Category — Bob Dylan

A sharp-eared listener (thanks Ginger) caught me calling the notorious manager of Bob Dylan and the Band Albert Goldman during the Levon Helm tribute program on KGNU.

Everybody knows it’s Albert Grossman.

Albert Goldman

Both of them were about the same age; Albert Grossman was born in 1926, Albert Goldman about a year later.  Each had some connection to rock and roll, and both were almost equally reviled for their efforts in that regard.

Albert Goldman was a teacher and an author, and it was his efforts in the latter that earned him the disdain of rock cognoscenti. His biographies of Elvis Presley and John Lennon dared to look down the subjects, instead of up. Each book had its flaws, but it was his disdain for two pop superheroes that pissed off most who read it. His biography of Lenny Bruce isn’t as reviled. His biography of Jim Morrison remains unpublished.

I would certainly recommend Peter Guralnick’s two-volume biography of Presley over Goldman’s, but after reading Tim Riley’s exhaustively researched Lennonbio, I don’t think Goldman, though he makes some rather ludicrous assumptions, was that far off the mark about Paul McCartney’s songwriting partner.

Albert Grossman circa 1966

Albert Grossman was once the most powerful manager in the music business, and a model for an entire breed of manager that thrived beginning in the 1960s. He was, as promoter George Wein told author Fred Goodman in Mansion on the Hill, “a strong, one-way street. He was a brilliant man and a good man in his way, but a tough son-of-a-bitch.” And though he was militant about protecting his “artists,” his arrogance generally drove away all his clients, including Bob Dylan, whom he famously managed from 1962-1970.

But the most interesting thing is that both men died on jets heading from the U.S. to London,  Grossman of a heart attack Christmas Day 1986 aboard the Concorde at age 59 and Goldman on March 28, 1994, aged 66.

As it turns out, I walked past Albert Grossman once. It was forty years ago this month. I was in Chicago, May 1972, at a Peter Yarrow/Lazarus concert. After the show I saw this fellow standing near the doors cupping a cigarette in his hand who, as best I could figure, looked like Benjamin Franklin. I wasn’t sure it was Grossman, but since he created Peter Paul and Mary, it seemed right. Years later I began reading other descriptions of him as looking like a certain bespectacled founding father.

We'll be celebrating Bob Dylan's 70th birthday (it's May 24) early on Roots & Branches April 3.

I just finished Sean Wilentz’s “Bob Dylan in America,” a series of essays that looks at Dylan’s career, many of them about the later parts of it.  Like Wilentz, I have been fascinated at Dylan’s reincarnation after a period of confusion that lasted through much of the 1980s as a kind of minstrel, performing regularly as well as becoming involved in other kinds of creative expression.

Dylan is marking 70 years next month, so I put together a special KGNU (88.5 FM) Roots & Branches show for Sunday, April 3, 9-11 am MT that will argue that the last twenty years of Dylan’s career will be a period that be considered one of his most fruitful. (Download the show here until April 17.)

Nothing could possibly match the evolutionary path Robert Zimmerman took from the moment he first stepped onto New York streets fifty years ago in January to the release of Nashville Skyline nine years later. But he hasn’t done so bad of late, either.

In Chronicles Dylan relates that he realized by 1987 that he had been coasting, riding the laurels of his legend, performing erratically and releasing albums that seemed little more than pale reflections of his glorious past. He minced few words about his predicament, which coincided with an injury to one of his hands that he feared might end his playing days. “Always prolific, never exact,” he wrote, “too many distractions had turned my musical path into a jungle of vines.”

At the same time he writes that he realized that he would have to change the way he wrote and presented his music. “By combining certain elements of technique which ignite each other I could shift the levels of perception, time-frame structures and systems of rhythm,” he wrote, “which would give my songs a brighter countenance, call them up from the grave – stretch out the stiffness in their bodies and straighten them out.”

He also describes a musical numerical system, which I still don’t understand, that he says the guitarist Lonnie Johnson taught him. But for whatever reasons, things began turning around for him.

