VA - Theme Time Radio Hour With Your Host Bob Dylan (2008)

50 songs and 75 years of musical dreams, schemes and themes drawn from the first series of the highly acclaimed Theme Time Radio Hour with your host, Bob Dylan. This fully authorised release is packaged with a 48 page booklet.
What, I wonder, do we dream of when we dream of Bob Dylan? And, more intriguingly, what does Bob Dylan dream of when he dreams of us? This is what I think: he dreams of a small boy called Robert who lives in a small city, an industrial centre in a rural landscape. It’s a nowhere town that was once called Alice but had its name changed when an enormous hole was dug where its new name used to be. That giant hole was – and still is – the biggest of its kind in the world, an open-cast iron mine.

It’s a place that seems to doze on the periphery but is, in fact, also surprisingly at the heart of things. When Robert was growing up, it had the most lavishly appointed high school auditorium in the whole country. He played there, in a rock’n’roll band.

It’s the head point for the drainages to three great seas, the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans. Swim up any of the great rivers of the eastern United States (Canada, too) and it’s where you’ll end up, like a salmon returning to spawn.

It’s where the Greyhound Bus company was founded and headquartered for many years. It sits between the two great spinal cords of the continent – to the west, the eternal geographical one, the Mississippi River, to the east, the old national one, Highway 61.

Here, young Robert took in all the musics that swam to him up all those rivers, that spilled out of all those long-haul buses, that drifted up the great natural wonder that the Cheyenne called Big Greasy River – and the first European to see it called the River of the Holy Ghost.

Blues and folk and country and R&B, that’s what Robert’s dreams were made of. And I think he had a dream of a radio dee-jay out there somewhere, distant enough to be mythic, close enough to be real. This dee-jay would play records for Robert and his imaginary friends. He’d link song with song, mixing and matching and combining and recombining them. It’d be a bridal outfit of a radio show: something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. And the dee-jay would tell stories to go with the songs: about them, inspired by them, around them.

In dreams begin responsibilities, wrote Delmore Schwartz, poet, drunk, Lou Reed’s teacher. And so Robert eventually became his own dream, hosting Theme Time Radio Hour, week in, week out. Last time, I looked there had been 69 shows. I’ve got them all in my iTunes and so, whenever I shuffle-play, I’ll always hear Bob Dylan’s voice, reading me a Robert Frost poem or making one of those wry digs he makes every time he plays a Beatles track. It’s strange: one of the most elusive of performers now shares his thoughts with me on an almost daily basis.

Theme Time Radio Hour is the mix-tapes collection we’ve all dreamed of making. It’s both a taxonomy and a topography of 20th century popular musics. Not all of them, it’s true. There’s no Charles Trenet, say. No Abba, either. But Grandpa Jones is there. Jack Teagarden, Charles Mingus, the Donays and the White Stripes, too. The show is always as happy to let songs collide and divorce as it is following them up the aisle or encouraging them to cuddle up in bed together.

Dylan (and his collaborators, I guess) approach 20th century pop the way 18th century naturalists figured out how tomatoes are related to tobacco and where swallows go to in the winter. Making sense of things nearly always involves categorising them somehow.

As these things do, it started with life’s basics, things like Weather, Mother, Father. And it’s pretty much stuck with the everyday: School, Sleep, Food, Tears. It’s addressed life’s two great certainties, Death and Taxes – though not yet the third, Nurses. It’s travelled a bit: Tennessee, New York. It’s even found space for a little product placement: Cadillac.

Roger Armstrong (and his collaborators, I should imagine) have taken this great, ongoing taxonomic and topographic project and refined it down into an elegant precis of the original. A taxonomy of a taxonomy, a topography of a topography. I found myself thinking about something I was told only recently: that any chip of any diamond will always be a mini-version of the whole diamond, a microcosm of all its glories.

So this double CD, too, takes and shakes the everyday world, raising all kinds of new questions and notions along the way. Listen – carefully or lightly, or both – and you find new thoughts on something as old and universal as the Heart (show 41, Billie Holiday’s Good Morning Heartache) or the potential erotogenic symbolism of Musical Instruments (show 37, Dinah Washington’s Big Long Slidin’ Thing) or the relationship between family life, heredity and alcoholic Drink (show 3, Mary Gauthier’s I Drink).

