From 1999, on YouTube, here’s Bob Dylan and his band kicking off another gig with Somebody Touched Me.

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The famed critic Terry Teachout tackles Bob’s radio show, “Theme Time Radio Hour,” in the Wall Street Journal, and his appreciation of it is right on the money.

Part of what I find so engaging about “Theme Time Radio Hour” is that it flies in the face of the conventional wisdom about radio in the 21st century. Teenagers and college graduates are less likely to listen to radio nowadays, a decline that media consultants attribute to the rise of the iPod, which allows its owners to choose from thousands of previously downloaded songs at will instead of settling for whatever a disc jockey cares to play. The assumption is that under-40 listeners are now choosing to withdraw into gated communities of musical taste, behind whose electronic walls they listen only to what they already know they like. That’s how most of the hundreds of existing satellite-radio channels work. Each one is devoted to a narrow stylistic sliver — show tunes, New Age, old-school hip-hop, even 24/7 Led Zeppelin — so that when you tune it in, you know just what you’re getting. Not so “Theme Time Radio Hour,” which gives you what Mr. Dylan thinks you ought to get. Nor is his taste predictable: He likes nothing more than to throw musical curve balls, and if you don’t like the song he’s playing now, all you have to do is wait three minutes for the next one to come along.

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