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A MIXTAPE FROM BOB DYLAN

The fur has been flying in the publishing world of late as the economy sags and hit books have been hard to come by. It has even been claimed that the failure of Dan Brown to deliver his latest deposit of “loose stool water", to quote Stephen Fry, has been behind the layoffs and restructuring at the monolithic Random House.

But of far more importance is the anticipation surrounding the second volume of “Chronicles” (2004), Bob Dylan’s literary autobiography, which the legendary songwriter is now reportedly writing. I say “literary” because “Chronicles” doesn’t conform to any dry, conventional guidelines of the genre, but rather jumps back and forth in time and digresses more than Laurence Sterne. All of this should be tiresome, no matter how famous the person or eventful his career. Yet Dylan manages to pull it off with childish insight and a prose style that reads like Jack Kerouac at his best. His observations are refreshingly simple, which is not to say shallow. Rather, he displays the poet’s baffling ability to simultaneously describe and explain his world in a single phrase.

Some of the best passages of the book is just Bob sitting around an acquaintance’s cold apartment in Greenwich village (where the newly arrived folk singer was crashing on the couch) diving through books from different centuries, listening to the songs that were floating around the radio in 1961 and talking about how infatuated he was with folk music. This aspect of Dylan, his love for stories and storytelling, is what defines his life, his music and his importance, which has never been more apparent than over the past few years.

Since his Grammy Award-winning comeback album “Time Out of Mind” in 1997 and prominent placement in “The Big Lebowski”, Dylan has been riding a resurgence of interest and activity with two fantastic studio albums and the eighth volume of his Bootleg Series, “Tell Tale Signs” (2008), his best-seller to date. If that wasn’t enough, Dylan fans have also been treated to two quality films that labour prodigiously to define “Dylanesque”: Martin Scorsese’s two-part documentary “No Direction Home” and Todd Haynes’ “I’m Not There” (we’re going to forget that “Masked and Anonymous” ever happened).

But, as with “Chronicles”, Dylan always tells us more about who he is when talking about those he admires. Beginning in spring of 2006, Dylan began his splendid radio show, “Theme Time Radio Hour”, broadcast on Sirius XM (also available twice a day on Dylanradio.com), promising tales of “dreams, schemes and themes”, and he doesn’t disappoint. Dylan is at his best telling the stories behind all of the obscure oldies and the forgotten artists that were lucky enough to holler and moan their excitement and troubles into a microphone. The show works because of Dylan's folk sensibility; he chooses songs written for the masses about common subjects, such as the weather or body parts or baseball or numbers or shoes or money or war (the list goes on and on, with nearly a hundred shows produced thus far).

Dylan’s obvious love and reverence for this material explains why this skinny 20-year-old kid from Minnesota would frequently travel from the city to New Jersey to visit with Woody Guthrie at a psychiatric hospital. He nearly caught his death one winter night while going to Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island to recover Guthrie’s lost manuscripts (the same ones that were subsequently recorded by Billy Bragg and Wilco). Earlier this year, Ace Records released an incomparable 2-CD collection of music featured on the “Theme Time Radio Hour”, which is like getting a mixtape from Bob himself—you can’t beat that with a stick.

For those of us that grew up with the last days of radio, listening to “Theme Time Radio Hour” feels like a blessed return to free-form (shoutout to WFMU 91.1), to public entertainment that mixes musical acumen with the better angels of talk radio. Only someone as iconic as Bob Dylan could force that kind of change, could return the music of the people to the people, where it belongs. On that note, I implore you to see what the hubbub is all about and stream in your radio, radio.   ~ DANIEL ARIZONA

Picture credit: Shht! (via Flickr)