Bob Dylan’s Lives of the Poets:
Theme Time Radio Hour as Buried Autobiography 

In 1777 Samuel Johnson was approached by a committee of booksellers to write biographical prefaces to the works of 47 poets whose writing they hoped to present to readers in a new popular edition.1 At the time, in his sixties, by the acknowledgement of his contemporaries Johnson possessed an unmatched command of English literature: the author of the Dictionary of the English Language, editor of Shakespeare, according to Adam Smith, Johnson “knew more books than any man alive.” His erudition was monumental, legendary, memorably mythologized by his biographer James Boswell, who tells how young Sam Johnson as a boy searching for apples his brother may have hidden in their father’s bookshop discovered on a high shelf, not apples but a folio volume of Petrarch, a book he then and there read “a great part of” with “avidity,” thus embarking upon a lifetime’s ravenous reading. Such was the power of Johnson’s reputation at the time that the booksellers permitted Johnson to name his own terms—and were relieved when he requested a very modest 200 guineas (Bate 526). What Johnson wrote was a labor of love: rather than the little prefaces the booksellers would have been contented with—what they wanted most was Johnson’s name on the project—but with a congenial subject and in a relaxed mood, he gave them 370,000 words, the equivalent, it has been pointed out, of about five modern novels: anecdote, critical commentary, appreciation, literary theory, observations on life, and in particular, the life of writing—the distilled wisdom of a lifetime. Many of the poets Johnson writes about are obscure, of little interest today—how many people still read William Garth or William Shenstone or Mark Akenside or Edmund Smith? What remains of enduring fascination is what Paul Fussell calls “buried autobiography,” glimpses of Johnson’s mind at work and of the man himself.

In 2006, Bob Dylan, likewise in his sixties, was approached by XM Satellite Radio about the possibility of hosting a weekly program. One imagines that what XM may have initially most desired was Dylan’s name, a worthy competitor to Howard Stern who’d recently signed on with Sirius Satellite Radio; one also imagines Dylan requested more than 200 guineas. If Johnson was, as the novelist Tobias Smollett called him, the “great cham” of English literature in the eighteenth century, Dylan is the great cham of twentieth-century music. His encyclopedic knowledge of American song has been frequently noted, described, and admired. Martin Scorsese—Dylan’s Boswell—gives us the mythic anecdote of Dylan finding in his father’s house not a book of poetry but a record player and the 78 recording of “Drifting Too Far from Shore,” a song, Dylan says, which made him feel like someone else.

Theme Time Radio Hour stands in nearly the same relation to Dylan’s career as the Lives of the Poets do to Johnson’s. We hear Dylan late in his life, for the moment no longer combative, in a generous mood and working within a capacious form, the one-man repository of a great tradition, now playing the role of gregarious old codger, speaking to a popular audience in an accessible format, willing now to share his astonishing knowledge and record collection with the next generation. It reveals his Johnsonian love of biographical detail, his sometimes dark sense of humor, his love of corny jokes, and his desire to rescue from oblivion art he clearly loves and treasures.

There may have been those who expected Dylan’s radio program to be a straightforward autobiographical exercise of some kind: play a song—something from Woody Guthrie, say, or from old pals like George Harrison or Johnny Cash—and then reminisce. Such expectations were quickly disappointed: you could read the complaints on the Internet. Again and again Dylan does play and mention musicians whose careers have intersected his own—Mike Bloomfield, Augie Myers, T-Bone Burnett, among others—though for the most part, he steers clear of direct personal commentary. (There are some memorable exceptions: on the Cars program, Dylan claims he rode in a Lincoln once with Joni Mitchell, and notes, she “was a good driver,” who made him “feel safe.” On the Texas episode, Dylan notes that Willie Nelson, his former touring partner, runs his bus on cooking oil: “Sometimes late at night, you can see us,” Dylan says, “I’m filling up my tank at the gas station; He’s filling up his at Denny’s.”) But when Dylan introduces the Staples Singers he doesn’t mention his long personal association with Mavis Staples, whom he may have in fact proposed marriage to at one time; instead he comments on the guitar technique of Pops Staples, how beautifully he controls the tremolo.

However much some fans may have wished for the kind of nostalgic song-and-story show Roger McGuinn loves to present these days, what Dylan delivers is far more complex and far more interesting. Of course it’s not straightforward. Greil Marcus quite rightly asserts that “few performers have made their way onto the stage of the twentieth century with a greater collection of masks” (220). As Johnson, who wrote essays under the names “The Rambler” and “The Idler,” well understood, the mask allows both protection and liberation.

