Dylan the DJ is sharing his record collection with radio listeners - but he won't play his own tracks, writes Oliver Burkeman.
Early morning, somehow, does not seem to be Bob Dylan's natural time of day. Nevertheless, the legendary singer-songwriter made his debut as a radio DJ last Wednesday at 10am on America's east coast, which is 7am on the west coast - although anyone expecting a peppy, caffeinated rundown of the day's news, perhaps with some traffic updates, would have been disappointed.
There was lots of weather, though. The Theme Time Radio Hour - "with your host, Bob Dylan" - will take a different theme each week, showcasing songs selected from his personal record collection, and Wednesday's topic was the weather.
The result was an eclectic stew of blues, pop, easy listening, jazz and rock, featuring Fats Domino, Judy Garland and Stevie Wonder, to name just a few. But the show's celebrity presenter will not be playing his own songs, so his own forays into meteorology - Blowin' in the Wind and A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall - were absent. If Dylan did not seem sleepy at such an hour, it might be because the show was pre-recorded.
The XM satellite radio network is pay-for- service radio that is available across the US and on the web - to subscribe you must be a US resident. It has provided Dylan with equipment so he can record his thoughts at home, or on his still frequent tours. And while he has grown progressively less reclusive in recent years, publishing a memoir in 2004 and appearing last year in a Martin Scorsese documentary, No Direction Home, his comments in Wednesday's show remained enigmatic.
"West coast weather is the weather of catastrophe, and the Santa Ana winds are the winds of apocalypse," he said at one point, in a speaking voice that is just as much of an acquired taste as his singing voice, and probably would not have made it through the station's audition process had it not belonged to Bob Dylan.
"Chicago . . . it's known as the windy city but it's not the windiest city [ in the US] . . . the windiest city is Dodge City, Kansas."
Subsequent themes are said to include cars, dance, police, whisky, and - for Mother's Day, which falls on May 14th in the US - a show about mothers, featuring Merle Haggard's Mama Tried and LL Cool J's Mama Said Knock You Out: a juxtaposition of country and hip-hop seemingly typical of Dylan's catholic taste.
"He sounds like he's been doing it for years," the Dylan expert and rock critic Greil Marcus told Reuters. "In his head, he probably has."
In No Direction Home Dylan recalled how radio had given him his first sense of an American musical culture that reached far beyond his hometown of Hibbing, Minnesota.
"We'd have to, like, listen late at night for other stations to come in from other parts of the country," he said. "Johnnie Ray, he had some kind of strange incantation in his voice, like he'd been voodoo'd, and he cried, kind of, when he sang . . . it was the sound that got me, it wasn't who it was . . . I began to listen to the radio, [ and] I began to get bored being there [ in Minnesota]."
Never one to worry about enraging his fans by embracing new technology - as during the 1960s, when he abandoned acoustic for electric guitars - Dylan has chosen to present his show on one of the two satellite radio networks now battling for domination of the medium's next generation. XM also carries shows presented by Tom Petty, Oprah Winfrey and Snoop Dogg, while the station's competitor, Sirius, has signed Eminem.
- (Guardian Service)