BC107 - Five Mixes: Ray Padgett on Bob Dylan’s ‘Theme Time Radio Hour’
The live-show Dylanologist on “a radio persona who is sort of Bob Dylan, but also sort of not Bob Dylan”
via The Onion, 2010
As I’ve said before, Ray Padgett’s Bob Dylan live-show chronicle, Flagging Down the Double E’s, is one of the reasons I decided to start Beat Connection. It won’t be a surprise that I thought of this particular feature very early in the newsletter’s life—I waited until I’d been doing it a couple years to broach it with Ray. He was instantly agreeable, though new fatherhood beckoned—but he stayed on the case, naming the five goodies below around the holidays.
Just in case you aren’t familiar: Bob Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour aired for three seasons on Sirius XM, from 2006 to 2008. Per the title, each episode grouped a bunch of songs based on a simple theme. The songs themselves mostly dated from the twenties to the sixties, but they were almost always well chosen—and as Padgett mentions, Dylan’s own introductions could elevate even ordinary material. Theme Time episodes are personality-DJ radio in the classic sense—a style bred particularly on Black radio during the fifties, where you were listening as much to them as the records they played. If this sounds familiar with dance-music fans, it should.
The first season of Theme Time has fifty episodes; seasons two and three have twenty-five apiece; he also did one-offs on the theme of “Kiss” (2015) and “Whiskey” (2020), the latter a tie-in with Dylan’s new whiskey brand, Heaven’s Door, all of which comes up in our discussion below.
Ray Padgett; photo by Lesley Stephen, via Cover Me
In addition to the Dylan-shows one, Padgett also runs another Substack on Tom Waits. He also founded and continues to edit Cover Me, a blog about cover songs, and published a book about nineteen of those covers, also titled Cover Me, in 2017. (Cover Me recently published its “Top 50 Covers of 2024,” as well.) Padgett’s second book was the 33 1/3 volume on I’m Your Fan: The Songs of Leonard Cohen, in 2020, followed by the delightful Pledging My Time: Conversations with Bob Dylan Band Members, in 2023, about which I say more here. He also works as a publicist for Shore Fire Media.
You can hear four of these Theme Time Radio Hour episodes on this YouTube playlist.
RAY PADGETT: Thank you for waiting on me for, like, six months.
MM: Oh, it’s fine—it wasn’t holding anything up, for sure. I appreciate you doing it. I’ve always seen commonalities between Dylan fandom and DJ culture, and specifically in the way live recordings are, in many ways coin of the realm there. I don’t feel like it’s all that different, in some ways.
Sure. I mean, you’re far more of an expert than I am on half of that equation. But you’re absolutely right that the casual Dylan fan gets into the albums, but the super Dylan fan almost doesn’t listen to the albums, at least not as much, and is going nuts on the on the live tapes. Which is where I fall, definitely.
When Theme Time Radio Hour began in 2006, were you already neck-deep in live Dylan tapes?
Yes, but fairly recently. That would have been my freshman year of college, and when I got super into Dylan was my senior year of high school. So [in 2006] we’re about one year into me collecting live Dylan tapes. And this is the period of time where collecting live Dylan tapes means mailing burned CDs in the post. The Internet exists enough that you can find the people to trade with, but it’s not fast enough to actually send the files. I remember in my college dorm, every day I’d be getting three or four or ten burned CD-Rs and mailing out just as many.
Were they audio, or were you recording mp3 files on them?
Oh, no. MP3 was a big no-no. You got a lossless-to-lossless.
So, there were rules within the Dylan fandom for this sort of thing. Did you know about those beforehand? Did you have to learn them?
Oh, I had to learn them. And like many cults—let’s say there were a Byzantine array of complicated rules for trading this stuff, all of which, of course, were totally irrelevant: Within one year, people just started downloading off . . . I guess RapidShare was the one. But yeah—there’s B&P, which is blank-and-postage, and that’s what you do when you don’t have much to trade . . . I sound like I’m talking about ancient history. But it happened to be the period where I was really getting into Dylan. It was all about doing it properly.
I came to Theme Time Radio Hour as somebody who had been long interested in the sort of stuff that Dylan plays on the show, and I was decently knowledgeable about older music. But a lot of it was a surprise to me. How familiar, if at all, were you with the music on those shows when you began listening to it?
I mean, out of the hundreds of songs he played, I might have known five of them—generously. Especially the forties and fifties [stuff], I’m sure I still don’t know half the songs he plays. I was just coming out of high school, so I really didn’t know anything.
