.” The New Orleans station WWOZ was, Dylan writes, “the kind of station I used to listen to late at night growing up, and it brought me back to the trials of my youth and touched the spirit of it.”
[...]
A musician and writer, Damon Krukowski is co-publisher of Exact Change.