Dreamtime - Commentary on Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour

XM/Sirius Merger: "I think it's fair to say an agreement in principle has been reached,"

dreamtimepodcast@gmail.com (Fred Bals) — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 09:51:50 -0500

WASHINGTON - A majority of commissioners at the Federal Communications Commission have reached a deal to approve Sirius Satellite Radio Inc.'s long-pending purchase of XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc.

The final hold-out, Republican commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate, agreed to vote to approve the deal after winning several concessions from the companies involving enforcement issues.

"I think it's fair to say an agreement in principle has been reached," FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said in an interview Thursday morning. "We're still trying to work out the language."

A deal was reached with the companies late Wednesday night to pave the way for Ms. Tate's vote on the merger, Mr. Martin said. Four of the commissioners had already voted on the deal, but they had split 2-2 on whether to approve it.

The two satellite radio companies agreed to enter into a consent decree to resolve complaints they violated FCC rules. Those violations include using excessive power levels on some radio units sold to consumers and erecting several unauthorized towers to boost their satellite signals.

The companies have agreed to pay almost $20 million to settle the complaints, with XM paying about $17.5 million and Sirius paying about $2.2 million.

Ms. Tate is expected to vote on the deal as soon as Thursday. The FCC isn't expected to formally release its decision for a few days, as staff attorneys draft the final paperwork for review by the five commissioners...

...The companies are expected to bring new a la carte radios on the market in the next three months that would provide consumers more choices in which stations they receive from the two services. ...

Full article here.

Episode 56 - Ho Daddy! The Surf & Turf Episode

dreamtimepodcast@gmail.com (Fred Bals) — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 10:07:48 -0500

Direct link to mp3.

Subscribe to the Dreamtime podcast

Listen now with the Dreamtime Player

It's Summertime, the living is easy, and our July Twenty-Ought-Eight show is all about solar rays and happiness, direct from the sun and fun capital of the world, Merrimack, NH.

Summer Days, Summer Nights

Leading us off, a 19 and 67 song in praise of Trans-Love Airways, strobe lights, blue jeans, Harley-Davidsons and warm summer nights in San Francisco. Direct from the Summer of Love, Eric Burdon and the Hippie incarnation of The Animals with San Franciscan Nights.

[San Franciscan Nights - Eric Burdon and The Animals]

As anyone who has spent any time in San Francisco can tell you, "warm" would only be used to describe a San Franciscan night by someone who's never lived there. But hey, it's still a pretty song, and one that could only have been written in the summer of 1967, when all of us wanted to wear flowers in our hair.

This was the second incarnation of the Animals, much more psychedelic than the earlier blues-oriented Animals of the `early 60s, whose big hit was House of the Rising Sun. The New Animals would also have a string of hits during the late `60s, each one getting successively weirder, until culminating with 19 and 68's Sky Pilot, a seven-minute song that included gunfire, bagpipes and dive bombers, and which had to be split over two sides of a 45. Nevertheless, Sky Pilot (Parts 1 and 2) made it to #14 on the charts.

[Jingle]

Nobody Puts Baby in a Corner

There's a movie I watch every summer, on a warm night, all the lights off, just the glow of the tube lighting the room. Now - don't laugh at me - that movie is Dirty Dancing, which is one of my favorite summer movies of all time.

Some movies just get the time and place right on, and Dirty Dancing hits the summer of 19 and 63 and the Borscht Belt world of summer resorts perfectly. Maybe that's no surprise, as screenwriter Eleanor Bergstein, herself called "Baby" as a girl, used the memories of her own childhood to write Dirty Dancing.

You know the plot: Young Jewish girl goes to summer resort, falls for dancer on wrong side of tracks. Hotel workers spend nights gyrating hips. Obnoxious college kid moonlighting as waiter knocks up hired help. Doctor Father confused about who's sleeping with who. Sister sings Wiki-Wacky-Woo. Old Jewish couple revealed as master thieves. Everybody dances at the end.

And nobody puts Baby in a corner.

One of the things that make Dirty Dancing so great is the soundtrack, much of which was based on screenwriter Eleanor Bergstein's personal record collection. That soundtrack includes our next song, Mickey & Sylvia's Love is Strange, a hit from thirty years before the movie was made.

[Love is Strange - Mickey & Sylvia]

Love is Strange was written by Bo Diddley, but was credited to Ethel Smith, who was Bo Diddley's wife at the time, because he was in the middle of a legal battle with his record label over who owned what. "Who owned what?" might be the best phrase to describe Love is Strange and its history, as its distinctive riff was lifted for numerous songs - including the roller skate rink hot hit of 19 and 62, Rinky Dink and 1963's Killer Joe by The Rocky Fellers.