“Where would radio be without a disc jockey?” Dylan asks on the Radio episode by way of introduction to Boyd Bennett and His Rockets “Cool Disc Jockey,” a 1959 rockabilly song Dylan may very well have heard for himself for the first time over the radio. The mask of the deejay is one that Dylan seems to wear with considerable pleasure and even pride. It aligns him with Sonny Boy Williamson II, whose “Don’t Start Me to Talkin’” Dylan covered so memorably on the Letterman Show in 1984, a Theme Time favorite, played five times on various episodes, well known both as the king of blues harmonica and as the long time host of King Biscuit Time from KFFA in Helena, Arkansas.

A deejay’s task is introduce music, and even though inevitably formulaic to some extent, Dylan the deejay’s introductions are often revealing. Robert Zimmerman, the boy from Hibbing, Minnesota, who wanted variously to become James Dean, Little Richard, and Woody Guthrie, whose life changed when he signed with Columbia Records, not surprisingly, tells us typically, where an artist comes from, the label he recorded on, the name he was born with and the names he may have assumed. He seems especially attuned to musical identity. “We forget how much Elvis wanted to be Dean,” Dylan remarks after playing Dean Martin’s “I Don’t Care if the Sun Don’t Shine.” There are moments of a what can only described as a kind of artistic projection: Randy Newman, for example, Dylan introduces as “obstinately self-willed,” known for “refusing to conform to popular trends.” Dylan, who thinks of singers and songwriters as coming from somewhere in particular—Irma Thomas and Fats Domino from New Orleans, Bruce Springsteen from New Jersey, They Might Be Giants from Massachusetts—notes with apparent pleasure the Minnesota roots he shares with Judy Garland, Eddie Cochran, and Prince. And on the School episode, Dylan plays the Minneapolis-St Paul version of Tommy Facenda’s “High School USA,” released in 1959, when Dylan was a student at Hibbing High School, a song released in thirty versions nationwide, each one naming local schools: “Central, North, and Edison/ Harding, Henry, Bloomington,” Facenda sings, “Johnson, Murray, Fergus Falls, Roosevelt High was having a ball.”

The relationship between a radio deejay and listener is built around the illusion of a certain kind of intimacy. In his fine new book Something in the Air: Rock, Radio, and The Revolution that Shaped a Generation, Mark Fisher describes how radio, “for all its artifice, its deejays with fake names, its sameness and phony familiarity,” nevertheless can succeed in creating a real sense of community and in forging deep and abiding bonds with its listeners” (xviii). Unlike a rock performer, say, who comes to us amplified, at a distance, in a huge public place like a hockey arena, who appears as distant as a speck on stage or image on a screen, the deejay enters our lives, our cars, our kitchens, even our bedrooms. Put your radio under your pillow, Dylan advises an email correspondent on the Baseball show, that’s what he says he used to do. Dylan’s deejay persona is built around his voice, his greatest instrument, sounding absolutely ancient now, like the voice of someone who may have traveled or played with the likes of Charlie Patten or Son House.

What a deejay needs to do is choose and play music. Today, in the age of personal play lists and customized Internet radio and interactive and open-ended and choose-your-own art of all kinds, it’s probably worth noting how old-fashioned—and typically Dylanesque—this approach is. He doesn’t give us what we want; he gives us what he thinks we need. Jakob Dylan told an interviewer once he remembered driving with his dad on vacation: they were headed to northern Minnesota, and his dad played a single tape the whole way, Hank Williams, over and over and again. Jakob says he didn’t object; he figured his dad was trying to teach him something. Since then, Dylan has varied his list and developed a line of patter, but still, to listen to Theme Time Radio, you have to get in the car.

Further evidence, perhaps, that the country of Theme Time Radio is ruled by a benevolent dictator is the fact that though each program includes a listener email, all of them appear more or less cooked. One wonders who might be the real author of this one, read on the Mothers show, used to introduce Ernie K. Doe’s “Mother-in-Law”: “Dear Bob: I've got a hammerhead of a mother-in-law, an ugly, evil-lookin' old woman, so pitiful. She's careworn, drawn and pinched — gaunt and lank. I bought her a new chair, but she won't let me plug it in. She belittles me, depreciates me, disparages me. She downgrades me, berates me, censures me and condemns me, libels me and raps me, dismisses me and rejects me. Could you please play a song for her?” Another comes from a certain George Clooney: “Dear Bob, My Auntie used to sing. Do you think you could play one of her songs?”

