GOTTA SERVE SOMEBODY: BOB DYLAN, WHISK(E)Y, AND A NEW "THEME TIME RADIO HOUR"

Bob, books, booze: beautiful.

warning: contains spoilers. GO listen to the show before you read this (link here; also available on youtube)

From 2006 until 2009, Bob Dylan manned a satellite radio show called Theme Time Radio Hour. The themes, dreams, and schemes he explored, with the help of an excellent staff of researchers and executive producer Eddie Gorodetsky, included cars, hair, trains, Christmas, flowers, and California. Individual shows on each topic featured familiar and obscure songs about them, poetry readings, history lessons, jokes so terrible they’re delicious, and whatever Dylan felt like tossing into the mix. The hundred shows are old friends, now, and some of the best road-tripping listening you can find.

The announcement of a brand-new episode of TTRH, to be aired September 21st on Sirius XM Radio, sent Dylan fans into transports. That it was to be about whiskey, and in conjunction with Bourbon Heritage Month, didn’t undercut any glee. Yes, Dylan is in partnership with Heaven’s Door Spirits, and therefore makes and sells whiskey himself these days. TTRH’s “Whiskey” isn’t about for-profit and self-promotion, though. Heaven's Door has just launched its second annual #ServeSomebody philanthropic program, which works with food banks across the United States. With more than 20 million Americans now jobless since COVID-19, and many of those people working in the food, beverage and hospitality industry, meal donations matter intensely. Heaven’s Door is donating for every bottle or beverage sold, and hopes to offer 300,000 free meals by October 31. If the popularity of this special radio show increases that number, so much the better.

“It’s nighttime in the city. There’s a hint of jasmine in the air. A startled cat runs across the piano keys….”

“Hello, friends, and welcome back to Theme Time Radio Hour. I’m your host, Bob Dylan. To paraphrase Alexandre Dumas in The Count of Monte Cristo, I’m so delighted to see you again, it makes me forget for the moment that all happiness is fleeting.” My, it’s good to hear Dylan sounding so fresh and clear. On stage, of course, he uses his singing voice — like all performers do. On the old TTRH, he had a persona, a gruff growly Wolfman-Jack dj way of speaking. Here, in “Whiskey,” he talks in his normal voice, and quite conversationally. It makes the stories and songs he shares feel porchside, living-room — a throwback to the days when families gathered around the towering wood-cased Zenith for fireside chats and all kinds of radio hours. “Theme Time Device Hour” isn’t going to happen, even if you’re listening on what looks like cigarettes shoved into your ears.

“Quiet Whiskey,” by Wynonnie Harris, comes with a lesson about Harris’s fellow songwriters. Dylan loves the standards and schools us in them: from a line in a 1928 book through a Sleepy John Estes song we arrive at Charlie Poole. The great Charlie Poole, Dylan’s fellow Columbia recording artist, who “knew how to take lemons and make lemonade,” mashed up Estes’s song with the earlier “Hesitation Blues” and “If the River Was Whiskey” was born. If you don’t like my peaches, dontcha shake my tree.

Dylan tells the story of a molasses flood in the North End of Boston in January 1919, when a rum manufacturing tank exploded and the 40-foot flowing wall of viscous sugar killed 21 people. He tells us of Johnny Bush and Willie Nelson’s friendship, and Bush’s unique voice, which, says Dylan, “it had a little catch in it, like a built-in heartbreak.” This episode of TTRH couldn’t have been without Nelson’s funky classic version of “Whiskey River.” Musing about whiskey bottles leads into bottleneck blues: guitars styled with slides from actual bottlenecks (and knives, and pieces of copper pipe). Dylan rightly calls Derek Trucks “maybe the best of them all, keeping that sound alive.” This may seem like a minor point, but it is not: one thing I have always appreciated about TTRH is Dylan’s giving credit not just to the recording artists and singers you know, but to the songwriters. He names them all, and lets you know about them. It’s appropriate, and generous.

A checklist of whiskey drinks ends with The Average Redhead….a new one on me. Someone needs to make me one, please. Bobby Charles would have known how to. Charles’s “He’s Got All the Whiskey,” a snaky, sexy, envious Southern blues that lights up the night, is one of the best moments in this episode of TTRH.