In 20 years, he’s released two albums of traditional songs (Good as I Been to You and World Gone Wrong, four albums of original material (Time Out of Mind, Love & Theft, Modern Times and Together Through Life) and eight editions in his bootleg series that includes a couple of three-disc sets. He published the first of a three-part memoir, Chronicles, which offered his own memories of his early days in New York City and two other periods of his life where he felt at a crossroads. He let Martin Scorsese direct No Direction Home, a three-hour-plus documentary on his life to 1966, that included two more albums of outtakes and other interesting material.

He wrote, directed and produced Masked & Anonymous,  an apocalyptic film that starred some of Hollywood’s finest acting talent. He curated and was host of Theme Time Radio Hour for three years, producing 100 hour-long programs that featured his obvious love for all kinds of music and American history and featured his oddball sense of humor. He let Twyla Tharp try to adapt his music for dance.

He plays about a hundred concerts a year, which isn’t an unusual number of shows except, it seems, in Dylan’s case, when it’s called the Never Ending Tour. His paintings are now hung in galleries around the world. He made Christmas in the Heart, a fantastic Christmas album and donated the money to charity. You probably wouldn’t have called Bob Dylan charitable in 1965, but you might today. He seems to have grown comfortably into old age with the same instincts and curiosity intact that have, except for a period in the 1980s, always sustained him.

And his most recent work, as Wilentz relates, recasts him as part of a long American tradition. In many ways, it’s no more than an extension of what he has always done. In Chronicles Dylan relates, as a voracious reader from an early age, how he dug into historical texts in friend’s apartments and the New York City Library. Early on he paid tribute to his heroes by copying them – his own tribute, “Song to Woody,” steals the melody of Woody Guthrie’s own “1913 Massacre.” Today, he finds different ways to connect with music and literature from, as Greil Marcus once dubbed it, the old, weird America, and spit it back out at us in different ways.

I think I make a strong case for his recent success, but the proof is in the music. Time willing, here’s the playlist for Sunday morning. The show will stream from kgnu.org, and I’ll post the link to the podcast Sunday afternoon.

Introduction, Bob Dylan Concert 2009
Blind Willie McTell, Bob Dylan Bootleg Series Vol. 1, Disc 3.
Tomorrow Night, Lonnie Johnson Bluebird single
Tomorrow Night, Bob Dylan, Good As I Been To You
Money Honey (take 2), Bob Dylan Unreleased
Nashville Skyline Rag, Bob Dylan, Nashville Skyline
Love Sick, Bob Dylan, Time Out Of Mind
Not Dark Yet, Bob Dylan, Time Out Of Mind
Tryin’ To Get to Heaven (Oct. 5, 2000, London, England), Bob Dylan, Tell Tale Signs: The Bootleg Series Vol. 8
Marchin to the City, Bob Dylan, Tell Tale Signs Bootleg Series Vol. 8
Things Have Changed, Bob Dylan, Wonder Boys
Having Myself A Time, Billie Holiday, Lady Day: The Complete Billie Holiday on Columbia 1933-1944 (Disc 4)
Bye & Bye, Bob Dylan, Love & Theft
Po’ Boy, Bob Dylan, Love & Theft
High Water, Bob Dylan, Love & Theft
Come Una Pietra Scalciata (Like A Rolling Stone), Articolo 31. Masked & Anonymous
Down In The Flood (New Version), Bob Dylan, Masked & Anonymous
Gonna Change My Way Of Thinking    Bob Dylan & Mavis Staples, Gotta Serve Somebody: The Gospel Songs Of Bob Dylan
Spirit On The Water, Bob Dylan, Modern Times
Beyond The Horizon, Bob Dylan, Modern Times
Cross the Green Mountain, Bob Dylan, Tell Tale Signs Bootleg Series Vol. 8
Checkers by Dylan, Theme Time Radio Hour: Dogs
Sinatra and Kennedy, Theme Time Radio Hour: President’s Day
Dylan GPS rap, Theme Time Radio Hour: Street Map
Life is Hard, Bob Dylan, Together Through Life
It’s All Good, Bob Dylan, Together Through Life

Here’s the set list for a special Roots & Branches look at one of rock’s most beloved and influential groups. Hope I can get through all these in two hours. I also direct your attention to a piece I wrote about Music From Big Pink that graciously wound up on the unofficial band website.