Everybody does a Bob Dylan imitation of some sort, and mine is the Theme Time Radio Hour voice. It’s so much fun to chew words up and spit them out the way he does. There’s always a little bit of a put-on with him, but especially on the show, when he is always just this side of pulling your leg.
Yeah, he definitely has adopted a radio persona who is sort of Bob Dylan, but also sort of not Bob Dylan. One thing he loves to do is just recite lists of words: “Here are,” I don’t know, “ten baseball terms, or a bunch of different jobs that famous people had,” and he’ll just list five or ten—and clearly, he’s just playing with words, and it’s so fun to hear. Or recitations: He recites [Edgar Allen Poe’s] The Raven in [the “Halloween” episode]. Anyone can recite The Raven, but when you hear Bob Dylan recite The Raven, it’s just fantastic.
He’s riffing. The first time I heard him doing it, I realized: “That’s his brain.” Because you might think, “Oh, that’s just the songs.” And it’s not just the songs.
I mean, Theme Time Radio Hour is so long ago now. But of course, he just did that book a couple years ago, The Philosophy of Modern Song, which is like a Theme Time Radio Hour sequel. And you sort of wish he would do more of it. I mean, there’s a lot of Theme Time Radio Hour episodes, but you feel like he could do one of these a week forever.
As a tape-head, you know how Dylan was singing live between 2006 and 2009. How does his spoken delivery compare with the shows you’ve heard in that period?
I’ll put it this way: It’s better enunciated. The late 2000s, his voice was starting to go downhill. And I’m saying this as someone who is obviously very tolerant of his unique vocal style. But I think even Dylan super-fans, you get into Tempest and Christmas in the Heart—fans nicknamed [him] “The Wolfman.” And while you can certainly hear that here, he’s taking care. He’s enunciating; you can make out what he’s saying. Then, you go listen to a live tape [from this period] where he says something to the audience, and half the time you’re like, “I have no idea what he just said.”
Well, you can also clearly hear the editing during his voiceover segments.
Oh, yeah. As with everything Dylan, there’s a lot of mystery around exactly how this was created and what [it] came from. Where I remember reading somewhere that he was recording out of his tour bus. I mean, you assume he’d have to. Yeah, it’s very casual-seeming. But clearly a lot of work went into this. He probably did need some retakes, too—maybe, “Can you mumble 10 percent less?”
S1 Episode 10: Summer (July 5, 2006)
We’re starting with the tenth episode, “Summer.” Why this episode in particular?
This is going to be a little lopsided, because the first two of the five changed my life. And then there’s three more I just like, But I’ll tell you, the first one changed my life more than any of the others.
My claim to whatever—not “fame”—but my writing has been [about] cover songs for a decade. I did two books about it, a blog that’s been going on for a million years. How did I get into cover songs? I got into cover songs from this episode of Theme Time Radio Hour.
[Dylan] played the Billy Stewart version of “Summertime,” the Gershwin song. I’d heard other versions of it, and I didn’t have an opinion one way or the other about the song “Summertime”—fine, but I didn’t really care.
Then he plays the Billy Stewart version. It’s fast and it’s scatting and has those drum fills, and it’s just incredibly high energy. I remember sitting in my dorm room thinking, “I didn’t know you could do this to a song. I didn’t know you could take a lyric, take a melody that had existed for years and a million other people done, and change everything else about it so completely.” That literally was one of those few lightbulb moments. That got me into covers. I didn’t have a trajectory of my professional life, but started me on the path that led to, basically, most of the writing I’ve done.
That’s interesting, because if Dylan has an m.o., it is to show you how many ways you can stretch or change a song. Did you already think of him that way yourself, or was it maybe something that you thought of as exclusive to him?
That’s a good question. I probably hadn’t given it much thought. Obviously, pretty soon I’d be into Dylan covers. That seems like a natural, but I clearly wasn’t yet—I was into him. This was fairly early. I had only been doing it for a year, with a limited budget; I don’t know how many CDRs I’d actually amassed by that point.
The song that stuck with me from this episode, not that I was expecting it at all, was Mungo Jerry’s “In the Summertime.” I had always filed that one under “not for me,” but it’s a catchy son-of-a-bitch, and Dylan’s comparison of it to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats, inspired by the same T.S. Eliot book, helped sell it.
I would say that’s true of so many of these songs—for me, a huge amount of appeal is his descriptions of them, his intros and his outros. Again, some of that’s personal—these genres, while I respect them, they’re not always for me. I’ve gotten some mixes of just the songs, and I kind of lose interest if it’s just the songs with no Bob Dylan. Some songs I like, but overall, there’s a lot more misses than hits.