You can make up your own mind how closely either song resembles Love is Strange by checking out the Dreamtime podcast blog (that's right here), where I've posted YouTube videos featuring both songs. For the record, Dave "Baby" Cortez was sued over Rinky Dink's close resemblance to Love is Strange - and lost - while The Rocky Fellers weren't. On the other hand, Mickey & Sylvia might have thought a band named The Rocky Fellers was already punishment enough.

Surf's Up!

Hey! What's that I hear? I think it's time to hit the beach!

[Ho Daddy! - Bob Denver]

I have many guilty pleasures - indeed, Jailbait claims that my life is one big guilty pleasure - and one of those guilty pleasures is my love of surf movies from the `60s. One of the best from that genre that did not have Annette Funicello in it, but did have James Darren, Bob Denver, Tina Louise, Nancy Sinatra and Paul Lynde was 1964's For Those Who Think Young.

A "hodad" or "hodaddy" is surfer slang meaning someone who adopts the surfer look, even to the extent of having a surfboard that he never uses, because he's on the beach to pick up girls, themselves referred to by the surfing crowd as "Betties."

While one story has it that the term "Betty" came from The Flintstones character Betty Rubble (an obvious sexual hysteric who Barney isn't satisfying in bed, according to that great surfing mystery, The Dawn Patrol), "Betty" was being used by surfers to refer to an attractive girl long before the cartoon was a glimmer in Hanna-Barbera's eye. "Betty" is probably derived from Bettie Page, fabulous pin-up and bondage star of the `50s, whose life story is worth a Dreamtime by itself.

Jerry Fielding, who is credited with writing the music for For Those Who Think Young, must have consulted with some real surfers to come up with the authentic lyrics. Besides "hodaddy," you'll hear Denver refer to "hot doggers," "gremmies," (inexperienced surfers), "pearl diving," "the nose," and "going over the falls.

The Man Who Walked on Water

Believe it or not jazz babies, the godfather of California surfing was novelist Jack London, who, while trying to learn to surf in Hawaii saw what London later described as a "brown-skinned god" shoot past him on a surfboard.

That brown-skinned god was one George Freeth, son of an Irish sailor and a Polynesian mother, who would later become the All-Father of California surfing.

The legend goes that Freeth borrowed a surfboard from an uncle, and finding the 16-foot board too unwieldy to carry, chopped it in two. The truncated board was not only easier to carry, Freeth found he was able to surf a helluva lot more easily too, and soon earned a reputation as someone who could do about anything in or on the water.

The impressed London talked up Freeth to anyone who would listen, and Freeth was eventually recruited by Henry Huntington - he of the famous beach - to come to California. Huntington was trying to promote his new pier at Redondo Beach, and crowds started to gather when Freeth - billed as "The Man Who Can Walk on Water" - began swooping through the pier's pilings on his surfboard.

Freeth's exploits were legendary - wrestling sea lions into submission, saving seventy-eight people from drowning, rescuing a capsized Japanese fishing skiff and surfing it to the shore, saving its crew of seven. That last exploit prompted Congress to award Freeth with the Medal of Honor.

Freeth also invented the crawl stroke and the the torpedo-shape life float that lifeguards still use to this day. Freeth started the world's first water polo team and founded the San Diego lifeguard corps. His proteges won both gold and silver medals in the 1912 Olympics. Freeth himself probably would have won a slew of medals, but he lost his amateur status because he took Henry Huntington's money.

Freeth died in 1919, age 35, a victim of the Spanish influenza epidemic that was raging through the world. Today, if you take a stroll on the Redondo Beach boardwalk, you'll find a bust George Freeth, one of the few memories left of the Man Who Walked on Water.

The Case of the Missing Navel

I have this theory that all men of a certain age had the hots for Annette Funicello, as I certainly did, and as I did for another Disney girl, Hayley Mills.

The last of the original Mouseketeers to be cast, Annette also turned out to be the most popular. Even though Annette herself knew she had an unremarkable singing voice, by age 16 she was in the studio, recording 15 albums for Disney, which resulted in a string of pop hits during the `50s and `60s.

In 1963, Annette took to the beach, starring with Frankie Avalon in what was essentially the same movie repeated five times over the next two years, culminating with 19 and 65's Beach Blanket Bingo.

Here's Annette with the theme from the first of those infamous beach movies, Beach Party, from 19 and 63.

[Beach Party - Annette Funicell0]

One of the more enduring - and kind of endearing - urban legends surrounding Annette and the beach movies is that Walt Disney himself gave Annette the go-ahead to do them, but with the caveat never, ever to "show her navel." And thus that is why you never see Annette in a bikini in any of the beach movies, even though nearly every other girl on the beach is fruggin' around in the skimpiest two-pieces allowable by 1960 standards.

