Dylan Plays Leonard on his Radio Show 3/6/08

[lightning]

"Birds" was the theme of today's Bob Dylan Theme Time Radio Hour and Dylan included Bird on a Wire ( not a song about birds, but who cares?)

Here's a link to the track with Bob's introduction to it. It doesn't make sense to me that a bird would be partially on a wire and partially on the ground and somewhere,and so get electrocuted, but maybe someone could explain it to us:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/pv4sl6

[liverpoolken]

Lightning

Being a bit of a bobsessive I've been listening to and recording all of Bob's wonderful Theme Time Radio Shows since day one and I was beginning to wonder what the reason was why he hadn't played any LC tracks.

During the course of these radio shows Bob has just about played songs of every major artist of the last 100 years or so, except Barry Manilow of course, so why not LC I fretted.

I can now sit back and relax in the knowledge that LC has at long last been awarded his 'approved by Bob' status.

BTW the grapevine tells me that after years of lurking Bob has just signed up as a member of the forum along with a zillion other folk.

So let's all give a big warm welcome to Bob Dylan everyone.

Ta Ken

[Diane]

I just heard on the news that Bob Dylan said something comprehensible last night!

SAO PAULO (Reuters) - The normally taciturn Bob Dylan was moved to words on Thursday night when a young Brazilian woman rushed on stage and hugged him during a concert in Sao Paulo.

The American singer-songwriter is known for saying very little to his audience between songs and if he does it's usually an incomprehensible mumble.

During the encore of his second show in Sao Paulo, a long-haired woman ran on to the stage and embraced the star. A startled-looking Dylan hung on to his black Cordoba hat before a bouncer carried her away.

At the end of the song, he spoke to his fans for the first time in a two-hour show. "Thank you, friends. And I'd like to thank that young lady for coming up and joining us on stage."

Then he started chuckling to himself and said: "Where did she go? I want to give her my hat. Don't let her get away."

It was not known if the two did eventually get to meet formally. Dylan is currently on tour of Latin America with dates in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Chile.

[liverpoolken]

LC keeps good company on Bob's latest radio show - Fats Domino, Buffalo Springfield, Al Johnson, Captain Beefheart, Misssissipi John Hurt and the the legend that is Mel Blanc.

You have to have a sense of humour to be a real Bob fan. Who better than a real "Bobsessive" to make jokes about Bob? Believe me, we really know where the bodies are buried. So it was very pleasing when these radio shows were first broadcast to find out that Bob is a great comedian. A true Jokerman in fact.

Here is the setlist for Bob's 'Birds' show.

01 Opening
02 The Rooster Song - Fats Domino
03 "Frank Purdue, Slim Gaylor and Boids"
04 Cooing To The Wrong Pigeon - Merrill Moore
05 Bluebird - Buffalo Springfield
06 "Bluebird of Happiness"
07 Chicken - Mississippi John Hurt
08 The Coo-Coo Bird - Clarence Ashley
09 "The Cuckoo Bird"
10 "Roadrunner Joke by Redd Foxx"
11 "Canary in a Coal Mine"
12 Bird On A Wire - Leonard Cohen
13 Phone Call
14 Red, Red Robin - Al Jolson
15 "Round Robin"
16 Buzzard Pie - Rudy Green & His Orchestra
17 Daffy's Rhapsody - Mel Blanc
18 Ice Cream For Crow - Captain Beefheart
19 "Crows For Kids"
20 "One Melody, Four Songs"
21 Great Speckle Bird - Roy Acuff
22 E-Mail
23 Billy Vera on Tony Allen & The Champs
24 Night Owl - Tony Allen & The Champs
25 "Bad Bob Bird Jokes"
26 Wings Of A Dove - Blues Busters
27 Shake A Tail Feather - The Five Du-Tones
28 Closing/End Credits

[Peter]

Returning to Lightnings question: Even though I often have difficulties to understand what Dylan wants to say, this time his statement is quite clear and correct.

When a bird perches on an electric wire, nothing will happen. Even you could walk on it without getting electrocuted. But as soon as the bird (or you) touches the electrical ground, that is anything with zero voltage like the earth or the pole or anything connected with the ground, an electrical circuit will be completed. Then the electrical current flows through the bird, leading to electrocution.

Lots of birds are killed every day by touching the wire and the pole at the same time. This is especially true for big birds like birds of prey (raptors), e.g. eagles. They perch on the pole and if they stretch a wing and accidentally touch the wire with it they are dead within a second.

So save energy to save the birds ...

Peter

[lightning]

Thanks for this clear and knowledgeable explanation. It was hard for me to understand how a bird high on a telephone wire could also touch the ground. but touching the pole that touches the ground, or has zero voltage itself seems plausible. It's a sad end to the bird on the wire, which I always conceived of as doing a delicate balancing act high above the rest of us, trying in his way, to be free.

[Minna]

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[liverpoolken]

Minna

Here is a link to easily downloadable zip files of Bob's Theme Time Radio Shows.

http://ttrh-blog.patrickcrosley.com/

Ta Ken

[Minna]

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[Kush]

It would be much easier to access if he had done the show on NPR but ...oops he wouldnt be making a multi-million dollar deal in that case. And there are extremely talented musicians who do NPR shows....Marian McPartland comes to mind and many many others but they dont have his pop celebrity status. But he prefers the money to the dissemination of art so its his call. I prefer my taste in music to his.

p.s. actually it was rumored to be $ 35 million or 3.5 million or something like that.....
He plays all these really old blues masters on his show and these folks pretty much lived in poverty or atleast never made made any decent money. He plays their music and makes a million bucks on radio (to add to the millions he already has). something is just wrong here I think...somewhat like Al Gore having a $ 20,000 electricity bill.