The house at Big Pink.

“Ain’t Got No Home” (Clarence ‘Frogman’ Henry) Clarence “Frogman” Henry The Complete Buddy Holly, Vol. 10
“The Great Pretender” The Platters Rock N’ Roll Era: 1954-1955
“Saved” LaVern Baker Atlantic Rhythm & Blues Disc 4: 1947-1974
“The Third Man Theme” The Band Moondog Matinee
“She’s Nineteen Years Old” The Hawks A Musical History
“Who Do You Love” The Band A Musical History-Selections
“He Don’t Love You” Levon Helm & The Hawks Across The Great Divide [Disc 3]
“The Stones I Throw (Will Free All Men)” Levon & The Hawks A Musical History
“I Ain’t Got No Home [Live]” Bob Dylan & The Band A Musical History
“Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat” Bob Dylan The Bootleg Series, Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live, 1966: The Royal Albert Hall Concert [Live] [Disc 2]
“Orange Juice Blues (Blues For Breakfast)” (Outtake – Demo) The Band Music From Big Pink
“See You Later, Allen Ginsberg” Bob Dylan & The Band Genuine Basement Tapes Vol 4
“Yazoo Street Scandal (Outtake)” The Band Music From Big Pink
“We Can Talk” The Band Music From Big Pink
“To Kingdom Come” The Band Music From Big Pink
“The Weight” The Band Music From Big Pink
“Look Out Cleveland” The Band The Band
“Rag Mama Rag” The Band The Band
“The W.S. Walcott Medicine Show” The Band
Stage Fright
“Life Is A Carnival” The Band Rock Of Ages [Disc 2]
“The Last Waltz Refrain [Live]” The Band Across The Great Divide [Disc 3]
“The Shape I’m In” The Band & Friends The Complete Last Waltz
“The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”  The Complete Last Waltz
“Stage Fright” The Band & Friends The Complete Last Waltz
“Go Back To Your Woods” Robbie Robertson & Bruce Hornsby Storyville
“Ragtop” Danko Fjeld Anderson Ridin’ On The Blinds
“You Don’t Know Me” Danko, Manuel & Butterfield Lone Star Cafe, New York City NY, September 19, 1984
“Atlantic City” Levon Helm Band FestivaLink Presents Levon Helm Band MerleFest Ramble At MerleFest, NC 4/26/08 [Disc 1]
“I Shall Be Released” The Band Live At Watkins Glen
“Acadian Driftwood (Neil Young & Joni Mitchell)” The Band & Friends The Complete Last Waltz
“Theme From The Last Waltz [Live]” The Band Across The Great Divide [Disc 3]
Slippin And Slidin’ [Live]The BandAcross The Great Divide [Disc 3]

Here’s the playlist for the Morning Sound Alternative for Jan. 24, 2011 on KGNU. The only restriction for this show is that the singer is not the author of the song.

