We have a couple of TTRH-related miscellanea to talk about, nothing weighty enough for a post by itself, so we're hereby initiating the Dreamtime Theme Time Radio Hour Roundup Day, which, as all good Mouseketeers know, always comes on a Friday.
Our readers probably know by now that the "deluxe" edition of Together Through Life will include as a bonus disc the "Friends & Neighbors" Theme Time episode, first broadcast way back in Season 1, August of 2006. The track listing on Amazon matches up to the aired show, and I think one can safely assume that Our Host's commentary will be included.
"Friends & Neighbors" will be the second "official" full TTRH show to be released. The first, of course, was the "Baseball" show from Season 1, itself a not-for-sale promotional CD that was haphazardly distributed to some stores such as the now-defunct Circuit City. As I remember, you had to buy both Modern Times and at least one other Dylan CD at onerous CC prices in order to get your "free" copy of the "Baseball" show. Being the total TTRH fanboy that I am, I have two copies of the show. It still remains one of the best TTRHs ever aired, if, for no other reason, Mr. D's a capella rendition of the full Nellie Kelly version of Take Me Out To The Ball Game.
The Fan's Conundrum
Speaking of "official," there's been a minor kerfuffle in various online forums about Our Host's comments to a supposed email in this week's "Family" show. In reply to a listener's aside that she copies various TTRH episodes to pass on to her family, Mr. D. notes that he "can't condone that," goes into Ann Landers' mode to straighten out the listener's family problems, and concludes his commentary with a stern, "And stop giving my shows away!"And stop making copies of my show! (Dylan's actual statement courtesy of our friends over at RightwingBob).
The comment generated some angst among fans. Is he talking about us? Does he mean it? What does that mean in relation to Mr. D.'s remark in an earlier show that listeners should go "illegally download" TTRHs that they've missed?
"Who knows?" is what we say here at Dreamtime. You can drive yourself crazy trying to parse any Bob Dylan remark, of course. If he said, "the sky is blue," there would be several articles - if not books - written on its exact meaning, postulating everything that it had been an ironic commentary on the American political situation to proof positive that Dylan was a Freemason.
On the other hand, he might have meant that the sky was blue.
The whole bootleg/download thing is something that any Bob Dylan fan has to confront and deal with on an individual basis. At Dreamtime we subscribe to Sirius XM as a means to assuage our conscience, and we encourage others in a position to do so to do the same. We also make copies of the show, usually for personal use only. Occasionally we make copies for family and friends. We don't sell them.
That still doesn't make it right. Plus, we have to deal with the fact that bootlegging is one of the few issues I can remember where Dylan's position has been unchanging and unyielding. Space travel is the only other subject I can think of where his opinion has been the same each time it's been brought up. He doesn't like either, period. He's compared bootleggers to thieves and house-breakers and complained that they've diluted his artistic opus. He won't play any new work on tour until it's been released on album for fear that the first release would be a bootlegged release... which, of course, it would.
So, we're dealing with a revered figure that has flatly said that he doesn't want us doing what we're doing, while we grasp at straws like, "some of these bootleggers they make pretty good stuff," in our defense.
Yet we still do it. Such is the conundrum of the fan.
It's a conundrum that even Our Host has fallen into at times. In at least three instances Theme Time Radio Hour has played bootlegged music: a Frank Sinatra commercial for Pete Epsteen Pontiac in the "Cars" episode of Season 1, and more recently, the "Blood" and "War" shows featured two Jerry Lee Lewis songs that have never been officially released. An obviously delighted Bob Dylan noted, "You know, if anybody ever asks me why I do this radio show, I could just play them that - Jerry Lee Lewis singing Shakespeare. That's what this show is all about."
Indeed. And we all would have been the poorer if he hadn't played them. Such is the conundrum of the fan.
Name That Tune
We'll leave it at that and with a question for our readership which is bugging the usually infallible crack Dreamtime research team. At the beginning of the "Truth & Lies" show, when Mr. D. claims that we're listening to Little Steven's Underground Garage, there's a song playing in the background. It's annoyingly familar to me, I can even hum it all the way through, but damned if I can think of its title or the artist. Can anyone clue me in?
"You know, if anybody ever asks me why I do this radio show, I could just play them that - Jerry Lee Lewis singing Shakespeare. That's what this show is all about." ~ Bob Dylan on Jerry Lee Lewis' Lust of the Blood from the rock musical, Catch My Soul.