However close study - and believe me, I've studied those movies closely - reveals that Annette also reveals in 19 and 64's aptly named Bikini Beach, where her belly button is shown repeatedly to God and everyone else in all its glory.

[Left- Annette's belly button. Photo via The Myth of the Hidden Navel]

Annette wrote a charming autobiography several years ago titled, A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes, which I heartily recommend if no other reason that it's one of the few autobiographies I've read where there are no stories of exploitation, abuse, or backstabbing.

If not fully a charmed life, as she now suffers from multiple sclerosis, Annette seems to have had a pretty good one, and one that she's appreciated even through illness. To us, she'll always be our favorite Disney Girl, and we offer her our best wishes from Dreamtime.

Fugue for Tinhorns

Hey, I see that Jailbait has the lobster tails and steaks on the grill, so I think it's time for the turf portion of our show. Here's a song that I can almost guarantee you'll know, but I bet you can't tell me the title.

And nope, it's neither Paul Revere or Can Do.

[Fugue for Tinhorns - from Guys and Dolls]

That was Fugue for Tinhorns - from Guys and Dolls, and like I said, you probably know the song, if not the name.

If you've been to Vegas, or even a carnival, you've probably seen a chuck-a-luck cage. It kind of resembles an hour-glass-shaped birdcage. It contains three dice, the dealer tumbles the cage, and you bet on the dice roll.

The first version of chuck-a-luck was played with a tin horn, and since chuck-a-luck players were considered small-time by their more sophisticated brethren, they acquired the name tin horn gamblers, which eventually became shortened to tinhorn, meaning any cheap gambler.

While there's no evidence that the horses named in Fugue for Tinhorns were real, Equipoise, whose name is mentioned by "Rusty Charley" as being the great-grandfather of "Epitaph", was a famous thoroughbred from 1928 to 1938. "Known as the "Chocolate Soldier," Equipoise won 29 of 51 races in six years of racing and was named Horse of the Year twice.

Here's one more song dedicated to the Sport of Kings to add to our turf portion of our show, Willie Egan and Big Boy Groves doing You Can't Beat the Horses from 19 and 56.

[You Can't Beat the Horses - Willie Egan with Big Boy Groves]

In 19 and 62 Willie Egan lost all his equipment in a nightclub fire, and broke and worn out from the music business, retired and went to work as a hospital orderly. Twenty years later a fan tracked him down after hearing his solo singles on an LP that a British label had put out. Everybody - including the label - had thought Willie Egan was dead, but when he found out that he was a hit in Europe, he went to London, revived his career, and cut a new record in 1984.

Willie Egan, a man who couldn't beat the horses, but did all right anyway.

It's a Cruel, Cruel Summer

Cruel Summer was originally cut by the British girl group, Bananarama in 1983, and then re-recorded by the Swedish group Ace of Base in the late `90s. Me, I like the hip-hop version Blestenation, using samples from Bananarama's original, did for Blue Crush, another one of my all-time summer movie faves... and that's what I'm going to play for you now to close out the show.

This is Fred Bals, your summertime theme deejay left all alone and putting in a hot day at the studio while Mr. D. takes his leisure at the beach.

Here's hoping your summer is cool rather than cruel, the back of your neck doesn't dirty and gritty, and those summertime blues stay far away.

[Cruel Summer - Blestenation]

***

With Theme Time Radio Hour on hiatus, Dreamtime is on a once-a-month podcast schedule for the duration. We'll be back in August with a new show. Thanks as always for listening, and remember to enter our Dreamtime Constant Listener Contest, underway right now. Send us an email with your guess on the date that Theme Time Radio Hour returns with Season 3, and get the opportunity to win a copy of Million Dollar Bash, as well as a CD of Poetry Readings direct from the Dreamtime studio with those nifty stewART covers.

***

You've been listening to the Dreamtime podcast – occasional commentary on Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour. Dreamtime is researched and written by Fred Bals and is a Not Associated With production. As the name says, we're not associated with XM Radio, Bob Dylan, or much of anything else.

Some of the music on Dreamtime is provided via the Podsafe Music Network. Check it out at music.podshow.com.

Remember that the Dreamtime team loves to get email. You can write us at dreamtimepodcast@gmail.com

The Dreamtime top cats are Curly Lasagna and Shaggy Bear. Our announcers are the notorious honky-tonkin' sisters, Jailbait and Joyride.
Until next time, dream well.