Everybody Wants To Rule The World    Patti Smith    Twelve    4:07    2007
Rebel Rebel    Seu Jorge    The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou    2:24    2004
Coffee, Coffee, Coffee    Freedy Johnston    Real: The Tom T Hall Project    3:02    1998
The Third Man Theme    The Band    Moondog Matinee    2:49    1973
It’s A Long Way To The Top    Lucinda Williams    Little Honey    4:56    2008
Angel Of The Morning    The Pretenders    Pirate Radio [Disc 3]    3:32    1994
Words (Between The Lines Of Age)    Chip Taylor    Harvest Revisted (MOJO )    5:09    2010
A Day In The Life    Jeff Beck    International Forum, Tokyo JP, February 6, 2009    5:14    2009
This Wheel’s On Fire    Neil Young and The Sadies    Garth Hudson Presents A Canadian Celebration Of The Band    3:28    2010
Lean On Me    Eric Bibb, Rory Block & Maria Muldaur    Sisters & Brothers    4:07    2004
Superstition    Old School Freight Train  Heart of Glass      3:23
Everything I Do Gonna Be Funky    Peter Wolf    Midnight Souvenirs    2:12    2010
Gonna Move    Susan Tedeschi    Wait For Me    4:26    2002
Never Gonna Give You Up    The Black Keys    The Black Keys (Brothers)    3:41    2010
Angel Dance    Robert Plant    Band of Joy    3:49    2010
Run Through the Jungle (Gunmen soundtrack)    Los Lobos    Rarities, Covers & Radio Shows    3:46
Garden Party    John Fogerty    The Blue Ridge Rangers Rides Again    3:51    2009
She Belongs To Me    Rick Nelson    Legacy (Disc 3)    3:03
Lonesome Town    Bob Dylan With Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers    Lonesome Town [Disc 2]    5:30    2002
Burn Down The Cornfield    Charlie Musselwhite    Sanctuary    3:30    2004
Louisiana 1927    Sonny Landreth        3:59
Losing You    Mavis Staples    You Are Not Alone    2:52    2010
Just One Smile    Al Kooper    Soul of a Man (Disc 1)    6:09    1994
Gone Dead Train [Movie-Soundtrack]    Randy Newman    CD 3: Odds & Ends    2:54    1970
Everybody’s Talkin’    Harry Nilsson    Greatest Hits    2:46    1968
Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood    Nina Simone    Broadway Blues Ballads    2:48    1993
Hey Gyp    The Animals    Retrospective    3:50    1966
Voodoo Child (Slight Return)    Angelique Kidjo, Buddy Guy, And Vernon Reid    Lightning In A Bottle. A Salute To The Blues Soundtrack Recording [Disc 2]    5:17    2004
I Am Waiting    Ollabelle        4:15
Walk Away Renee Linda Ronstadt & Ann Savoy    Adieu False Heart    3:26    2006
When Doves Cry    The Be Good Tanyas    Hello Love    4:02    2006
Soul Serenade    Aretha Franklin    I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You    2:39
State Trooper    Deana Carter    Badlands: A Tribute To Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska    3:46
Paint The Town Beige    Bill and Bonnie Hearne    Watching Life Through A Windshield    3:39    2000
Glad & Sorry    Golden Smog    Down By The Old Mainstream    3:34    1996
Don’t Knock    Tom Jones    Praise & Blame    2:15    2010
Perfidia (Guitar)    The Ventures        2:03    1960
Señor (Tales Of Yankee Power)    Tim O’Brien    Red On Blonde    4:03    1996
Al Vaivén De Mi Carreta    Afrocubismo    Afrocubismo    5:00    2010

Here’s the set list for the R&B Program on KGNU Jan. 23, 2011. The only only rule for inclusion today is that it be a song by one musician written about another one. Musicians on Musicians.