In his first show devoted to Trains, Dylan expresses impatience with those who make requests, which he notes, usually involve someone asking to hear a record they already own and presumably love and want someone else to play so they can hear it again. If you want to hear your own records, Dylan says, play them yourself. What he is trying to do, he says, is to “shine the light” on music that otherwise might not be known. Johnson demonstrated a similar urge in the Lives of the Poets: “an instinctive desire to rescue them, if only briefly, from extinction in the sludge of time,” Walter Jackson Bate says, “to see them as part of the general drama of human effort, experience, risk, hope, and disappointment” (531). Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour is preoccupied with mortality: he seems to take an almost perverse delight in reciting accounts of early deaths, boating and car accidents, plane crashes, alcoholism and cirrhosis, drug overdoses; he takes the roll of all those gone before their time: Otis Redding, Hawkshaw Hawkins, Cowboy Copas, Patsy Cline, Shorty Long, Lefty Frizzell, Leroy Carr. On the other hand, in the face of time and mortality, our deejay is trying to save something. Especially revealing in this regard are Dylan’s remarks on Tiny Tim: before playing “Tiptoe Through the Tulips with Me,” he praises Tiny Tim for his knowledge of obscure music: A lot of people think he was a joke, Dylan says, “but no one knew more about old music than Tiny Tim did. He studied it and he loved it. He knew all the songs that only existed as sheet music. When he passed away, we lost a national treasure.”

The first show opens with Dylan playing Muddy Waters’ “Blow Wind Blow.” Many journalists were quick to notice that this is an interesting choice by the author of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” It’s also been noted that in the lyrics are a clear precursor to Dylan’s “It Takes A Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry.” Even more interesting may be that this is the year Dylan was recording a Muddy Waters song for Modern Times, his version of “Rollin’ and Tumblin’,” a song which so resembled the original, that it inspired disgusted charges of plagiarism and likewise passionate defenses with references to the rich folk tradition of artistic appropriation.

Just as revealing as the artist and song Dylan chooses to begin his show is his manner of introducing Muddy Waters: “One of the ancients by now,” Dylan calls him, “whom all moderns prize.” This is a classic eighteenth-century distinction, Ancients vs. Moderns, embodied memorably in Jonathan Swift’s Battle of the Books, and Johnson’s own magisterial Preface to Shakespeare, when in 1765, he acknowledges that Shakespeare “may now begin to assume the dignity of an ancient, and claim the privilege of established fame and prescriptive veneration.”

“I think I shall be among the English poets after my death,” John Keats famously said near the end of his life, and there was no doubt who it was he aspired to be among: Dryden, Milton, and Shakespeare. One way to think about Dylan’s Theme Time enterprise, then, is this: it is his own roll call of the artists he would aspire to be among. Dylan is week-by-week constructing a canon of his own. T.S. Eliot in his famous essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” asserts that when a new work of art comes into being, all existing works re-arrange themselves around it: the new reconfigures the old. Dylan’s radio show is his own oblique contribution to the ongoing debate regarding how to place his work, the question of where he belongs: is it with Allen Ginsberg and Williams Carlos Williams in the pages of the Norton Anthology of Poetry? Or is it, as Christopher Ricks has suggested, among the English poets—Keats, Tennyson, and Hardy? Or as Gordon Ball and others have suggested, is it among the Nobel Laureates—Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Seamus Heaney?

Dylan’s response, as I said, is oblique: it is characteristically sly. He seems to be saying once again that he is a song and dance man, kin to the Carter Family, and Slim Harpo, with his harp on a rack, or bluesmen like Lonnie Johnson, with the cowboy bands, with The Spaniels, whom he claims again to have seen as part of the doomed Winter Dance Party. Dylan’s gift for eclectic appreciation, one of the great surprises of his Chronicles Volume One perhaps, his penchant for weirdly suggestive, metaphoric epigrams of praise, these are perfectly suited for a deejay’s commentary before and after a song. Tommy Duncan’s “Daddy Loves Mommyo,” Dylan says, is “all hydrogen and sulfide.” Warren Storm’s “Prisoner’s Song” is a “hard-boiled hayburner,” and Hank Williams’s “My Son Calls Another Man Daddy” is “the Battle of the Bulge of all songs.”

On the other hand, Dylan again and again brings in poets in juxtaposition with his beloved blues and country singers. He recites Laurence Ferlinghetti on baseball, Gregory Corso on weddings. He begins the show devoted to the Devil by reciting a passage from the first book of Milton’s Paradise Lost: the magnificent description of Satan’s Fall while in the background Reverend Gary Davis is heard strumming “The Devil’s Dream”:

Him the Almighty Power

Hurled headlong flaming from th' ethereal sky

With hideous ruin and combustion down

To bottomless perdition, there to dwell

In adamantine chains and penal fire,

Who durst defy th' Omnipotent to arms.