But when he’s intro-ing and talking about these and telling these shaggy dog tales or stories from Hollywood history or something, that’s fascinating. Like that version of “Summertime” by Billy Stewart—I love the song. But the only mp3 [of it] I’ve ever had was ripped from that show. So, I’ve literally never heard that song without Bob Dylan’s intro and outro. To me, that’s part of the song. I can practically [recite it], I’ve heard the whole thing so many times: “Billy was much too big a talent to stay in the background.”
One reason I love Theme Time Radio Hour so much is that even when the music itself doesn’t connect to me, hearing him intro and talk about it makes it connect.
S1 Episode 13: Rich Man, Poor Man (July 26, 2006)
Was this the show that brought about your re-introduction to Tom Waits?
You got it. That’s why I picked it as number two, and that’s why it’s the other big one for me. Yes, this is the show that got me into Tom Waits.
When you get very into Bob Dylan, you wonder who else is like that. And at some point, someone had told me about Tom Waits. In my dorm room, I downloaded Rain Dogs off the shared file server that someone in the dorm was running. I made it one and a half songs into Rain Dogs, and was like, “Nope. This is awful. Never want to hear this guy again.” And I deleted the mp3s off my computer. I just thought, Tom Waits I was going to hate.
Anyway, however many months later, this comes out. He plays “On the Nickel.” He introduces it, he talks about what it means, and L.A. and all that, and it’s a very different sound than the first two tracks of Rain Dogs, which are very abrasive. This is a slow piano ballad. It totally hooked me. And I was glad it did, because Tom Waits became my other obsession, and the other person I write a newsletter about.
This is a pretty ribald episode overall. I like how Dylan calls Bob Miller “a man you couldn’t jack around” and makes sure to highlight the key line of “Charming Betsy”: “My gal don’t wear no perfume at all/But you can smell her just the same.”
That’s another one of my favorite things about these—him reciting the lyrics. When I was listening to some of these, I was like, “If no one else has done it, I need to make a megamix of just him reciting the lyrics to songs.” In one of the episodes, he does “Heat Wave” by Martha and the Vandellas, literally [reciting] the lyrics.
It’s the “Summer” episode. I was about to mention that one as my example. There’s something about the way he’s reciting it that puts you on edge. You wonder what the next word is, even though you know all the words. It’s the delivery. Like, “Oh, wow, he’s really like an old blues hipster.” There’s an archetype there that he’s following, that he’s putting himself into.
I’m just curious—were you into Theme Time at the time, or did you come to it later?
I was into it at the time, although I didn’t listen to satellite radio. I was just downloading the episodes. People were sharing them on Blogspot blogs.
Yeah. I would, too. I never did have a Sirius subscription. I don’t remember where I got mine, but that must have been there or the Dylan forums that were around at the time.
How much, if any, insight do you have with regard to the making of the show?
I know a little behind-the-scenes stuff, not a lot. The little I know is that this is as much [producer] Eddie Gorodetsky’s show as it is a Bob Dylan show—the music all comes from his archives. I think he was very involved in scripting it. They have been friends for years. He’s a TV guy—he’s the reason Dylan got on Dharma and Greg, for instance, because [Gorodetsky] called his buddy up. He is the key player behind the scenes, and very behind the scenes. He has no public presence.
I ask because I’ve seen knowledgeable people say Dylan simply read the script. I can buy that up to a point, but for Dylan to put his name on it means he has to at least approve of it, never mind say people’s names and quote the lyrics. If not everything that got played was his idea, it had to pass his muster.
With Dylan, I feel like there’s always these fan conspiracy theories that he’s just a mouthpiece, or he’s just doing something because he has to—which begs the question: Why does he have to? He doesn’t need whatever paltry amount of money Sirius Satellite Radio is paying him to do this. So why would he just blindly read a script he had nothing to do with?
I will absolutely buy that Eddie did a first draft, was very influential in picking the songs, etc.—sure. But the idea that [Dylan is] just handed a script two minutes before and just sort of reading it dead-eyed—I don’t see any reason that would be true. Again, he just wrote a whole book, Philosophy of Modern Song, that basically is like Theme Time Radio Hour scripts. So clearly, this is the stuff he is interested in, even if he does have help with scripting. I’m sure the research team—the facts he gets, I’m sure some of them are from his own brain, but a lot of them, I’m sure, are heavily researched. It’s amazing, the stuff they pull up. I think this is as much a Bob Dylan project as it appears to be.
S1 Episode 26: Halloween (October 25, 2006)
The Halloween episode is really fun—the songs have a lot of humor to them and so especially does the commentary. I also like the “spooky” echo on his voice that’s used a lot here. It’s so against what he typically does. He might be the classic-rock figure who played the fewest tricks with his own voice in the studio.
