VA - Theme Time Radio Hour With Your Host Bob Dylan
ARTIST.....: VA
TITLE......: Theme Time Radio Hour With Your Host Bob Dylan
LABEL......: Ace
URL........: http://www.acerecords.co.uk/content.php?page_id=59&release=7726
RIP DATE...: Jul-22-2008
STORE DATE.: Feb-25-2008
GENRE......: Other
QUALITY....: VBR / 44.1Hz / Joint-Stereo
SIZE.......: 154,5 MB
Track Listing:
cd1
01 - Grandpa Jones - Turn Your Radio On 03:00
02 - Leroy Carr & Scrapper Blackwell - Papa's 02:57
On The Housetop
03 - Paul Chaplain & His Emeralds - Shortnin' 01:55
Bread
04 - The White Stripes - Seven Nation Army 03:52
05 - The Valentines - Gun Fever 02:47
(Blam Blam Fever)
06 - Al Dexter & His Troopers - Pistol Packin' 02:47
Mama
07 - The Hurricanes - Pistol Packin' Mama 02:27
08 - Otis Rush - Homework 02:39
09 - Jerry Butler - He Will Break Your Heart 02:49
10 - Eddie Noack - Take It Away Lucky 02:26
11 - Betty Hall Jones - Buddy, Stay Off The 02:21
Wine
12 - Charlie Rich - Tears A Go-Go 02:27
13 - Li'l Millet & His Creoles - Rich Woman 02:37
14 - Ernie Chaffin - Laughin' & Jokin' 02:07
15 - Memphis Minnie Accompanied By Little Son 02:47
Joe - Me And My Chauffeur Blues
16 - The Stanley Brothers - If I Lose 02:09
17 - Jimmy Nelson - I Sat And Cried 03:02
18 - Patsy Raye & The Beatniks - Beatnik's Wish 02:31
19 - The Donays - Devil In His Heart 02:38
20 - George Jones & Melba Montgomery - Let's 02:13
Invite Them Over
21 - Sister Rosetta Tharpe With The Sam Price 02:28
Trio - Don't Take Everybody To Be Your Frie
22 - Billie Holiday - Good Morning Heartache 03:10
23 - James Carr - Pouring Water On A Drowning 02:42
Man
24 - Mary Gauthier - I Drink 04:33
25 - Memphis Slim - Mother Earth 03:34
cd2
01 - Aretha Franklin - Chain Of Fools 04:21
02 - Joe South & The Believers - Walk A Mile 03:44
In My Shoes
03 - Alton Ellis & The Flames - Cry Tough 04:12
04 - The Clash - Tommy Gun 03:16
05 - Roy Montrell - 02:24
(Every Time I Hear) That Mellow Saxophone
06 - Patrice Holloway - Those Dj Shows 02:32
07 - Lonnie "The Cat" - I Ain't Drunk 02:24
08 - Charles Mingus - Eat That Chicken 04:40
09 - Bobby Peterson Quintet - Mama, Get Your 02:00
Hammer
10 - Slim Gaillard - How High The Moon 04:33
11 - The Sons Of The Pioneers - Cool Water 02:55
12 - Geraint Watkins - Only A Rose 03:44
13 - Berna-Dean - I Walk In My Sleep 03:16
14 - Jack Teagarden's Chicagoans - Stars Fell 03:00
On Alabama
15 - Merle Haggard & The Strangers - Mama 02:14
Tried (From The Film Killers Three)
16 - Dinah Washington - Big Long Slidin' Thing 02:58
17 - Bobby Darin - Black Coffee 04:02
18 - The Cats And The Fiddle - I'd Rather 02:49
Drink Muddy Water
19 - George Zimmerman & The Thrills With The 02:35
Bubber Cyphers Band - Ain't Got The Money T
20 - The Yayhoos - Bottle And A Bible 03:35
21 - Jimmy Patton - Okie's In The Pokie 02:26
22 - Louis Jordan - If You're So Smart, How 02:59
Come You Ain't Rich?
23 - Santiago Jimenez - Ay Te Dejo En San 02:49
Antonio
24 - Bo Diddley - Mona 02:22
25 - The Modern Lovers - Roadrunner (Twice) 04:06
─────
cd1: 68:58 cd2: 79:56
Release Notes:
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.
ItÆs 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 û and still is û the biggest of its kind
in the world, an open-cast iron mine.
ItÆs 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 rockÆnÆroll band.
ItÆs 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
itÆs where youÆll end up, like a salmon returning to spawn.
ItÆs where the Greyhound Bus company was founded and headquartered
for many years. It sits between the two great spinal cords of the
continent û 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 û and the first European to see it called the River
of the Holy Ghost.
Blues and folk and country and R&B, thatÆs what RobertÆs 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. HeÆd link song with song, mixing and matching and
combining and recombining them. ItÆd 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 ReedÆs 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. IÆve got them all in my
iTunes and so, whenever I shuffle-play, IÆll always hear Bob
DylanÆs voice, reading me a Robert Frost poem or making one of
those wry digs he makes every time he plays a Beatles track. ItÆs
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 weÆve all
dreamed of making. ItÆs both a taxonomy and a topography of 20th
century popular musics. Not all of them, itÆs true. ThereÆs 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 lifeÆs basics, things like
Weather, Mother, Father. And itÆs pretty much stuck with the
everyday: School, Sleep, Food, Tears. ItÆs addressed lifeÆs two
great certainties, Death and Taxes û though not yet the third,
Nurses. ItÆs travelled a bit: Tennessee, New York. ItÆs 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 û carefully or lightly, or both û and you find new thoughts
on something as old and universal as the Heart (show 41, Billie
HolidayÆs Good Morning Heartache) or the potential erotogenic
symbolism of Musical Instruments (show 37, Dinah WashingtonÆs Big
Long SlidinÆ Thing) or the relationship between family life,
heredity and alcoholic Drink (show 3, Mary GauthierÆs I Drink).
Then thereÆs the two versions û one black, one white û of Pistol
PackinÆ Mama (show 25, Guns). They got me thinking afresh about
what really is one of popÆs 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 thereÆs another
song recorded by both Bing Crosby (plus Andrews Sisters) and Gene
Vincent (plus Blue Caps). I never heard it.
If it werenÆt for the jauntiness and accordion of Al DexterÆs
original, IÆd have realised long ago that itÆs a pop musical
parallel to the same periodÆs film noir, with the same anxieties
about womenÆs 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 singerÆs murder. If you canÆt find your own
dreams, schemes and themes in there somewhere, I doubt youÆre
human.
by Peter Silverton