Bobby Charles, by Michael Ochs ©Getty

Penn Gillette, David Hidalgo, Jenny Lewis, John C. Reilly, Allison Janney, and other friends drop in to say a few words, without ever interrupting the flow. More effervescence in the water? Sure, teach us about that. And to hear Dylan say “beer goggles” and then describe Laura Cantrell’s “The Whiskey Makes You Sweeter” as a “spirit spectacles” song actually made me lonesome for crowded bars. When he leads into a song by talking about the particular joys of “a solitary evening of melancholy rumination” it could only be Frank Sinatra coming. It’s grand that Dylan follows Sinatra with Jeff Beck and Rod Stewart, and a song recorded in the same times, but released far later. “The generation gap is never as wide as people thought,” he asserts, with a grin you can see. “Voice of a Generation”? Ah, yes, but which one? Here he is in 2020, going, praise be, strong.

Dylan with a happy whiskey reference, Masked and Anonymous

Corn whiskey and its making gets a nice little story and Jimmy Witherspoon’s eponymous song, with its mesmerizing hand claps and concluding sound of a pour. Dylan gives you his recipe for a hot toddy, and then further warms and comforts you with Alfred Brown’s 1968 ska-reggae-blues version of “One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer.” “A hat-trick of inebriates,” says Dylan wryly. Rye whiskey is spicier, and based on Dylan’s story about it, more dangerous: the delirium tremens he had from withdrawal, while in jail, resulted in the death of 28-year-old Cajun fiddle king Harry Choates. Robert Burns, too, died too young — but he was only seventeen when he cleaned up, marginally, the very dirty old poem “Comin’ Thro The Rye” for the standard we know today. (If you want the raunchy Burns, please check out Paul Clayton’s Merry Muses of Caledonia, 1958).

Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s “Mountain Dew” is one of my favorite drinking songs; Dylan and Johnny Cash recorded it once upon a time. He and Van Morrison sang together on the Muses’ hill in Athens, and Dylan recounts a story Morrison told him about moonshine before playing The Man’s superb “Moonshine Whiskey.” Lotte Lenya is someone whose work Dylan compares to his: half-speaking, half singing, or Sprechstimme, is “a technique I’ve used myself.” We know from Chronicles Vol. 1 how he admired “the raw intensity of the songs” that Lenya’s husband Kurt Weill wrote with Bertolt Brecht. The whiskey-soaked “Alabama Song,” premiered by her in 1927 in the Brecht-Weill opera Mahagonny-Songspiel, is the recording he chooses for TTRH.

Joshua Soule Smith (1848-1904) is not a poet you will likely know, but this Georgia-born journalist and essayist (who often published as “Falcon”) wrote an ode to the mint julep that Dylan reads with relish. He then purposely states David Allan Coe as "Edgar Allan Poe.” 19th Century American poetry is never far from his mind, it seems.

another mint julep poem, 1845, not by Smith

The next song is the standout of the show for me. I’m so glad that, out of all the covers of this traditional tune available, Dylan plays the Thin Lizzy “Whiskey In The Jar.”

Dylan’s Irish roots have grown deep from his first days in the Village, when he became friends with The Clancy Brothers and particularly with Liam. In his own last visit to Washington Square, Liam fondly recalled the young man soaking up traditional Irish folk songs “like a sponge,” and did a perfect impression of Dylan that made Murray Lerner guffaw. No show about whiskey should be without Liam’s crystal voice and the hymn entitled “A Parting Glass.” As he replays a portion of an earlier TTRH for which Liam, who passed away in 2009, told a story, Dylan says, quietly, “I wanted to hear my friend’s voice again.” There is no reason to ever excuse hearing any story of Liam’s, twice-told or more.

Hangovers are part of drinking: cures include the hair of the dog, and scrambled eggs, as poet Hayden Carruth knew. Charles Bukowski, “hard-drinkin’ poet,” knew it too. The episodes of TTRH on which Dylan reads the most poetry and other literary selections remain my favorites. When I find out about a recording artist I’d never heard of before on one of the shows, it can be a revelation. Today’s wonder for me is Byllye “Jet” Williams, who recorded in the 1940s and 1950s and was rightly called “The Blues Girl.” Thank you, Bob.

“I never had a chance to talk about Bourbon Street,” mourns Dylan, leaving us hoping that the gang up in Studio B of the Abernathy Building will be back soon, with more about whiskey, or New Orleans, or the House of Bourbon, or any theme they dream up. Today’s show was such a relief and a pleasure to listen to, in a world gone wrong. Any time we’re left with a toast and blessing from David Crosby, and Dylan channeling Timmie Rogers’s signature “Oh YEAH” one more time, I will certainly continue to hope, and tune in.