IAGO: It is merely a lust of the blood and a permission of the will.
Catch My Soul started out as not much more than a gleam in the eye of the aptly-named Jack Good, actor, producer, journalist, manager, and most of all, rock-'n-roll impresario. Good was the man behind Shindig!, one of the first - and one of the best - of the rock-'n-roll variety shows. Although Shindig! didn't last much past a year, ultimately brought down in a ratings war with The Beverly Hillbillies and replaced in the ABC lineup by Batman in 19 and 66, it had an influence far beyond its short life. Among many other artists, Shindig! brought Howlin' Wolf and The Chambers Brothers to television for the first time, and popularized Sonny and Cher in America, who the U.S. audience thought were a cool British duo.
When Sonny and Cher first started out they had trouble getting gigs, club owners thinking they were just too weird. But Jack Good caught their act, loved them, and told Sonny and Cher "you've got to go to England." The two sold everything they owned to finance the trip, which turned out to be the right move, 'cause England swingin' like a pendulum do immediately took to Sonny and Cher, with even the older generation chasing them down for their autographs. By the time the duo got back to the States, they were a huge hit, and everyone thought the Italian-American Sonny and the Iranian-Cherokee Cher were English.
[Shindig! - Sonny & Cher]
Othello: Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul, / But I do love thee! and when I love thee not, / Chaos is come again.
Jack Good had wanted to produce a rock-'n-roll version of Othello since he was an undergrad at Oxford in the Fifties. In 19 and 58, Good spotted Jerry Lee Lewis stalking angrily through a hotel lobby and knew he had found his Iago. But it would take nearly another decade before Catch My Soul would go into production. By 1965 Good was bored with Shindig! and was looking for new worlds to conquer. He recruited Ray Pohlman, Shindig's! musical director, to start writing the score for Catch My Soul. With 19 songs in the can, Good starting casting around for his acting ensemble in late `66, signing Jerry Lee Lewis for the role of Iago in August.
Jerry Lee and Jack already knew each other from Jerry's Shindig! performances, and why Jerry would consider doing a rockin' version of Shakespeare isn't a mystery. In the peaks and valleys that made up his musical career, Jerry Lee Lewis was definitely down in a valley so low during the mid-Sixties, having left the Sun label in 19 and 63, and unable to score a hit since that time with his new label, Mercury. Indeed Mercury had notified Jerry Lee in `68 that his contract wasn't going to be renewed, and The Killer was in trouble.
But Catch My Soul turned out to more than just a paying gig that turned up at the right time. In Shakespeare's Iago Jerry Lee found a kindred spirit, someone with as just as much blood in his eye and hellfire in his soul as Jerry Lee Lewis himself.
It would take two years and a slew of cast and theater changes before Catch My Soul would be performed before an audience. During the interim the venue changed from Broadway to L.A. and the role of Othello changed hands from ex-linebacker Rosey Grier to the more experienced actor, Peter Brock. Incidentally, the mind boggles at the idea of Rosey, whose acting career highlight would be to co-star in The Thing With Two Heads - as Othello.
[The Thing With Two Heads trailer]
Rehearsals for Catch My Soul finally began on January 22nd 19 and 68, and both the cuts Mr. D. played on Theme Time Radio Hour, Lust of the Blood during the Blood show and Let a Soldier Drink in the War episode, are from those rehearsal sessions.
At the first rehearsal, Jerry Lee surprised the rest of the cast as the only one there who already had all his lines memorized. "This Shakespeare is really somethin'," he'd later tell a reporter, wondering aloud what Willy the Shake might have thought of The Killer's music.
If the critics' response to Lewis' performance was any indication, the Bard of Avalon would probably have righteously dug the Man from Memphis. According to Nick Tosches book Hellfire, Jerry Lee stole the show on opening night and every night thereafter, wowing reviewers ranging from The Christian Science Monitor ("a Lousiana-born genius") to The Toronto Daily Star ("genuinely diabolical as Iago"). After the first show, sixties luminaries including Burt Bacharach, Andy Williams, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and Tom Jones all lined up in front of Jerry Lee's dressing room, trying to get inside to congratulate The Killer.
IAGO: Some wine, ho!
