Ricky's Radio Blog

Dear Bob

This has been a big week. In case I haven’t made this clear; Happy Birthday and many happy returns. If you decide to retire then thank you for what you have done. It has given me so much pleasure to listen to your music from the age of eleven or so. It has been exciting waiting to hear what you will do next and there have been so many great memories.

It also occurs to me that you are seventy years old. I’m 53 and I know by your age I’d like to spend a fair amount of time in my garden, watching some football and doing a bit of painting. Perhaps you too would like to wind down, record and tour no more and spend your days enjoying the Californian sunshine. Who wouldn’t? If you do then rest assured you have my blessing. Anyone who makes one great album is a rare talent. Getting three out there is a wonderful achievement which a few have managed. But managing to make great records over five decades is something else entirely.

In case you were wondering I’d like to say these ones in particular strike me as really great: The Freewhelin’ Bob Dylan, Bringin It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, Blood On The Tracks, Slow Train Comin’, Oh Mercy, Time Out of Mind, Love and Theft and Modern Times. Most artists would be pleased to have so many great songs but you have done so much more. Of course there are many other really great songs – in my opinion one of your greatest – not on these records;  With God On Our Side, Knockin on Heaven’s Door, Forever Young, Positively 4th St…I could go on.

However if you do decide to write, record, perform, engage in more prose or broadcast again I, for one would be very happy. I have enjoyed almost everything you have done and where I haven’t enjoyed one project as much as another I have consoled myself with the knowledge that this is how it always is with great artists.

Finally thank you for the less celebrated things you have done: for playing old records on the radio by some great performers, for visiting Neil Young’s house, for finding The Band, for offending folk-musicians, for refusing to be the spokesman for anybody and for continually taking the opposite direction people expect of you.

One final thing. When I was at school people perpetually nagged me because they thought your voice difficult or unformed in some way. Over the last month I have had the mixed pleasure of sifting through many cover versions of your songs. There are some that are good and many that are really unbearable. Eventually they all fail because they don’t have the thing which your own version always has: your voice. You are a great singer and your voice has brought me so much pleasure since I first heard Watching The River Flow on Radio 1 all these years ago.

One last personal thing. I made a long journey last year from Rome to Paris by mini bus. At the time it looked about the worst possible journey to make as we were stuck on land because of the ash cloud over Europe. I had my  ipod and I listened and loved your last record, Together Through Life. I played it and I played it again against an increasingly darkening sky and high foreboding Alps. It’s a memory that will live with me forever.

My enjoyment could be repeated millions of times over by the millions who still love your music.

God Bless you Bob,

Ricky

On Friday you’ll hear Bob appreciated and covered by the Americana community and you’ll hear some sparkling great Dylan cuts. No adverts, no competitions just Bob Dylan for two hours. Next Friday? We’re going to do it all again. After two weeks surrounded by US Radio I love public broadcasting. Hope you do too!

So I’ve decided the best way I can introduce the next two Fridays is to put out this essay I wrote for The Scotsman in 1992. Why they asked me to write it then I can’t remember. But I disagree with very little that I wrote  except we now know he was about to make 6 straight great albums. Just as well I got round to realising he was as good as I’d first imagined. So here it is unchanged; my younger voice speaking about the Bob I grew up with.

In the stock room of my father’s warehouse I heard my dad asking cousin Brian, “Who is this Bob Dylan anyway?” It was the summer of the Isle of Wight festival and the reason for the assorted PVC jackets sailing into Cowes was a mystery to my old man. The social historians among you (who, I may add will find nothing else worthwhile in this piece) will no doubt notice that this  was an incredible question given  that what many people consider Dylan’s most worthwhile work had all been released…….but that would be to overestimate pop culture and underestimate  my father’s ignorance of the “poet”.

Brian knew who Bob Dylan was. Brian was at university, took flying lessons and would occasionally come to work in the summer sporting a
cravat and a jaunty goatee……….he also left a Thunderclap Newman elpee at our house never to have it returned. (Sorry about that Brian but believe me I needed all the youth culture I could get when I came from a Dylan free family – we’d only got the record player the Christmas before and were still getting off on the Jim Reeves Christmas album) I decided to be a Bob-familiar person too. I asked for an album and my aunty Ev finally obliged the following Christmas. More Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits arrived down the lum containing the first track I’d been aware of on the radio – Watching the River Flow.
At this point the purists will all have turned the page muttering darkly about dispatching their first ever letter to the Scotsman but the strange thing about my convoluted conversion to Bob Dylan is that I liked the sound of the whole thing. I liked the guitar, the moothie, Leon Russell’s piano and most of all the voice. I liked the rasp and whisper, the nasal whine and the the fender-twin honk of it all. I knew nothing of God on Our Side or The Chimes of Freedom but I loved this collective noise that was Bob Dylan.
I went on this way for some time enjoying the little extra that I heard: the seminal Blood on the Tracks, the work of the Band, the small newspaper clips in my Dad’s Daily Express about Bob being a right-on-millionaire (yet he still wears denim jackets pop fans) and I began to relax in the knowledge that I was maturing in my Dylan taste. I knew nothing.