In the studio, that might be true. He does use some echo in concert on the song “Black Rider”—for years now, he’s been doing echo on certain lines, and some before that: I think “[Ballad of a] Thin Man,” too. So, he will do that occasionally. But you’re right. It’s unusual. I mean, the big vocal change, even beyond the echo, is that Steven Wright is suddenly the announcer for one episode—he has a crack about some about “a female announcer who dresses like me,” which is funny, because usually it’s a woman [Ellen Barkin].
Which struck me as an odd Halloween joke, because it feels more like an April Fool’s joke. Also, I will say the one song I actually just skipped was “Monster Mash.” We do not—I do not—need to hear that song ever again.
Yeah. I guess that would be on my list of five I would have even known at the time.
S2 Episode 69 [Ep. 19]: Doctors (February 20, 2008)
This is also a very funny episode. The bit that stands out is when he lists a bunch of musicians with “doctor” in their name and patiently explains how they’re not, in fact, doctors.
I also like when he just lists thirty types of doctors, because, again, it’s his pronunciation: “Podiatrist, therapist, optometrist.” On paper it says, “Okay, there’s a bunch of doctors,” but the way he does those lists is phenomenal.
Is there anybody you can Is there anybody else you can think of who does that? . . . Actually, that’s a terrible question. This episode also features the return of Tom Waits, calling in this time; he did that a few times. Is that part of the reason you chose that episode?
It wasn’t. I didn’t realize it was this episode—that was a pleasant surprise. I mean, I knew he called in, probably a half dozen times—he was one of the most frequent callers, “callers” in heavy quotes. Bob Dylan is not talking to any of these people, including on a few of these episodes where he has quote-unquote dialogues with random callers. It’s just clearly two parts recorded separately. But Tom Waits as a contributor is just phenomenal.
And actually, that question you just cut, my answer was going to be Tom Waits, because he has those [calls] where he recites characteristics of insects—facts he read in a book or something. But because it’s Tom Waits telling you these random insect facts, it’s just amazing.
That works. I also really like Dylan’s dialogue with a caller where he gives her the loopiest “here’s how you treat a cold” advice imaginable.
I think it’s the next one [see below] where [the caller says] she wants to become famous, but she doesn’t have any skills, so he tells her to start committing crimes. I mean, these insane conversations. Or on “Doctors,” when John Cusack calls in, and the intro is like, “I went to the farmers market with John Cusack.” Well, God knows. God knows if he’s ever . . .
Has Dylan ever been to a farmer’s market?
Even someone like Tom Waits. I’m sure they know [each other]. I’m sure they’ve met, But there’s no indication they’re close personal friends. But [with] Theme Time Radio Hour, [he’s got a] “When you’re on my show, everyone’s my friend” persona, even though he never quite acts like he’s Bob Dylan.
What struck me listening to a bunch of these is that he will play songs by people he knows very well, and make no mention. He’ll play songs that he’s recorded and make no mention. There’s one where he mentions Willie Nelson starting Farm Aid. He doesn’t mention that he played the first Farm Aid. He doesn’t mention that his comments inspired Farm Aid. He doesn’t even mention that he knows Willie Nelson. It’s just like any other DJ, introducing these people. And that’s such a classic thing for him. On the one hand, it’s very intimate. On the other end, he’s not really acting like he’s Bob Dylan, the musician. He never really makes any reference to him[self] being a musician.
I also have to note the aptness of Bob Dylan’s roots-music-heavy show playing Harmonica Frank, one of the people Greil Marcus writes about in Mystery Train, which is a full-circle kind of moment, since that book, as much as anything, invented the very idea of “Americana” as a style, or at least format.
I noticed that, too. I just re-read Mystery Train last year sometime. That was the first time I’d heard of Harmonica Frank. And this is probably the second and last time I heard of Harmonica Frank.
Greil Marcus is one of the few people who writes about Bob Dylan that Bob Dylan will actually read. No doubt he’s read that and maybe even learned about Harmonica Frank from it. But another reason I picked this one is because I’m a big White Stripes fan. It’s so rare that he plays anything approaching modern music. Usually the cutoff is 1969 or something, maybe a few in the seventies. So, hearing him play “Girl, You Have No Faith in Medicine,” which was only a couple years old. I mean, the White Stripes were an active band. I remember getting very excited about that.
S3 Episode 10: Famous People (December 10, 2008)
It’s funny to hear Dylan promise us an hour of “celebrity driven music,” given his own disinclination to put his personal life in the media.