Nina Simone    Tom Russell    Blood And Candle Smoke    2009
The Great Hank    Robert Earl Keen    What I Really Mean    2005
When The Beatles Hit America    John Wesley Harding    Just Say Da: Vol. 4 Of Just Say Yes    1990
Wilson Pickett    Tim Krekel    Soul Season    2007
Here’s Your Mop Mr. Johnson    Keri Leigh    The Last Soul Company (Disc 6)    1999
I’m So Restless    Roger McGuinn    Fantasy Factory vol.8    1973
Got to Find Blind Lemon-Part One    Geoff Muldaur    The Secret Handshake    1998
W. Lee O’Daniel And The Light Crust Dough Boys    James Talley    Got No Bread/Tryin’ Like The Devil    1989
I Dreamed Of A Hillbilly Heaven    Tex Ritter    Collectors Series    1961
The King & I    Fred Koller    Sxsw Live Volume 5 (Disc 2)
Baby Boom Ché    John Trudell    AKA Grafitti Man    1992
Went To See The Gypsy    Bob Dylan    Genuine Bootleg Series Vol 3 [Disc 2]    1970
Blind Willie McTell    The Band    Jericho    1993
Wild As The Wind (A Tribute To Rick Danko)    Steve Forbert    Just Like There’s Nothin’ To It    2004
Gram`s Song    John Phillips    Phillips 66    2001
Alcohol And Pills    Todd Snider    East Nashville Skyline    2004
The Late Great Johnny Ace [Demo]    Paul Simon    Hearts & Bones [Bonus Tracks]    1983
Death of Muddy Waters    The Chicago Blues Reunion    Buried Alive in the Blues    2005
Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way    Robert Earl Keen    Lonesome, On’ry & Mean: A Tribute To Waylon Jennings    2003
My My, Hey Hey (Out Of The Blue)    Neil Young    A Perfect Echo: Vol. 3, Disc 1
Johnny Met June    Shelby Lynne    Suit Yourself    2005
Carl Perkins’ Cadillac    Drive-By Truckers    The Dirty South    2004
The Man Who Could Have Played Bass For Shanana    Darrell Scott    Theatre Of The Unheard    2003
House on the Lake    Rosanne Cash    Black Cadillac    2006
Link Wray    Jason Ringenberg    Empire Builders    2004
Where Is Bobbie Gentry?    Jill Sobule    California Years    2009
Flat Top Joint    The Blasters    American Music    1997

DOUG SAHM
The Last Texas Blues Band
Antones 10036 (CD). 1994. Clifford Antone, exec. prod.; Malcolm Harper, eng. TT: 56.30.

Confession: I had to be coerced into seeing Doug Sahm onstage the first time. I only knew Sir Douglas’ “She’s About a Mover” and “Mendocino,” and there he was playing ringmaster for the most eclectic and perhaps the finest three hours of live music I can remember, a veritable phantasmagoria of pop nuggets, polkas, soul, R&B, tejano and big- and small-band blues. Along with Juke Box Music (the soul version of this big-band collection), this is how I most like to remember Sahm, that bemused grin beneath the cowboy hat, wandering among the ghosts of Texas music, recalling T-Bone and Guitar Slim, mimicking Fats Domino and leading the band to ever higher plateaus. The definition of Texas music. (118)

BOB DYLAN
Self Portrait
Sony 30050 (CD). 1970. Bob Johnston, prod. TT: 73:15.

The only real problems with Dylan’s most misunderstood and unheard album are the timing and the title. Were it released as The Bootleg Series Vol. 6 in 2002, it might not have dismayed critics and confused most of the rest of his audience. Dylan has long claimed it was his response to unauthorized, bootleg recordings, and that description fits — from the scattershot sequencing to the wildly eclectic repertoire. Given the current Dylan penchant for unpredictable covers in his live show, mixing up country ballads, folk standards and contemporary favorites and a sprinkling of his own songs seems downright rootsy. Most interesting is that except for his voice, Self-Portrait isn’t much different from his onstage act today. What goes around comes around. Self-Portrait takes us full circle. (127)

The rules are that the reviews be 100 words or less, and I went a little long on both. These originally appeared in Stereophile magazine in 2002.

Here’s a good one.

An Associated Press story carried by major news outlets announces that a few Bob Dylan items are for sale, including a high school yearbook with his inscription and a lyric sheet with a poem, “Little Buddy,” that he wrote about a dead dog at summer camp when he was sixteen years old. Go to Google and you’ll find the story repeated in at least 39 different publications.

The lyric sheet in question, which the story says Christie’s auction house hopes will bring upwards of $10,000 – “the earliest example of Dylan’s lyric genius,” enthuses the Guardian’s headline — makes you wonder whether the infamous auction house or media outlets actually check their items for authenticity.

