Belatedly getting around to a few notes on the final episode of Bob’s second season of “Theme Time Radio Hour” on XM Satellite Radio. Bob said plenty of defining things in this episode relating to his attitude to music, and some fairly generous quotes are included below, scattered amidst the show’s playlist.

Ellen Barkin’s spoken intro for this episode:

“It’s night in the big city. A man falls asleep, far from home. The last piece of pie is gone. This is Theme Time Radio Hour with your host, Bob Dylan.”

( “Here’s the King of Texas blues guitar, Aaron Walker …” Bob tells us that he got his nickname, “T-Bone,” from his middle name, “Thibeaux.” )
T-Bone Walker — Cold, Cold Feeling
Porter Waggoner — The Cold Hard Facts of Life ( “It’s a great example of how you can tell a complete short story in a little over two minutes.” )
Ray Charles and Betty Carter — Baby It’s Cold Outside
John Lennon — Cold Turkey
( Bob talks about the origins of the term “cold turkey.” “My buddy Keith Richards once told me the phrase goes all the way back to 1910. It means ‘without preparation,’ as easy as it would be serve a dish of cold turkey. By the twenties, this expression acquired its darker connotation, relating to drug withdrawal. Personally, I think it comes from the same place as the phrase to ‘talk turkey’: honestly, squarely. Because when you quit cold turkey, you’re facing addiction head-on. But now that I think about it, I don’t know how turkeys came to be associated with honesty. I mean, I don’t think of them as a particularly honest bird. I know they’re supposed to be a dumb bird; in a rainstorm, they tilt their heads up and keep drinking till they drown. And I know they wait all year just to get onto your table for Thanksgiving. But who knew they were so honest?” )
( Bob reads a poem about junkies and thieves by Charles Bukowski. )
Lightnin’ Slim — Winter Time Blues
( “Where do you even begin with a record like that? There’s so much right with it. First of all, nobody’s in any hurry. You could just about drive a truck between the beats. You got a girl named Priscilla, barely sixteen years old; Lightin’ Slim employs a Socratic method, starts asking himself questions half-way through the song: just a perfect record. Nobody makes records like that anymore.” )
Loretta Lynn — When the Tingle Becomes a Chill
Big Joe Turner — The Chill Is On
( “There’s a line in that song, ‘I been your dog ever since I been your man.’ Certain phrases are used over and over in the folk process, and they cross the boundaries between country and blues music. A phrase like that one, or ‘I’m goin’ where the chilly winds don’t blow,’ can be heard over and over. For example, here’s a song called ‘Chilly Winds.’ It was originally recorded back in the ‘twenties, and many people recorded variations of it. Riley Parker [?] did it in 1924; Bill Monroe did a version of it; Woody Guthrie turned it around a little bit and got it ‘Going Down the Road Feeling Bad.’ The version we’re gonna play is by a guy named Clarence Ashley. He was a medicine show performer dating all the way back to the ‘teens and ‘twenties … ” )
Clarence Ashley and Doc Watson — Chilly Winds
Willie Walker — Warm To Cool To Cold
( “Gold Wax was known as a soul label, but the guy who started it was pure country. Y’know there weren’t as many lines drawn in southern music as people like to pretend there are. Country music, soul music and blues all came from that same river. The guy who started Gold Wax records — Quinton Claunch — also cowrote a song by one of my favorite rockabilly artists. As a matter of fact, during our Countdown show, I promised I’d play it. So just to prove I never forget a promise, here’s a song cowritten by Quinton Claunch, and the other man who wrote it, well he’s singin’ it. Here’s Charlie Feathers …” )
Charlie Feathers — Defrost Your Heart
( Bob on how cold it is where he comes from: “It’s so cold out there that the politicians have their hands in their own pockets.” )
( Bob explains that “The Charmer” was the name that Louis Farrakhan adopted as a calypso singer in the 1950s. “Well in the interest of equal time, we’ll let other people discuss the politics and we’ll just stick with the music.” Magnanimity indeed. )
The Charmer — Stone Cold Man
( “Roy Hogsed — that’s a great name — he’s one of those guys that you don’t know where to put his records. Are they country boogie? Are they early rockabilly? Are they country and western? That’s why I file everything alphabetically. I don’t separate it by style. That’s why you find Thelonius Monk right next to the Monkees. So here’s Roy, and a hopped-up little song called …” )
Roy Hogsed — So Cold So Dead So Soon
Parliament — I Can Feel the Ice Melting
( “No matter what you do, no matter where you go, no matter how you feel right now, at some point you’re gonna end up in that cold, cold ground. Here’s Tom Waits, along with David Hidalgo on the accordion … ” )
Tom Waits — Cold, Cold Ground
( Bob introduces and then reads a passage from Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”:

Bob continues, “Kings, jesters, and everyone in-between end up in the cold, cold ground. Willa Cather once said, ‘I shall not die of a cold; I shall die of having lived.’ I don’t mean to bum you out — I just like to face the cold-hearted facts of life. Here’s another cold hard fact of life: This is our final show of the season. We’re gonna go away for a little while, but not for too long. Just long enough to look for some more themes and records to go along with them. In the meantime, you try to stay warm. Be careful, ‘cos I’ll be counting heads when we come back for Season Three. You better be there! See ya soon.” )

End of the second season of Bob Dylan’s “Theme Time Radio Hour” on XM Satellite Radio.

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