Yes, and he has a broad definition of celebrity. In some of these, they’re celebrities to him. Some of them are honest-to-God, real celebrities. But some of them are Lee Van Cleef and James Ensor and people you’re Googling if you’re under eighty-four.
The Halloween episode uses background music and FX in a witty way, but this one might be funnier, if only for the canned version, with superfluous rock-guitar histrionics, of the Entertainment Tonight theme.
He must have picked the topic. And in this one, he makes some very subtle references to who he is. Like, I think the caller in this one starts out by saying, “You’re famous,” which is as close as you get to acknowledging that this is Bob Dylan. There’s one moment where he talks about photographers chasing you—sort of something he can relate to. It’s still a little vague. I actually didn’t even remember this episode, and one reason I picked it because I wanted to re-listen and see if something called “Famous People” would like have more stories about famous people he knows, or personal connections. And it absolutely does not, no.
It has a lot of Wikipedia.
And a ska Beatles diss track, which is my favorite moment of the show. I mean, he’s telling long stories about, you know, Gene Vincent getting in car accidents. These things are so funny, too. Like, he’s talking about Christopher Columbus and how he discovered America, but really didn’t discover America. But then, instead of being outraged by the obvious genocide, he’s outraged on behalf of this other guy on the ship who supposedly saw land first and was supposed to get some sort of reward, but then Christopher Columbus claims it for himself. [Dylan makes] some crack like, “That’s why it’s good to be captain.” These things are just laugh-out-loud funny, when he’s just going on these long historical anecdotes.
I like Theme Time Radio Hour better than The Philosophy of Modern Song, which I liked fine. But I think when he’s delivering these, they’re just so compelling in a way that on paper was I found a little more hit-and-miss.
You have to imagine the Dylan voice, as opposed to the Dylan voice transforming everything.
Yes.
Which brings me to my final point. When I began listening to Theme Time Radio Hour, I remember being bowled over that Dylan, who had been so private and therefore seemingly eccentric, was actually normal. He knew things that normal people knew—in particular, on the Baseball episode, he plays a song from the musical Damn Yankees, and then cracks: “And I don’t mean that group with Ted Nugent and those guys from Styx!” It removed the scales from my eyes. I’m curious if the show did anything like that for you?
I was so early in my Dylan fandom I don’t know that I had many preconceptions. This is the Bob Dylan I got into. The idea that he was incredibly enigmatic and mysterious to some degree, maybe I never bought into that quite as much as other people, because right when I was getting into them, he’s releasing an hour of radio every single week for, like, three years.
But I do think it ties into his broader project, which is what I sometimes talk about. I write pretty much exclusively about him in concert. And people sometimes ask me about his reputation as this elusive, mysterious figure. And I say, “Well, on the one hand he is. On the other hand, he’s on a stage in front of five thousand people every single night every year, so it’s not like he’s a recluse living in his castle and no one’s seen him in days. He’s constantly out there, presenting himself to the public, but in this very limited, circumscribed way.”
And that’s what Theme Time Radio Hour is—hundreds of hours of audio of him talking and sharing things and telling these stories. But it’s very specific. It’s not “Behind the scenes in Bob Dylan’s personal life,” Lord knows. It’s just this sort of character: Bob Dylan, the radio DJ, which is just fascinating to dive back into. You’re going to get what he wants to give you. And it’s more interesting—I’m sure his daily life is fairly prosaic. He’s an eighty-four-year-old guy; probably does eighty-four-year-old guy stuff in private. But presenting himself this way, I just think is much more interesting than the warts-and-all approach that everyone else seems to take.
Do you have any opinion of the post-series shows he’s done? He did one on “Kiss” and one on “Whiskey.”
I haven’t listened to them since they came out. I remember thinking that they seemed like they kind of just fit right in—to the point that the “Kiss” one, I thought was probably sitting around in the vault. The “Whiskey” one can’t have been, because it was tied to promoting Heaven’s Door. But I was hoping it was the start of a new season four, rather than the random one-off. Because, like I said, it seems like he could just keep cranking these out. I wish he would.
You’ve told me that you drive around sometimes listening to Theme Time Radio Hour with your family. How does your family feel about Dylan as DJ?
My wife loves it. She’s not even a huge Bob Dylan fan, but she finds him extremely charming. And my daughter—well, I have two daughters, but one’s a baby, so jury’s out on her. But my older daughter has asked for at least one song—we have a running mix of her favorite songs that we put on the car. She’s asked for one song so far to be added to the Ella Mix, and that is “Do Re Mi” by Woody Guthrie. So, Bob Dylan is introducing four-year-olds to Woody Guthrie all these years later.