From the A.P. story: A spokesman for Christie’s auction house marveled at the poem’s genius. ‘It’s a very early example of [Dylan's] brilliance,’ Simeon Lipman gushed. ‘It comes from the mind of a teenager [with] some very interesting thoughts … percolating in his brain.’

That might be — if it came from his brain. Even a simple blogger could have done a Google search and find that “Little Buddy,” the lyric in question, was written and recorded by Hank Snow. It’s a sentimental tearjerker that apparently Dylan copied in his own script and should have made any Christie’s expert, or journalist, suspicious. But apparently it didn’t, and even the Washington Post and Rolling Stone, along with many other organizations, fell for it.

Watch the YouTube clip of the song here.

Broken hearted and so sad, golden curls all wet with tears, ’twas a picture of sorrow to see
Kneeling close to the side of his pal and only pride,
A little lad these words he told me
He was such a lovely doggie and to me he was such fun
But today as we played by the way
A drunken man got mad at him because he barked in joy
He beat him and he’s dying here today.

Now I ask: Does that sound even remotely like Bob Dylan, even at age 16? Doesn’t it make you even a little suspicious? And one more question: And media wonder why we don’t trust them anymore? As Dylan actually did write: When you gonna wake up?

Dave McIntyre made his performance debut Wednesday at Bob Dylan night at Oskar Blues, Lyons, Colorado.

The Is It Rolling Bob Band made its debut last night at Oskar Blues in the small but musically mighty village of Lyons, about fifteen miles north of Boulder.

It was Bob Dylan celebration night at Oskar, and there were 20 or 21 various combinations of solos to bands, each getting the chance to do two songs written by Uncle Bob. In a little over four hours.

Sharon and Kris and I had gone up in January for Beatles night, and Sharon and Steve were there in December for Neil Young night.

So we put in a bid for Mallworthy (Gil Asakawa, Sharon Meyer, Steve Meyer and me) to play Bob Dylan Night and were selected by intrepid promoter and musician Jami Lunde to perform a (relatively) recent song, “Things Have Changed,” and “I Shall Be Released,” an old favorite that Gil and I have closed our sets on the Boulder Mall with for twenty-five years,

After the selection Gil and Steve both found they would be out of town that night. A flurry of emails later, and Sharon, who plays mandolin, and I were joined by Kris Ditson, a drummer who most recently has worked with Pete Wernick’s Flexigrass, Rob Ober, who lives two doors up the street from me and plays about anything you put in front of him, on bass, and Patrick Cullie, our local connection (he lives about two blocks from Oskar), who has picked with Gil and I in the past and plays a mean slide guitar. I was humbled to be working, if only for two songs, with such talented people on short notice.

We practiced without Patrick once and then Tuesday night we all got together and ran through the two songs a few times each. We figured driving up that since Oskar Blues is the home of Dales Pale Ale, king of craft beers, it wouldn’t matter if we sucked.

It was already crowded when we got there, and with fifty musicians as part of the crowd in the basement, it stayed that way all the way to the end. And it was really noisy.

Watching the talent on this night, all I could think of was that Lyons, a town of less than two thousand, is a little mini version of Austin, Texas, with talented musicians in many genres. The song selection was eclectic and unpredictable. I didn’t take notes, but I’d guess the most popular Dylan album of the night was Blood on the Tracks. Among the highlights I remember was a bluegrass quartet, Steamboat Zephyr, that absolutely smoked its way through “Quinn the Eskimo” and “Odds and Ends,” both from the Basement tapes and perfect candidates for their picking frenzy.

Several solo performers did courageous performances of intricate Dylan songs in a room that was filled with too many people to properly appreciate the subtleties. Everybody cheered loudly as Dave McIntyre, who books the entertainment, sat on the other side of the mike for the first time ever with a mandolin player named Greg Schocket and played spirited versions of “Spanish Harlem Incident” and “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues.” Schocket later accompanied Lunde for two numbers, included a nice “She Belongs to Me.” Reed Foehl kept the crowd’s attention with great versions of “Visions of Johanna” and “Every Grain of Sand.”

