A gracious Bob Dylan calls tune on XM show


Comedian Richard Lewis called the show ‘a surreal hour of radio.’

By LINTON WEEKS

THE WASHINGTON POST

Through the years, Bob Dylan’s dealings with the public have been difficult.

Hear him live and he can be a mumbling and aloof musician (he can be seen at Petersen Events Center in Pittsburgh Thursday). Riffle through interviews with Dylan on YouTube and you discover a contentious, pretentious artist who is laconic, distant, apparently indifferent to enunciation, pleasantries and other everyday social constructs.

But listen in on Dylan’s weekly satellite show, “Theme Time Radio Hour” on XM Radio — now in its second season — and you discover quite a different Dylan. He’s voluble, generous, articulate. He’s liable to quote a poem, give tips on hanging drywall, pass along a recipe. In his show on baseball, he broke into “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” — a cappella.

For nearly 50 years, besides being the voice of his particular generation (and maybe several others), Bob Dylan has been a musical rainmaker. He is a tireless performer, prodigious songwriter and now ardent professor and promoter of all kinds of songs. He has produced more than 30 studio collections. This month Columbia Records is releasing a three-CD retrospective of Dylan’s Methuselahian career.

The one thing missing from the radio show, oddly enough, is Dylan’s own music.

“With this show, Dylan is tapping into his deep love — and I would say his BELIEF in — a musical world without borders,” author Peter Guralnick, who has written several books about music, wrote in an e-mail. “I feel like the commentary often reflects the same surrealistic appreciation for the human comedy that suffuses his music.”

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“Theme Time” is a “surreal hour of radio,” comedian Richard Lewis wrote in an email.

The show is unavailable on terrestrial radio.

As part of the contract, Dylan, 66, is given artistic freedom. The show is delivered, pretty much as a done deal, to the XM studio in New York. “Doing something that would be illegal or filthy is not in his repertoire,” said Lee Abrams, XM’s chief creative officer.

“The actual recording of it is a big mystery,” said Abrams, who usually hears it for the first time when it airs.

Every show begins with a noir intro — spoken sotto voce by whiskey-voiced Ellen Barkin — such as this: “It’s nighttime in the big city. A husband plots his escape route. The last train from Overbrook pulls into the station. It’s ‘Theme Time Radio Hour’ with your host, Bob Dylan.”

And for the next hour the listener is transported to Bobby’s World. Each show is built around a theme and the music is a deep and multicultural trove of musical history.

He plays tunes by a parade of musicians, such as the Andrews Sisters; Hank Williams Jr.; Darlene Love; Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys; the Horace Silver Quintet; Bobby “Blue” Bland and the Washington-based Winstons.

“I don’t mean in any way to diminish the importance of the quality music he plays,” said magician and loyal listener Penn Jillette, “but Dylan’s heart is so in this show that you hear Dylan even in other people’s music.”

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