I never knew about the bike crash, The Big Pink, or even who the Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands was. It was big Alan that told me all these things. Big Alan owned and played a copy of a Les Paul Sun Burst with humbuckers (that’s electric guitar to you, square) and even knew that All Along the Watchtower was ripped off a dude called Isaiah! I quickly came to “know” these things too.

Off course it was ludicrous that in the current release Bob claimed to have written  Sad Eyed Lady of  the Lowlands (we just called it lowlands) for his wife Sara….. I mean people had waited years to get that kind of hard news and he gives it away like, well like Alan lent me his phase-pedal  never to see it again. (Sorry about that Alan) Alan “knew”, and your man here was not a million miles behind him, that the most important record onˇ the College of Commerce jukebox was Like A Rolling Stone/Gates of Eden. I came to “know” that Like a  Rolling Stone was the greatest record ever made. It didn’t perturb me unduly that at the particular time of its release I was more keenly tuned into the Alan Price Set’s “Don’t Stop the Carnival”.

It was shortly after this a truly wonderful and awful thing happened – Punk. Let’s face it (as one of Mike Leigh’s best characters says) these were not Dylan friendly years. Icononoclasm was in and there was no bigger statue around than the one with the guy with the big nose and the striped T-shirt. He did his best; he jammed with Patti Smith at the Bottom Line, he tried wearing make up  but it was always a lost cause. His head finally rolled onto the pavement one day when some poor sod complained to NME about a less than flattering review they had carried about the “Street Legal” album. The fatal blow was ‘cruel but fair’;  the enfants terrible of the paper, Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons simply quoted the lines of a less that successful song on the album. It contained the immortal couplet: ‘Do you cook and sow, make flowers grow?/Do you understand my pain?’ You will understand me if I tell you that it hurts too much to continue at this point.
There really was only one way out of a ghastly career situation like this but sadly for his Bobness there was no convenient  all night drug store/ dangerous sports car/ fat-burger stall / roving gun-man to remedy the sinking
credibility. Instead Bob discovered Christianity.

Some of that isn’t actually true. Bob Dylan came face to face with Jehovah of the Old Testament which in some ways is just as well because he was soon to find out the meaning of unforgiveness for himself. As someone who was preparing to question the fundamental certainties of my younger years and become on of the people my parents warned me about Bob Dylan had made an album that restated the tenets of the family faith. Rock ‘n’ Roll phew!!During  this period Bob lost me and I certainly name no attempt to find him. The little I heard had God played by Norman Tebbitt and guitar by ..er Mark Knoplfler!

In 1986 I joined a pop group who got a recording deal on the CBS Records label, home to Shakin Stevens, Mel Torme and Bob Dylan. It was the great irony. To have access to all the Dylan back catalogue and no longer have the desire to collect it. To have people that would get me a ticket to a show and put a beer in my hand afterwards and not to want to go. To have the possibility of an awful lig which might put me in proximity of his legendary howling breath but find important things to do like washing my hair seemed to me to be a paradox worthy only  of the big guy that Bob had got to know and had given Job that particularly hard time.Worse. We were to tour in the states . We sought a support slot. It was possible that we might join the Bob Dylan tour. My life was going out of control.This being the kind of tale it is you’ll realise that the tour never happened.

Last year a kind Dylan acolyte in Germany sent me a numbered box-set CD of the bootleg series. It contained a lot of the unreleased material that had been illegally enjoyed for years. In the course of this refresher course I discovered one of the most beautiful songs ever to be written and performed by anyone. A song called ‘Every Grain of Sand’ was a truly touching litany of Christian faith and doubt which would drive the weakest brother back into the chapel and bring him to his knees. ÎIt was performed on a guitar with a piano accompaniment and a wild dog barking in the next room. Not only did it reverse all my negative doubts about Bob but I realised that any man willing to leave the dog on couldn’t be all the things the NME had called him.Ironically the song had been released as a different version on one of the aforementioned Knopfler/Tebbitt sessions but its genius had been disguised as only seminal rock acts seem to know how.I began to perform the song in the same stumbling fashion as the bootleg and on some of the happiest nights of my life when I truly enjoyed playing concerts like I hadn’t done for some time we would play Every Grain of Sand and people were patient enough to give me the time to sing