We were 18th on the bill, so I missed a few in front of us getting ready, but the biggest surprise was the debut performance of the Blue Maddies, five or six ladies in various western outfits that included stage manager KC Groves. I can’t remember the first song, but I will never forget the closer, “Boots of Spanish Leather.” As they reached for the high harmonies I had never heard on that song before, I felt like I could have been in Ryman Auditorium fifty years ago hearing the Carter Family. Just one of those moments where it all comes together.

With that to buoy us, the Is It Rolling Bob Band moved onstage and made its way through “Things Have Changed” and “I Shall Be Released.” I seldom work with amplification, but everything seemed to work pretty well, and thanks to a cheat sheet scotch-taped to my guitar, I made it through “Things Have Changed” for the first time without blowing the words. Everybody danced and sang along to the final chorus of “I Shall Be Released” as we sang it a capella.

And you know, for those of us who perform even just occasionally, that’s what it’s all about, folks. Thanks to Jami and Dave and KC and Michael and Sean and everybody else who helps put on these lunatic affairs. Hope we get to do it again sometime.

p.s. There was video shot of our performance. i’ll keep you posted on when that will become available.

First it’s Bob Dylan, who finally decided he wanted to be Wolfman Jack and now hosts Theme Time Radio Hour, a program dedicated to showcasing music by artists, most of whom are long dead and most of us have never heard of. Now along comes Spectacle: Elvis Costello With …, a television interview show that seems bent on showcasing large-name artists (Sir Elton John and James Taylor) and lesser-known ones (Lou Reed, Rufus Wainwright) in an intimate interview/performance setting. The twist here is that they aren’t talking about themselves. Instead, they are paying tribute to the music and musicians who influenced them.

Elvis Costello and Elton John make like Billy Stewart.

Perhaps it is that I share Dylan and Costello and John’s passion for arcane music and great artists who didn’t qualify for stardom. Given freedom from talking about why they are successful (for which most don’t have a clue, anyway) and prodded by the consummate music lover Costello, musicians talk much like the rest of us do in conversations about them. They’re just fans, too, and for me, that fact is far more interesting than anything about their celebrity or success.

Musically, I had long ago lost track of the former Reggie Dwight, but Costello drew me back into his story as he got John to talk about the period when he was trying to develop his act. John talked at length about performers, especially piano players, who caught his attention back then and from whom he picked up a style of playing that brought him more fame than any of those from which he learned. (He dismissed his own success as “luck” at one point.)

John used the piano to show how Laura Nyro’s talent for wandering off the traditional verse/chorus/middle eight/verse/chorus format crept into his piano playing and was his biggest influence. His stories about how hearing and seeing Leon Russell, Carole King and the Band shaped his own direction (which he dates to the album Tumbleweed Connection, where he says he found his sound) ring very true to the music itself.

John, a co-producer of Spectacle, seemed genuinely jazzed telling stories of touring with Major Lance, hanging with Patti Labelle and almost freezing onstage when he spotted Russell in the audience while performing “Burn Down the Mission” at the Troubadour in 1970. He did a short phrase of “Sitting in the Park,” the 1965 Billy Stewart single, which Costello quickly joined in before they discussed Stewart, the gifted, 300-pound vocalist who hit the big time by turning George Gershwin’s somber “Summertime” into a sputtering, falsetto soul masterpiece in 1966 and was killed several years later in a car accident (not by a gunshot, as John says).

And they talked about the sway that David Ackles, a piano player and songwriter with Nyro’s penchant for abandoning conventional verse-chorus formats, held on them both in the early 1970s. I, too, was stricken with Ackle’s 1972 American Gothic album back then.

Listening to it again for the first time in many years, I like it even better. Produced by John’s writing partner, Bernie Taupin, American Gothic still sounds wonderfully contemporary. Hearing Costello’s own interpretation of John’s “Border Song” and watching John and Costello close the program by resurrecting Ackles’ “Down River,” with a band that included Allen Toussaint, James Burton and Pete Thomas, transcended the decades.