Then there’s the two versions – one black, one white – of Pistol Packin’ Mama (show 25, Guns). They got me thinking afresh about what really is one of pop’s oddest megahits. It had a 15-year run as a scene-maker, from around the time the time the world went to war to the time Elvis went into the army. Maybe there’s another song recorded by both Bing Crosby (plus Andrews Sisters) and Gene Vincent (plus Blue Caps). I never heard it.

If it weren’t for the jauntiness and accordion of Al Dexter’s original, I’d have realised long ago that it’s a pop musical parallel to the same period’s film noir, with the same anxieties about women’s new place in a new world (and the bedroom). Personally, I see Joan Crawford in the lead, reprising her role in Mildred Pierce, only with a blam-blam-blam in every hand, as Dylan put it in John Wesley Harding.

A fast dance tune about sex and violence, drink, guns and girls that ends with the singer’s murder. If you can’t find your own dreams, schemes and themes in there somewhere, I doubt you’re human.

by Peter Silverton

Tracklist
Disc 1
1. Grandpa Jones – Turn Your Radio On
2. Leroy Carr & Scrapper Blackwell – Papa's On The Housetop
3. Paul Chaplain And His Emeralds – Shortnin' Bread
4. The White Stripes – Seven Nation Army
5. The Valentines – Gun Fever (Blam Blam Fever)
6. Al Dexter And His Troopers – Pistol Packin' Mama
7. The Hurricanes – Pistol Packin' Mama
8. Otis Rush – Homework
9. Jerry Butler – He Will Break Your Heart
10. Eddie Noack – Take It Away Lucky
11. Betty Hall Jones – Buddy, Stay Off The Wine
12. Charlie Rich – Tears A Go-Go
13. Li'L Millet & His Creoles – Rich Woman
14. Ernie Chaffin – Laughin' & Jokin'
15. Memphis Minnie – Me And My Chauffeur Blues
16. The Stanley Brothers – If I Lose
17. Jimmy Nelson – I Sat And Cried
18. Patsy Raye & The Beatniks – Beatnik's Wish
19. The Donays – Devil In His Heart
20. George Jones & Melba Montgomery – Let's Invite Them Over
21. Sister Rosetta Tharpe & The Sam Price Trio – Don't Take Everybody To Be Your Friend
22. Billie Holiday – Good Morning Heartache
23. James Carr – Pouring Water On A Drowning Man
24. Mary Gauthier – I Drink
25. Memphis Slim – Mother Earth

Disc 2
1. Aretha Franklin – Chain Of Fools
2. Joe South And The Believers – Walk A Mile In My Shoes
3. Alton Ellis & The Flames – Cry Tough
4. The Clash – Tommy Gun
5. Roy Montrell – (Every Time I Hear) That Mellow Saxophone
6. Patrice Holloway – Those DJ Shows
7. Lonnie "The Cat" – I Ain't Drunk
8. Charles Mingus – Eat That Chicken
9. Bobby Peterson Quintet – Mama, Get Your Hammer
10. Slim Gaillard – How High The Moon
11. The Sons Of The Pioneers – Cool Water
12. Geraint Watkins – Only A Rose
13. Berna-Dean – I Walk In My Sleep
14. Jack Teagarden's Chicagoans – Stars Fell On Alabama
15. Merle Haggard – Mama Tried
16. Dinah Washington – Big Long Slidin' Thing
17. Bobby Darin – Black Coffee
18. The Cats And The Fiddle – I'd Rather Drink Muddy Water
19. George Zimmeran, The Thrills & The Bubber Cyphers Band – Ain't Got The Money To Pay For This Drink
20. The Yayhoos – Bottle And A Bible
21. Jimmy Patton – Okie's In The Pokie
22. Louis Jordan – If You're So Smart, How Come You Ain't Rich?
23. Santiago Jimenez – Ay Te Dejo En San Antonio
24. Bo Diddley – Mona
25. The Modern Lovers – Roadrunner (Twice)