[Minna]

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[lightning]

He plays all those "old blues masters" (also country) because he knows that without them, there would be no decent American popular music, only "white bread" as its known. There would be no "Bob Dylan." . Poverty and pain were the sources of their creation. It's hard to believe a rich man when he sings the blues,( though we're all born to suffer and die and the cliché says "Money doesn't make happiness".) As for all those excess millions, it's a wonder they haven't attracted a Kelley Lynch or worse, a Marc David Chapman. Sarah did walk off with some of them, maybe half at that time.
Records, CDs and now downloads are cheap art compared to painting, sculpture, etc, and so recording artists must speak for and to "the people" though they be multi-millionaires. That's why I have trouble believing guys like Tom Waits with his blues-jazz influenced "low-life" pose, or even "Please Don't Pass Me By" Leonard Cohen.
The Bob Dylan of Theme Time often seems like a pre-programmed robot, not the clever, mercurial, independent mind of days long ago. I still listen to that show every week , waiting for the old Dylan to resurface.

[Joe Way]

I really enjoy the shows, but do agree that they are very tightly scripted. Bob has a great delivery, though and I'm sure that he approves of the tone of the shows. One of my favorites was when he was discussing a rivalry between two early Ska performers whose followers had a tendency to get into fights with each other. Apparently the government arranged a joint performance to show solidarity between the performers-Bob said something to the effect, "Yeah, the same thing happened between Gordon Lightfoot's followers and mine."

I think the music is outstanding and you can really learn a lot about the history of different musical genres by listening.

One of the best parts for me is that a certain forum member created the greatest cd covers ever when he sent me the shows!

Joe

[Kush]

Hi Minna, lightning...I have no doubt Dylan is a good man (for the most part) and I am not a left wingy type of person at all. Hardly so.... I am all for capitalism every single time but I am against its excesses. and there are many. npr is National Public Radio and if Dylan wants to disseminate American music and early blues to the american public then what better forum than that. Actually there are many programs at npr that play the same music as the Dylan show...but he is Bob Dylan and gets a million dollar deal at the exclusive sirius XM radio for which you have to subscribe to listen to. Or you can hunt around on the internet for obscure links. Its a rip-off in my book because of his celebrity status that he can command so much money to play a DJ to an exclusive club of listeners. But I do not doubt that it is a good program. Just not worth a million dollar deal on satellite radio.
But of course as you say I am only speaking from the outside so maybe there is something that I dont know. Just what it looks like to me.

Lightning...if you are saying that "old blues masters" is the only decent american music then I have to completely disagree. Are you saying Irving Berlin, Frank Sinatra, Cole Porter, John Coltrane, Broadway, Hank Williams etc etc is not decent "American music"? That seems a very sweeping statement to me. And who is to judge? Dylan plays his choice of music and brings people to appreciate that. Great. Just not for millions of dollars on satellite radio. Its a rip-off, the same as when we buy a high-priced Bose speaker (which are undoubtedly good) but you get equally good speakers for a tenth of the price.
I am not familiar with the term "white bread" and I'd probably like to keep it that way. As for Tom Waits....I dont personally care much for his music but so many people swear by it so I'll take their word. 50,000 Waits fans can't be wrong. But these are all a separate issue and my only point is the Dylan radio thing is a rip-off ultimately, even though the public do not directly shell out that much money to him. Indirectly they do.

p.s. I am probably making a bigger deal of it than it needs to be....I'll quit now . But it just sounded a little funny right from the start when they announced it...

[lightning]

I agree that some American standards that came from Irving Berlin, Broadway (Rogers and Hammerstein, Jerome Kern, Sondheim etc) are schmaltzy but sometimes very nice. "White Bread' usually applies to bland,conventional, often televised American music, especially of the '50s , pre- rock and roll, pre-Dylan, pre-integration and African - American infuenced popular music such as we have today. The comparison is to a spongy, nutiritionally valueless grocery product like Wonder Bread. Typical white-bread singers include Doris Day, Patti Page, Anita Bryant, Dinah Shore, Perry Como, Pat Boone and the likes. In retrospect that genre is uninteresting , kitschy and very bad (Rosemary Clooney has earned some respectability and you can probably think of some others). As for being outraged that Dylan is overpaid, or celebrities including ball players ,politicians and royalty having too much money while some lose their homes or sleep in doorways, I couldn't agree more, but that's the down side of capitalism. I'm also offended that the copyright laws didn't seem to help most of the great black musicians that were ripped off by their imitators and popularizers. If Eddie Gordetsky, the brains behind TTRH, were the DJ of the show, it would be less interesting than any three programs you find on WFMU in the course of a few days. But who's being ripped off? Does the sponsor Cadillac expect to sell its cars to Dylan fans, most of whom still think of him as Woody Guthrie's spiritual heir, and may still be in a quasi-sixties mode? I posed the question on the Expecting Rain forum," Now does anybody feel like buying a Cadillac?" I got jokes in reply. As a former major advertising agency copywriter, I can tell you it's the sponsor who's being ripped off. I don't understand why Cadillac continues to use Bob Dylan as a spokesman or fund Theme Time Radio Hour (unless that's a put-on too).