Spectacle: Elvis Costello With … is on the Sundance Channel.

Best Music of 2008 Part Two

Cardboard Bob stands in my office next to a black velvet painting of the desert. Who knew he wanted to be Wolfman Jack?

A big part of 2008 for me was my introduction to Theme Time Radio Hour, the program hosted by Bob Dylan. I have been up early many days this year, letting the dog out, and while perusing the news on the web with my first cup of coffee, firing up an episode. The program, now in its third season on satellite radio, is a series of one-hour programs, each based on a theme – divorce, birds, hair, baseball, presidents, women’s names, smoking, with Dylan as your disc jockey. You get the idea.

“Your place for themes, dreams and schemes,” he often cackles, and he seems barely able to contain himself as he eagerly shares little-heard gems that he seems to have discovered throughout his life. If you didn’t know it, Bob Dylan is a major-league record nut. He tells a caller that all the music on the show comes from his own personal collection, and that he likes music “that was made 70 years ago and music that was made last Tuesday.”

Those are attributes I can really admire and appreciate in a DJ. According to “Inside Dylan’s Brain,” a Vanity Fair article that serves as a kind of a thesaurus for the first two seasons, more than fifty percent of the music he plays is from the nineteen fifties and earlier. He plays show tunes, novelty songs, soul and R&B. He talks with great enthusiasm about calypso and reggae, sticks up for rap and cowboy music and plays the Replacements, Green Day, the Ramones and Run DMC alongside Dinah Washington, Muddy Waters and Mud Boy and the Neutrons. Genres have no place here.

And he’s funny. “I don’t usually like to tell people what I’m doing, but I am talking to a couple of car companies about possibly being the voice of their GPS system,” he says, introducing Ray Charles’ “Lonely Avenue” on his latest theme, Road Maps. “I think it would be good, if you’re looking for directions and you heard my voice saying something like ‘Take a left at the next street. No, a right. Know what, just go straight.’”

If you have read Chronicles Part One, you’ll know the world Dylan creates from a place he calls “the Abernathy building.” He seems to revel in history, pop culture, show-biz and political intrigue, rumors and gossip. He offers perspective on Nixon and the Checkers speech, Kennedy and his women, Sinatra and the Mob, Sinatra, Kennedy and their women. He likes Willie Nelson’s voice before he became the Red-Headed Stranger. When it comes to the Three Stooges, he argues Larry is the smartest and admits that he’s s Shemp man. He talks with equal aplomb about Edith Piaf and Paul Winchell, the ventriloquist who came up with the idea for the artificial heart. He is, he says, proud to live in America, “the only place where Slim Gaillard could sing an ode to matzo balls and gefilte fish.”

Dylan answers email, takes callers’ questions and includes conversations and soliloquies with Tom Waits (who ruminates on the extinction of the passenger pigeon, among other things), Elvis Costello, Jack White, Marianne Faithful, Richard Lewis, Jenny Lewis, Luke Wilson and Penn Gillette, among others. I mean, how cool is to hear David Hidalgo explain that Don Santiago Jimenez, the father of Flaco, is the godfather of tejano music, the first one to sing lyrics over polkas?

Dylan honestly sounds like he’s having the time of his life. “We’ve told the Percy Mayfield story a couple of times here,” he says introducing the original demo of “Hit the Road Jack” on the Road Maps show. “If you haven’t heard it, go download some of our shows illegally.” Did I mention he was funny?

After reading Chronicles and listening to a bunch of Theme Times, I think I know why people might get frustrated interviewing Dylan. If I ever got a crack at him I wouldn’t ask about him any of his songs. But you can bet I would bring up that Womack brothers’ acoustic demo of “Across 110th Street” that he says “shows how funky two acoustic guitars can be.”

Hear Bob Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour, on Sirius/XM and at Croz.FM. Read the first installment of Best of Music 2008.