7 pm tonight - For the first time in the UK, on BBC Radio 2, listeners will 
be able to hear Theme Time Radio Hour, Bob Dylan's critically-acclaimed XM 
Satellite Radio show.

Radio 2 will air 5 one hour special shows from December 23-28, see the 
schedule at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/shows/dylan/schedule.shtml


Deborah Orr
The Independent
23 December 2006

A freewheelin' Bob Dylan is let loose on the radio - what a brilliant idea

'It's night time in the big city. A woman in a red gown throws out her 
cellphone. A man sleeps with a gun under his pillow. It's Theme Time Radio 
Hour ... with your host Bob Dylan." Bob Dylan's radio show always starts 
with the voice of a deadpan woman describing some variation on a film noir 
theme, and intoning solemnly that the great man is coming on the air.

Nonetheless, it feels like a novelty every time when the laconic midwestern 
Dylan twang starts up with that deliberate and intimate chat. Highly 
stylised, deeply serious and fabulously playful, Dylan's subscriber radio 
show has been a stateside triumph since it began broadcasting last May.

Bootlegged recordings of the programme have been winging their way round the 
world ever since, in a brisk act of cultural dissemination that must drive 
the show's producers nuts. Tonight, and for the next week, listeners in 
Britain can actually tune in, courtesy of Radio 2. After this seven-day 
splurge, the show will go out weekly on 6 Music.

As the title suggests, each programme is arranged around a particular 
topic - be it fathers, food, cars, whisky or whatever. All the music is 
loosely connected to the theme, and part of the fun is trying to predict 
what might come up, and in whose version. My favourite among the ones I've 
heard has been Coffee, partly because it casts its arc of musical enthusiasm 
a little wider than is usual, and reaches out as far as the 1980s with 
"Black Coffee in Bed" from Squeeze and almost to this very millennium with 
Blur's 1999 hit "Coffee + TV". And no, Dylan doesn't play "One More Cup of 
Coffee (Valley Below)". Playing your own stuff would be too uncool.

Not that the tendency to select tunes from the early to middle part of the 
last century is a problem. As Mike from Saratoga put it to Bob in an e-mail: 
"I notice that you play a lot of old songs. What do you have against new 
songs?" And as Bob put it to Mike, and the rest of his listeners in return: 
"We have nothing against new songs. There are just a lot more old songs than 
new songs."

The explanation isn't disingenuous. One of the great joys of the musical 
selections is that one hardly ever feels that something important has been 
left out. Usually, the first song is so iconic and such a perfect 
distillation of that week's theme that there's simply no argument. Coffee 
began with "Java Jive" from the Ink Spots, Divorce with "D-I-V-O-R-C-E" from 
Tammy Wynette, Summer with "Summertime" from Billy Stewart, and so on. Quite 
often, Dylan will play two versions of the same song. There's quite a 
contrast between T Bone Burnett's "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" and 
Marilyn Monroe's.

Dylan has an endearing habit, after a song has ended, of very slowly 
reciting his favourite few lines from it. He might also throw in some arcane 
and apposite literary fact, or play some dialogue from a movie or 
advertisement that fits his theme and takes his fancy as well. He also, of 
course, seizes the opportunity to discuss a great deal of musical history, 
sometimes in fascinating detail.

It's in this respect that the show is most valuable to serious Bob students. 
Naturally the selections are a track-by-track account of Dylan's own musical 
influences and tastes. On one show, Dylan offers (with some incredulity): "I 
was looking through my records the other night, and I have more than 70 
records by George Jones."

Prior to this comprehensive stroll through Bob's oeuvre, the closest one 
came to similar insight was by listening to The Basement Tapes, recorded in 
1967 by Dylan and The Band on a home tape-recorder and officially released, 
remastered, in 1975. The US music critic Greil Marcus wrote in the liner 
notes that the album sounds "like a testing and a discovery of memory and 
roots. The Basement Tapes are a kaleidoscope like nothing I know, complete 
and no more dated than the weather, but they seem to leap out of a 
kaleidoscope of American music no less immediate for its venerability". 
These playlists are the same.

'Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour', Radio 2, 7pm
Chase away the cold - Bob Dylan's summer playlist:
'Summertime' Billy Stewart
'Summertime Blues' Eddie Cochran
'Heat Wave' Martha and the Vandellas
'Heat Wave' Sol K Bright and his Hollywaiians
'Sunny' Bobby Hebb
'Juneteenth Jamboree' Fatso Bentley
'So Nice (Summer Samba)' Astrud Gilberto & Walter Wanderley
'Youth of a Thousand Summers' Van Morrison
'It Ain't Hot Weather That Makes Me Stick to You' Mr Sad Head
'Summer in the City' Lovin' Spoonful
'Too Hot' Prince Buster
'In the Summertime' Mungo Jerry
'Ice Cream Man' John Brim
'Fourth of July' Dave Alvin
'Hot Fun in the Summertime' Sly and the Family Stone

http://comment.independent.co.uk/columnists_m_z/deborah_orr/article2097796.ece

.....  "A lot of my own songs have been played on the radio," Dylan notes, 
accurately enough, "but this is the first time I've ever been on the other 
side of the mic.",,

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv_and_radio/story/0,,1977426,00.html