Visit the Dreamtime Store

Congrats to Kevin from Maryland - Winner of the Dylan Tix!

dreamtimepodcast@gmail.com (Fred Bals) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 07:59:30 -0500

Many in the Dreamtime audience get their info from the blog through its feed rather than visiting, so, even though I've updated the "Dylan Tix" post from yesterday with the info, here it is again for my feed reading audience.

We received a flurry of email , almost all around the same time. Kevin from Maryland, who noted that he "lived in the Pittsburgh area for 11 years and would be happy to make the trip back..." was the first in our mailbox and our winner of the two tickets to the NAMU Music Festival on August 8 and 9.. Congratulations, Kevin! And thanks again to Christina at the Advance Guard for offering Dreamtime the tickets.

Although not a surprise, it was kind of neat to read how far people were willing to travel to catch Mr. D. Hundreds of miles, in some instances. As Jackie Gleason once said of Miami Beach, Bob Dylan fans really are "the greatest audience in the world."

Two Free Tickets to See Bob Dylan - Pittsburgh, PA - August 8 & 9

dreamtimepodcast@gmail.com (Fred Bals) — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 10:06:00 -0500

UPDATE: Congratulations to Kevin from Maryland,

the winner of the two free NAMU tickets!

The folks over at the New American Music Union, obviously cognizant of the quality of Dreamtime listener/readers, have kindly provided us with two tickets to the NAMU Music Festival being held in Pittsburgh, PA on August 8 and 9, 2008.

Bob Dylan and the Cowboy Band will be taking the main stage on Saturday, August 9th, headlining a show that includes The Raconteurs and Gnarls Barkley. More info on the concert can be found by clicking on the link above.

Dreamtime has two tickets - a $100 value - for the Festival that we're giving away !!FREE! FREE! FREE!! on a first-come, first-served basis to the first listener/reader who emails us at dreamtimepodcast@gmail.com. One ticket covers both days of the Festival, so you can bring a friend along. This giveaway only covers the tickets. You're responsible for your own travel and lodging, of course.

So, if you're in the Pittsburgh area - or decide you want to be - and want to catch Mr. D.'s show on Saturday, August 9th, here's your chance. Drop us a line at dreamtimepodcast@gmail.com - and be sure to include your name and address so the NAMU people can send you your tickets. Good luck! And, btw, Dreamtime will be expecting a full concert report from you.

So what do "Wild Thing," "Angel of the Morning," and "Try (Just a Little Bit Harder)" All Have in Common?

dreamtimepodcast@gmail.com (Fred Bals) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 07:18:26 -0500

All three songs, as different as they are, were written by one Chip Taylor, born James Wesley Voight, in Yonkers, New York.

If Chip's birth name or the photo to your left brings a question to mind, the answer is "yes," he also happens to be Jon Voight's brother, adding "uncle to Angelina Jolie" to his list of credits.

T he New Yorker had a piece on Taylor the week of the 7th, noting the recent release of Taylor's latest CD, New Songs Of Freedom. As the article relates, Smith has had one helluva life in 64-odd years. He first tried his luck as a pro golfer, but moved into music - and the famous Brill Building - after a wrist injury. Golf, incidentally, is where Taylor picked up the "Chip" nickname, as in "chipping a shot."

Chet Atkins heard one of Taylor's country songs, and not quite believing anyone who could write country like that was really from New York, asked to hear more... and liked what he heard, launching Taylor into a successful career as a country music writer, penning hits for Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings among others.

But Taylor liked R&B just as much as country, and by the mid-60s had also written The Troggs/Jimi Hendrix classic Wild Thing, possibly one of the most suggestive songs ever composed. In contrast, Taylor also wrote the near-hymn-like (at least when compared to Wild Thing) Angel of the Morning, a #7 hit for Merrilee Rush and The Turnabouts in 1968, and an even bigger hit in 1981 for Juice Newton, hitting #1 on the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart (for four weeks) and #4 on the Hot 100, as well as #22 on the Country chart.

Apparently not satisfied with being an awesome cross-over song writer, Chip Taylor also has had an extraordinarily successful career as a pro gambler - I'm not making this up - specializing in handicapping the ponies and playing blackjack well enough to get him banned from most Atlantic City casinos. Taylor's gaming career was so successful that he quit the music business in 1981, only taking it up again 12 years ago.

And he still plays the ponies.

Here's a link to Chip Taylor's personal label label, Train Wreck Records. As Chip notes on the site:

When Chip got back into the performing business in the mid-1990s he reflected back on his prior experience with the music business. He had not been pleased with how the big labels had handled his unique music that didn't exactly fit within one of the established genres. Given the new climate in the industry that allows small labels a better chance to compete, Chip decided to start his own company.

