Theme Time Radio Hour
[Mojo]
Various Artists: Theme Time Radio Hour with your Host Bob Dylan (Ace/ Theme Time Radio Hour)
Since May 2006 Bob Dylan has hosted over 70 episodes of ‘Theme Time Radio Hour’, each themed around human perennials like: Weather, Mother, Cars, Sleep, Laughter, Dogs, Drinking, right down to Death & Taxes. Broadcast on XM Satellite Radio and the BBC, the series celebrates earthy, direct songs that contain archetypal stories or universal emotions – what are in the widest sense folk songs – and formats them like an iTunes playlist from heaven.
Spanning the 20th century and reaching into the 21st, these 1000 songs and up have accumulated into an extraordinary resource – the 21st century equivalent of Harry Smith’s “Anthology of American Folk Music”. Many are from pre-Rock’n Roll America and they represent how Dylan saw the world: they were, as he has written, his ‘preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality, some different republic, some liberated republic’.
The series has been a personal triumph for Dylan, the latest episode in a 21st century resurgence that has seen his very well received album, “Modern Times”, the Martin Scorsese directed documentary “No Direction Home” with its extraordinary archive and illuminating interviews, and the first (?) volume of his autobiography, “Chronicles Volume 1”, which fuses rich memory with a lack of self-revelation that only increases the allure.
Hearing Dylan as a DJ is a treat: occasionally he offers wry comments, sometimes he recites the lyrics, often he gives detailed information – all in that mesmeric drawl. His dry, informative and on occasion opaque narration gives a sense of the mystery that still lies beneath the surface of the songs as well as his sheer enthusiasm for the music that inspired him in his youth or that has been made by peers whom he respects.
For Dylan obsessives – who have seized upon the series as a whole new arena for scholarship, on websites like thebobdylanfanclub – nothing less than every single radio show will do (and the bootleggers are busy supplying the demand). For civilians, however, this double CD will act as an excellent introduction to the series’ range and aesthetic, quite apart from offering a highly entertaining selection of little heard songs both old and new.
The first thing that you should know is that Bob Dylan does not appear: this is music from the series not the series itself. The second is that, to Ace’s credit, pre-1958 material is mixed in with songs from the likes of the White Stripes and the Modern Lovers. The temptation to go the out-of-copyright route must have been intense, but to do so would have missed one of the main points of the whole exercise.
The fact that “Seven Nation Army” and “Roadrunner (Twice)” sit so well next to the Valentines’ 1967 “Gun Fever”, Bo Diddley’s 1957 “Mona” or Memphis Minnie’s 1941 “Me and My Chauffeur Blues” is a tribute to an elemental drive so strong that it has transcended time and place. It’s what Dylan, in “Chronicles Volume 1” calls ‘the power of spirit’: ‘the ghost of Billy Lyons, rootin’ the mountain down, standing ‘round in East Cairo, Black Betty bam be lam’.
The selections cross time and genre: gospel, country, rock’n roll, girl groups, blues, jazz, jump R&B, rude-boy reggae and punk rock. There are detours into early soul and Motown – Berna-Dean’s 1961 “I Walk In My Sleep”, Patrice Holloway’s “Those DJ Shows” – and primal rock from the early sixties, that moment when the music was supposedly dead: “Shortnin’ Bread” by Paul Chaplain and his Emeralds, Jimmy Patton’s blistering “Okie’s In The Pokie”.
In fact “Theme Time Radio Hour” continues the deep exploration of pre-rock music that has been stimulated by Harry Smith’s Anthology, labels like Old Hat and John Fahey’s Revenant, books by Greil Marcus, Nick Tosches among others. “Rich Woman” by Li’l Millet and his Creoles is Bo Diddley’s “Diddley Daddy”, while the title phrase of “I’d Drink Muddy Water” by the Cats and the Fiddle has filtered through any number of post-war songs.
The rock’n roll generation didn’t invent everything: much of it was there already in the folk tradition. (You could argue that the time-old practice of musical quotation continues in today’s sample-dominated electronic music). Well music is a fast flowing river rather than a stagnant pool, and as a youth Dylan plunged right in: ‘folk songs were the way I explored the universe, they were pictures and the pictures were worth more than anything I could say’.
Many of the selections come from the 1940’s and 1950’s. There are two versions of “Pistol Packing Mama”, the original by Al Dexter from 1942 and an R&B version by the Hurricanes. Warnings against the demon alcohol abound, including Betty Hall Jones’ “Buddy, Stay Off The Wine” (1949) and “I Ain’t Drunk” by Lonnie ‘the Cat’ (1954). Sun Records are represented by Ernie Chaffin’s understated, tricksy “Laughin’ & Jokin’” – a lost classic from 1956.
The most haunting is “Cool Water” by the Sons of the Pioneers, a devotional Western song from 1945 that tells the story of a man and a mule travelling the American desert. The cool water that the singer sees in the burning sand is nothing but a devilish mirage designed to throw him off his course but, as he gets more and more desperate, he regains his strength. In the cleansing harmonies, you can detect an echo of the Beach Boys “Cool Cool Water”.
The spirit of the shows resides in Dylan’s youth. In his recent book “This Is Your Brain On Music”, Daniel Levitin marks fourteen as a peak age for musical receptivity: ‘part of the reason we remember songs from our teenage years is because those years were times of self-discovery, and as a consequence, they were emotionally charged.’ Also, ‘it is around fourteen that the wiring of our musical brains is approaching adult levels of completion’.
In this way “Theme Time Radio Hour” works as an imagined, idealised reconstruction of the radio shows that Dylan might have heard before he left home: where you might flip the dial and hear the Stanley Brothers, Bo Diddley, Slim Gaillard, the Sons of the Pioneers and Louis Jordan. This was the next generation on from ‘the old weird America’ that Greil Marcus writes about in “The Invisible Republic’, but the direct connection was still there.
Nostalgia for the teenage years has become a 21st century cliche, but this collection is something else – and not just because it is Dylan. The 50 songs collected here speak, as one, of a constant human spirit that today’s materialistic society has failed to eradicate. Packaged with Ace’s customary excellence, this compilation – even though it omits Bob’s penchant for the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band – could hardly be a better primer for the shows themselves.