The combined effect of Dylan’s voice, Milton’s verse, Rev. Gary Davis’s guitar work is deliciously spooky, and just the sort of juxtaposition Dylan incorporates into the show again and again. He follows Milton and Paradise Lost with Robert Johnson, “Me and the Devil Blues,” and the Louvin Brothers, “Satan is Real.” “That’s how Christopher Marlowe said it,” Dylan announces after reading from “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”; “Kim Shattuck and her band The Muffs have another way of putting it,” and lets them launch into their own grungy, punkish “Laying on a Bed of Roses.” In some of Dylan’s best-known songs, figures from literature and popular culture co-exist—Ma Raney and Beethoven, Ophelia, the Good Samaritan, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. They issue from the same imagination and live in the same songs. In Chronicles, Dylan acknowledges his admiration of Thucydides, Edgar Allan Poe, Bertolt Brecht, Frank Sinatra, Gorgeous George, Dave Von Ronk, and Ricky Nelson. Behind the more recent albums are both literary influences—F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virgil, Shakespeare, Henry Timrod—and blues and country singers—Memphis Minnie, Merle Haggard. Clearly, in Dylan’s imagination there are no distinctions, no categories. The radio show permits jug bands and lyric poets to bump up against each other, to engage in an open-ended conversation. When Dylan in the Coffee episode of the show asserts that another name for manic-depression or bi-polar disorder is “The Blues,” I don’t think he’s taking a Tom Cruise-like swipe at modern psychiatry; instead he’s making an argument for the continuity of human experience, of human nature: our terminology may change; human nature does not. This is a bedrock assumption of Samuel Johnson’s literary criticism. The ones who speak to it with enduring insight—Shakespeare and Lightin’ Hopkins, Lefty Frizzell and Emily Dickinson, Dylan Thomas and Skip James, and of course, Dylan himself—they are the Ancients. “The great songs live outside their moment of inception,” Dylan says about Jimmie Rodgers.

One obstacle for satellite radio, one that Marc Fisher points out in his book on radio, is that because its signal goes everywhere, it seems to come from nowhere: “Most channels are voice-tracked well in advance of broadcast, so there are few references to anything happening right now, and obviously nothing about what’s going on in your hometown” (301). For someone like Dylan, for whom the Civil War seems more immediate than the Iraq War, who recently expressed his preference for the Ted Mack Amateur Hour over American Idol, timeliness is not a worry. But Dylan does manage to draw upon the deeply imaginative power of radio to evoke a sense of place. Like his fellow Minnesotan’s Prairie Home Companion, Theme Time Radio emanates from a fictional place, not so fully realized as Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, but still vivid. The show is recorded, we are told, in the Abernathy Building, Studio B. Dylan tells us at various times he’s planning to head off after the show to Samson’s Diner or Elmo’s Bar. He mentions Carl the barber, whose shop is located in the Abernathy building. But ultimately, Theme Time Radio emanates not from any studio, but from the vast, still unexplored teeming landscape of Dylan’s imagination, a country as large and inclusive as Walt Whitman’s America, full of heartbreak and jokes, stories and crazy characters, recipes, and songs, songs that so long as we love and grieve and laugh and shed tears will celebrate our flawed and glorious humanity.

Works Cited

Bate, Walter Jackson. Samuel Johnson. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977.

Boswell, James. The Life of Samuel Johnson, L.L.D., with a Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, ed. George Birkbeck Hill and revised by L.F. Powell (6 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934-64.

“Cars.” Theme Time Radio Hour. XM Satellite Radio. July 2006.

“Devil.” Theme Time Radio Hour. XM Satellite Radio. August 2006.

Dylan, Bob. Chronicles: Volume One. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004.

Fisher, Marc. Something in the Air: Radio, Rock, and the Revolution that Shaped a Generation. New York: Random House, 2007.

Fussell, Paul. Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971.

Marcus, Greil. The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes. New York: Picador, 1997.

“Mothers.” Theme Time Radio Hour. XM Satellite Radio. May 2006.

No Direction Home. Spitfire Pictures, 2005.

“Radio.” Theme Time Radio Hour. XM Satellite Radio. August 2006.

Ricks, Christopher. Dylan’s Vision of Sin. New York: Ecco, 2004.

“School.” Theme Time Radio Hour. XM Satellite Radio. September 2006.

“Texas.” Theme Time Radio Hour. XM Satellite Radio. March 2006.

“Trains.” Theme Time Radio Hour. XM Satellite Radio. March 2006.

“Weather.” Theme Time Radio Hour. XM Satellite Radio. May 2006.

“Wedding.” Theme Time Radio Hour. XM Satellite Radio. June 2006.

Notes