Train Wreck also has (or had, it looks like there's been no new episodes since 2006) a podcast, Church of the Train Wreck, which you can subscribe to through an iTunes search or from here.

Christopher King and Greil Marcus on Disaster Songs

dreamtimepodcast@gmail.com (Fred Bals) — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 08:15:09 -0500

A 30-minute WNYC podcast on the "disaster song vogue" of the early 1900s. Includes excerpts from the magnificent box set from 2007, People Take Warning, as well as commentary from the compilation's producer, Christopher King, and from Greil Marcus.

A Dreamtime Cloud

dreamtimepodcast@gmail.com (Fred Bals) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 07:42:01 -0500

via Wordle and our friends at Coverville. A nice visual representation of what Dreamtime is all about.

Lawyers like Dylan too. A lot.

dreamtimepodcast@gmail.com (Fred Bals) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 12:09:07 -0500

Not much to do with TTRH, we know, but heck in the lazy hazy daze of Summer, you take your news where you can find it, right?

If you follow Expecting Rain, or any Bob Dylan-related news over the past couple of weeks, you probably read that John G. Roberts Jr., the chief justice of the United States, recently quoted from Like a Rolling Stone in his dissenting opinion on what the New York Times characterized as an "achingly boring dispute between pay phone companies and long distance carriers."

"The absence of any right to the substantive recovery means that respondents cannot benefit from the judgment they seek and thus lack Article III standing,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote. “"‘When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.’ Bob Dylan, Like a Rolling Stone, on Highway 61 Revisited (Columbia Records 1965)."

The Times links to a lengthy, and often very funny, article by an Alex B. Long, a law professor at the University of Tennessee. Long is cited by the Times as "the nation’s leading authority on the citation of popular music in judicial opinions," making him almost as much a niche player as Dreamtime. His 49 page article, [Insert Song Lyrics Here]: The Uses and Misuses of Popular Music Lyrics in Legal Writing [Warning: link is to an Adobe Acrobat file] is unfortunately only available in PDF format, but well worth the effort to print out and read, if for no other reason than the citations. A sample from the article:

So, for example, I didn't search for Frank Sinatra, even though you might have. I searched for Woody Guthrie on the theory that even though he hasn't been "popular" in the sense of selling a lot of records for decades, he is a folk musician and, as the old saying goes, folk music is just music for folks. That makes it music for popular consumption, which makes it pop music in my book. Plus, I live in Oklahoma.

Plus, such nuggets that Justice Alito once attended a ska festival; that the music of Paul Simon is recommended in helping attorneys better empathize with clients; and that "Disco is also dead in legal writing." The last not being all that much of a surprise, nor that only one female artist - Joni Mitchell - and no artists of color made Long's Top Ten list of artists most cited in legal documents "...white males still comprise the overwhelming majority of academics and lawyers in practice," as Long notes.

Now that I think about it, I guess there is a TTRH connection. as seven of the 10 artists on Long's Top Ten list have been played on TTRH. Or eight, I suppose, if you count Dylan's recorder solo of Blowin' in the Wind.

Abraham Lincoln Said That

dreamtimepodcast@gmail.com (Fred Bals) — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 08:20:30 -0500

In Bob Dylan on Abraham Lincoln, Ron Chester writes a fascinating article on the provenance of the Abraham Lincoln quote used in Talkin' World War III Blues:

Half of the people can be part right all of the time,
Some of the people can be all right part of the time,
But all of the people can't be all right all of the time.
I think Abraham Lincoln said that.

Which is a typical Dylanesque skewing of Lincoln's famous aphorism:

"You can fool some of the people all of the time,
and all of the people some of the time,
but you can't fool ALL of the people ALL of the time."

Chester points out that Dylan attributed the quote to Carl Sandburg during the Halloween concert of 19 and 64. Voracious reader of Civil War material that he was, it's likely that Dylan was familiar with Sandburg's Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and The War Years, published originally 19 and 54, where Sandburg relates the history of the maxim:

James O'Donnell Bennett wrote the first book to include the story... recounting the Lincoln quote...

The Bennett book quotes Fifer as saying, "In 1894, after my term as governor, I made a speech in Piatt County, this state, in which I repeated what Milt Hay had told me [Hay had heard Lincoln use the maxim in Springfield and often repeated it]. The speech was printed in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, the Chicago Inter-Ocean and other papers and thus the saying was first given publicity. None of the Lincoln biographers had ever discovered it."

Best Of Theme Time Radio Hour Volume 2

dreamtimepodcast@gmail.com (Fred Bals) — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 10:10:05 -0500

The folks who brought you The Best of Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour are back again with Volume 2.

