Last Thursday you read it here first: A video has been shot for Must Be Santa from Bob Dylan’s forthcoming album Christmas In The Heart. It will feature Dylan himself and the finished product may also include, among other things, a fight scene. More details were reported yesterday on a messageboard and are elegantly excerpted by Fred Bals at Dreamtime: ’50s Polka In a Decrepit Mansion, Russians, And a Fight Where Someone Gets Thrown Through A Window.

The thirty-second clip we’ve heard of Must Be Santa sounds riotous, and so it is apt that the description of the video shoot is, well, a riot.

I think it’s quite noteworthy that Bob himself is acting in the video. When was the last time he personally showed up somewhere and allowed himself to be directed in a video for one of his songs? There was Things Have Changed, and there was a clip used to promote “Love and Theft”, featuring Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum and scenes of Bob playing cards with some characters. But by and large we’ve gotten things like the videos for Dreamin’ Of You, Beyond Here Lies Nothin’, Thunder On The Mountain, and When The Deal Goes Down, where a director basically gets to riff on the song in a personal way, and the only time we see Bob is in old footage or photos. Clearly he doesn’t have much of an appetite for the rigmarole of making a video, but in this case he’s making the effort; this being a case where the royalties of the thing being promoted are going to charity.

The promotional value of the video ought to be considerable. When the album comes out, a lot of news outlets will no doubt be doing stories on it, as the idea of a Bob Dylan Christmas album has those novelty/shock/laugh factors that TV news editors seem to like. Now they’ll have something to put on screen to illustrate it while they’re making their bemused and/or clever remarks. Well, you know what they say: It’s all good.

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• It Must Be Santa (and there must be a video)
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