I’ve been here in Nashville since Tuesday.It’s not always easy to understand or describe “The South.” Downstairs in my hotel is an informal breakfast buffet arrangement which seems to mean that there are more people needing to sit than there are spare tables. I can’t imagine wanting to talk to anyone over breakfast so I reluctantly asked to share a space with a bloke doing the crossword in USA Today. He recognised I had “an accent” and struck up conversation. Turns out his half-brother lives in Peebles and he was in town on business from Mississippi. We chatted about oil spills, hurricanes and the usual stuff and I remarked that I found the south the bit of the USA I really found the most fascinating. I remarked that it was here that seemed to be the birthplace of so much of the cultural America came from. It’s a great place, I offered.

As I got up to pick up my toasted muffin I almost missed him saying. “Shame that most people don’t know that.”When I asked him to explain he gave me some interesting insights. ‘Most people think we’re racist and everyone knows we’re poor – compared to the north.’ I realised there is a lot of truth in what he said. When I grew up in the seventies the south was understood by my generation through the words of Neil Young’s Alabama. Now, I think – perhaps because of Randy Newman- but also because I’ve spent some time here that it’s a much better place than that. Equally, the northerners are no angels. ‘The KKK was started in Indiana,’ my breakfast pal told me. Maybe it’s good I didn’t get that table on my own after all.

I picked up a great book last night down town. It’s a portrait and mini biogs of classic country singers of the first half of last century. In the introduction Douglas Green makes an astute observation: ‘ Country Music may have existed before 1925 but it didn’t become country music until the advent of the radio and new stars were born.’ How true that is. It’s the radio that is omni present in these great films from our movie club – Coal Miners Daughter, Walk The Line and The Last Picture Show.(that one’s for next year!)

And it is to the radio that I go most often when I’m here. The great station is WSM 650 on the medium wave. ‘Some things sound better on AM.’ I bet there’s a few radio bosses would have killed for that cool strap line. There’s a truth in it too. I’ll play some radio highlights tomorrow including, Nanci Griffiths, Faith Hill and the most important record store boss of in this town (apart from Jack White), Ernest Tubbs.

We’ll also have a visit from East Nashville’s Diana Jones who will sing tracks from her new album and we’ll get a chance to talk to her about the Nashville Flood of a year ago which informed her great new record, ‘High Atmosphere.’ We’re not forgetting Bob backwards. In the current edition of a Nashville Listings Paper there’s a great piece about ‘Blonde on Blonde’ being the first time many people outside country realised what a great recording centre Music City was. Sadly this week’s album is no Blonde on Blonde but is Empire Burlesque…still, some nice things to play.

I’ll also tell you about my own adventures in Music Row which today takes me to a writing session with Cary Barlowe, the man who wrote American Honey.

It all starts tomorrow at 2…that’s my time….5 past 8 for you. BBC Radio Scotland.

It may be raining now after all these endless weeks of sunshine but here are a few important pointers to re establishing your happiness quotient:

It may be raining but we’re going to play Hank Williams.

It may be raining but we’re going to play George Jones.

It may be raining but but we’re going to play the longest song I have ever played on radio.

It may be raining but I am not going to play the bad stuff from “Knocked Out Loaded.”

It may be raining but we have an interview and session with Shelby Lynn.

OK…that’s enough weather. Let’s flesh in a little detail here.

First Shelby. Did anyone go to the gig? I was never going to go to the gig but I did have the pleasure of doing a Shelby crammer course during last week. She really has got a lot of lovely stuff on record and Love Shelby is a very good album. If you are going to get one I would suggest you listen to her Dusty Springfield album (Just A Little Lovin’).It really is gorgeous.

Interviewing Shelby was not the easiest thing I’ve ever done but I hope you’ll enjoy the chat tomorrow. The nice thing is she seemed to like it! (Phew….)

What else…

I think you will like the music of this man:

He is Gregory Alan Isakov and he sounds like a re born Ryan Adams. His album is called This Empty Northern Hemisphere….check it out, as they say.

We’ll also have a track from the new album of a song writer who has written a massive British No 1 hit single and lots of other great songs for artists including Morrisey, David Bowie and Ringo. You do the arith’ as my good friend Biffo would say.

Lastly………Join these dots up and stay fashionable.

All will be made clear round the wireless at five past eight on Friday night. BBC Radio Scotland.