Like the first edition, the 2-CD set includes 52 cuts (track listing below), relying heavily on out-of-copyright (at least in Europe) selections. Again, as with the first edition, no Dylanesque commentary or TTRH material, simply tracks that have been played on the show.

Available now through Amazon U.K. at £9.98 through: Best of Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour: Volume 2

or

on July 8, 2008 from Amazon U.S. currently at $15.99 through: Best of Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour: Volume 2

Track listing:

Disc 1

1. Jamaica Hurricane Lord Beginner

2. Just Walking In The Rain The Prisonaires

3. Mother Fuyer Dirty Red

4. One Mint Julep The Clovers

5. Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball Buddy Johnson

6. Forty Cups Of Coffee Ella Mae Morse

7. Folsom Prison Blues Johnny Cash

8. My Son Calls Another Man Daddy Hank Williams

9. Fannie Brown Got Married Roy Brown

10. Divorce Me C.O.D. Merle Travis

11. June-teenth Jamboree Fatso Bentley

12. Bonny Bunch Of Roses Paul Clayton

13. Every Woman I Know Billy The Kid Emerson

14. Get Rich Quick Little Richard

15. Must Have Been The Devil Otis Spann

16. 20/20 Vision Jimmy Martin

17. Ain’t Im a Dog? Ronnie Self

18. My Friends Howlin Wolf

19. Radio Boogie L.C. Smith and His Southern Playboys

20. The Old Ark’s A Moving AA Gray & Seven Foot Dilly

21. Take Me Back To Tulsa Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys

22. Professor Bop Babs Gonzalez

23. Atomic Telephone The Spirit of Memphis Quartet

24. Water, Water Effie Smith and The Squires

25. 24 Hours Eddie Boyd

26. Shotgun Boogie Tennessee Ernie Ford

Disc 2

1. Hoo-Doo Say The Sly Fox

2. Back To Back, Belly To Belly (Zombie Jamboree) The Charmer

3. I Can’t Dance (I’ve Got Ants In My Pants) Roy Newman

4. A Man’s Best Friend Is a Bed Louis Jordan & His Tympany Five

5. Hungry Man Louis Jordan & His Tympany Five

6. Let’s Be Friends Billy Wright

7. Tennessee Border Hank Williams

8. Havana Moon Chuck Berry

9. 3 x 7 = 21 Jewel King

10. Christmas Morning Titus Turner

11. Peggy Sue Buddy Holly

12. Red Headed Woman Sonny Burgess

13. Uncle Pen Bill Monroe & His Bluegrass Boys

14. Bad Luck Blues Guitar Slim

15. I’ll Drown In My Own Tears Lula Reed

16. I’ve Got The Last Laugh Now Roy Brown

17. Hearts Of Stone The Jewels

18. Paper In My Shoes Boozoo Chavis

19. Pink Cadillac Sammy Masters

20. Drifting Texas Sand Webb Pierce

21. Still A Fool (Two Trains Running) Muddy Waters

22. All Aboard Muddy Waters

23. (Now And Then There’s) A Fool Such As I Hank Snow

24. Let Me Off Uptown Anita O’Day & Roy Eldridge

25. Tax Payin Blues JB Lenoir

26. Bad, Bad Whiskey Amos Milburn

FCC Chair To Support XM-Sirius Merger

dreamtimepodcast@gmail.com (Fred Bals) — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 10:45:30 -0500

via The Washington Post

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin J. Martin said yesterday (June 15 - fhb) that he will support a merger between the nation's sole satellite radio operators, XM and Sirius, a decision that could remove the last regulatory hurdle in the lengthy and heavily criticized move to make the companies one.

Martin came to the decision after the companies agreed last week to several commitments intended to prevent the monopoly from raising programming prices and from stifling competition among radio makers, aides to the chairman said in an interview yesterday. Critics have argued that a merger of District-based XM and Sirius of New York would hurt consumers, who would have fewer choices of programming and radio transmitters and who would be charged higher prices because of a lack of rivals.

As early as this week, Martin is expected to issue an order that the commission vote to approve the merger, which at least two of the remaining four commissioners must also agree to, the aides said.

Full article

TTRH in the WSJ

dreamtimepodcast@gmail.com (Fred Bals) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 09:47:17 -0500

LBJ also rides the IRT to view the youth of America on LSD. And 10 Dreamtime points to readers who know the source of that non sequitur.

Anyway, Dreamtime reader/listener Steve Ramm sends us a link to an entertaining Wall Street Journal article by WSJ drama critic Terry Teachout. An excerpt:

To listen to "Theme Time Radio Hour" is to rediscover the sense of musical adventure that old-fashioned disc jockeys with strongly individual personalities offered in the days before big-money stations pinned their fiscal hopes to the rigid Top 40-style playlists that took the fun out of radio. Now that America's public-radio stations are abandoning musical programming in favor of news and talk, such shows have grown hard to find in many major markets. That's what makes satellite radio promising. Because it has so many different channels, it has room for everything -- including unpredictability.

Mr. Teachout notes as an aside that the FCC has apparently finally approved the Sirius/XM merger/takeover, of course doing it while Dreamtime was on vacay. There will be a separate post on that story upon the moment. Thanks for the tip on the WSJ article, Steve!

That Time of Year Again

dreamtimepodcast@gmail.com (Fred Bals) — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 10:15:25 -0500

Dreamtime Top Cat Bear sez, "Time to close the ol' laptop and enjoy the Summer."

His brother Curly is already outside contemplating whether it's worth the effort to chase down a chipmunk, and Jailbait is fixing the steaks on the grille.

Life is good. The Dreamtime team is taking our bi-annual Summer vacay, so there'll be no updates to the site or news features for a week or so.

See you soon! ~Bear, Curly, Jailbait, and Your Host.

Juneteenth Jamboree on KRLU-TV Thursday, June 19th

dreamtimepodcast@gmail.com (Fred Bals) — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 08:40:38 -0500

Dreamtime friend Michael Emery, Director/Producer at PBS station KLRU-TV, Austin, TX writes:

Contributors, supporters, and friends, it is done! JUNETEENTH JAMBOREE looks a bit different than what I initially envisioned, but the result yet fetches an appealing look and enlightening message. You can see the results of the past 13 months of effort on KLRU-TV (broadcast channel 9) at 8 p.m. on Thursday, June 19th. (There will also be previews of the program at the African American Cultural Center at ACC's Eastview Campus and at the George Washington Carver Museum, both on Juneteenth.)

And if you can't watch the show on TV or attend a public screening, there's always the internet: . You can watch program segments on your computer equipped with a high-speed connection. I owe some of you a JUNETEENTH JAMBOREE DVD; if you can't wait for its arrival, catch the show online.

Thanks to everyone who contributed, and particular thanks to the late Alvin Patterson. My sister played in his Anderson Yellowjacket band, and she was the tall and graceful drum major of the band as a high school senior. My dad played alongside the Patterson brothers in earlier Anderson bands that were led by B.L. Joyce. I cannot overstate how much influence the Patterson clan had in East Austin back in the day.

Before I had any tight ideas on how to proceed, Google and the search term "Juneteenth" led me to . Mr. Fred Bals, I thank you for telling the story and playing the music of Gladys "Fatso" Bentley. Her song, "Juneteenth Jamboree," became the theme song and the title of my program. The joy of the song harmonizes well with the spirit of Juneteenth!

And special thanks to the very patient and resourceful Brian Joseph, whom I filmed and had intended to include in the show. Well, the content sort of went out of my control, and I hope to deliver Brian's story as an Internet extra on the JUNETEENTH JAMBOREE website...coming soon.

There are also the faceless many at KLRU who have been supportive of this project. These folks know how to get a TV show on the air with last year's "Show World" and aluminum foil. Amazing!

My thanks, all, and my hope: I do hope that some money will fall out of the sky, and it will provide sufficient means to create JUNETEENTH JAMBOREE 2009. And 2010. And 2011. And on and on.

Juneteenth Jamboree | Black History in Texas from klru tv on Vimeo.

"I was without words." - A Freewheelin' Time by Suze Rotolo

dreamtimepodcast@gmail.com (Fred Bals) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 13:41:17 -0500

One of the editors of Club 47 - a Richard Fariña interest group I participate in - had noted that there was a mention of Fariña in Suze Rotolo's A Freewheelin' Time. I finally got around to reading that memoir last week, and here is the passage on Fariña in its entirety...

"When I met Carolyn [Hester], she was married to Dick Fariña. Though Dick played music, he spoke of himself as a writer. He would read aloud from whatever he was working on--a book, a poem, or an article. He and Bobby got on very well. They would talk and laugh and riff on stuff together. Dick said he was going to write about Bob. I got you down man, he'd say. Listen to this.

"He read hs description, focused on the way Bob pumped the air with his knees, and Bobby loved it. He loved Dick's writing. You write like a poet, man, he told him....

"[...] April 30 1966 was the publication date of Dick Fariña's book Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me and it was also the night he died. I was in the Limelight bar the next night as the news spread that he'd been killed in a motorcycle accidfent on the West Coast. I ran into Judy [Collins], a close friend of Fariña's, and she was a wreck. I was without words. It was shattering news."

-- A Freewheelin' Time - Pages 123-124

Unfortunately, most of Rotolo's stories are like the Fariña extract, superficial, offering no insights, and skittering back-and-forth through the years without explanation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there's no mention of Mimi Farina - Dick's wife and Joan Baez's sister - at all. In fact, there's little mention of Joan Baez in the book. Rotolo notes in passing that Dylan's affair with Baez was thrown in her face (she implies she was already aware of their relationship, but trying to ignore it) by Geno Foreman around 1964 when he drunkenly observed at a party that Dylan's new dental work had been purchased in California by the love-struck Joan.

Rotolo sometimes seems to be describing a completely different scene than the ones related in David Hajdu's Positively 4th Street or Chronicles itself. For example, she implies in her passage on Tiny Tim (Page 207) that she and Dylan first saw Tim at the Living Theater in either late 1962 or early 1963 - in any case, sometime after her return from Italy in 1962 - apparently unaware that Dylan writes in Chronicles that he and Tim were performing and sharing greasy hamburgers at the Cafe Wha? in 1961.

Again, as with the Farina excerpt, Rotolo's passage on Tiny Tim is all of two paragraphs, and offers no insights - "... he didn't look healthy." Most of A Freewheelin' Time is like that - it sometimes reads as a catalog of the "great and near-great I have known." Bill Cosby appears and disappears in a limo; Woody Allen shows up on stage; Hugh Romney and the Holy Modal Rounders pass through in a couple of lines.

It's too bad. It's a book I wanted to like, and there are a few sections that are interesting and enjoyable reading. Kind of sweetly, Rotolo's recounting of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan cover photo session is one of the few instances where she actually writes as if she's engaged with the memory. And she writes passionately about defying the travel embargo to Cuba - notably, one of the instances in the book where she's not writing about Dylan or the Village Folk Scene crowd. But most of the time you get the impression of a very private, guarded person, telling you the stories she knows you expect to hear, but determined not to reveal too much of herself, hinting at things you wish she'd talk about in more detail - something like Bob Dylan himself.

Rotolo is a readable, if not particularly inspired, writer, but I doubt if A Freewheelin' Time would have found a publisher without the Dylan connection. In publishing there's something known as the "John Jones" test. That is, would this book have been published if it were marketed as written by the unknown Jones as opposed to someone with a recognizable name (or connection to someone with a recognizable name)? For that test, and as a "Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties," as its subtitle has it, the book fails. Neither the times nor the people seem to have made much of an impression on Rotolo... at least not one that she's willing to talk about.

Theme Time Radio Hour Makes Bob Dylan Smile

dreamtimepodcast@gmail.com (Fred Bals) — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 10:01:02 -0500

An interesting interview conducted by the Times (UK) Online here. Some nuggets:

When I ask if he finds the art establishment preferable to the one he is more used to, Dylan grins and pulls a face of mock disgust. “The music world's a made-up bunch of hypocritical rubbish. I know from publishing a memoir [2004's Chronicles Volume One] that the book people are a whole lot saner. And the art world? From the small steps I've taken in it, I'd say, yeah, the people are honest, upfront and deliver what they say. Basically, they are who they say they are. They don't pretend. And having been in the music world most of my life [he laughs again], I can tell you it's not that way. Let's just say it's less...dignified.”

He's had two proposals for a new series of paintings, both of which he sounds interested in doing. The first is Dylan portraits of celebrities: "inventors, mathematicians, scientists, business people, actors..." The other Dylan's interpretation of "historically romantic figures. Napoleon and Josephine, Dante and Beatrice, Captain John Smith and Pocahontas, Brad and Angelina [here he laughs]..."

As already reported, he's at work on Volume II of Chronicles. On Volume I he notes:

“It took me maybe two years in total. I was touring so much in the beginning, on days off or on a bus, I'd write my thoughts out in longhand or on a typewriter. It was the transcribing of the stuff, the rereading and retelling of it, that was time-consuming and I came to figure that there had to be a better way. I know what that is now. You need a full-time secretary so that you can get the ideas down immediately, then deal with them later.”

He is, unsurprisingly, hopeful about Barack Obama:

“Well, you know right now America is in a state of upheaval,” he says. “Poverty is demoralising. You can't expect people to have the virtue of purity when they are poor. But we've got this guy out there now who is redefining the nature of politics from the ground up...Barack Obama. He's redefining what a politician is, so we'll have to see how things play out. Am I hopeful? Yes, I'm hopeful that things might change. Some things are going to have to.” He offers a parting handshake. “You should always take the best from the past, leave the worst back there and go forward into the future,” he notes as the door closes between us.

And when Theme Time Radio Hour is mentioned, Dylan smiles.

.