[Sings]
And let me the canakin clink, clink;
And let me the canakin clink
A soldier's a man;
A life's but a span;
Why, then, let a soldier drink.
Some wine, boys!
CASSIO: 'Fore God, an excellent song.
Catch My Soul the play had a short but successful three-month run, closing on April 13th 19 and 68, and reportedly pulling in more than a half-million dollars. Jerry Lee would head back down to Memphis and record What Made Milwaukee Famous (Has Made a Loser Out of Me), a single that would singlehandedly revitalize Lewis' career. What Made Milwaukee Famous broke into the Country charts in June and eventually hit the #2 slot, selling more than 170,000 copies by the end of the summer of `68. And the rest, of course, is history.
Catch My Soul had less of a successful future, albeit nearly one as strange as Jerry Lee's. The play was eventually adapted to film and directed by Patrick McGoohan, he of Secret Agent Man and The Prisoner fame. As a piece of trivia, this would be McGoohan's second involvement with a musical adaptation of Othello. Back in 1961, McGoohan performed in the film All Night Long, a jazz version of the play that included appearances by Dave Brubeck and Charlie Mingus.
Released in 19 and 74, Catch My Soul the movie starred Richie Havens as Othello, Season Hubley as Desdemona, and journeyman actor Lance LeGault taking over the role of Iago.
Except for being produced by Jack Good and retaining a bit of Shakespeare's original language, the movie had little resemblance to the play, or even to reality. Influenced heavily by the hit rock operas Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell!, Catch My Soul the movie was set in the American Southwest. Othello became a itinerant evangelist who wandered into Iago's remote commune. Othello falls in love with beautiful Desdemona, infuriating Iago, who also loves her. Iago plots his revenge and murder and tragedy predictably ensue. In between the bouts of murder, madness and blood there are songs, some performed by Richie Havens, some by Tony Joe White, others by Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett, two singers who had something of side-career with showing up in weird movies of the `60s and `70s. None of the music from Catch My Soul the play made the transition to the movie, which was described by one reviewer as a "train wreck."
Dreamtime received over a half-dozen emails asking about Catch My Soul, some from TTRH fans wanting to know why Jerry Lee Lewis was singing Shakespeare - which I hoped I've answered - and several from fans who already knew the story of Catch My Soul, but were interested in where Mr. D. had found the songs.
Both cuts are from The Killer's Private Stash, a semi-bootleg out of Holland that also includes Lewis' first known recording and an X-rated version of Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On. As far as I can determine, those two songs from the Catch My Soul rehearsal sessions are the only known circulating tracks in existence. But given their quality, maybe somewhere, maybe hidden away in some box or basement shelf, there's more in the Killer's Private Stash, maybe there's a complete recording of Jerry Lee Lewis as Iago in Catch My Soul... and maybe someday we'll get to hear it.
We can only hope.
Sources
The primary source for this article was Nick Tosches' Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story. But as is usual with anything Tosches' has written, anything he claims are specific names, dates, or places should probably be taken with a grain of salt. Tosches is a great writer but sloppy researcher. It's Rosey, Nick, not "Rosie."
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.
... another in our ongoing efforts to come up with audience-attracting blog titles. No, no, actually War was last week's episode and Fruit is going to be the theme for the November 26th show according to several Dreamtime correspondents who took the time to write to us (and thank you).
If you were listening to the premiere airing of the War episode last Wednesday you found that the closing credits were missing. The stock Outro was added in later "encore" rebroadcasts, which is how we came to know that Fruit will be this week's show. At least one of our correspondents heard the title as "Fruit Bowl," but I suspect that it is simply Fruit, as that was the title of one of the "lost" episodes from Season 2, announced by XM Radio but never released.
And that leads to several interesting questions. Is Fruit an un-aired show from Season 2, or did the TTRH team never get around to recording it until this season? Will we eventually get to hear the other lost episodes - Streets; Something; and Nothing? I had always figured the last two a joke cooked up by Eddie Gorodetsky, pressed by XM Radio to give them something for their Season 2 press release, and a sideways nod to Seinfeld. But who knows, maybe there will be a TTRH show about nothing.
The fact that XM is airing Fruit and the missing - and then added - Outro, also leads to some speculation about TTRH production, although it's a very trivial thing of interest only to the completely demented like me.
Much of TTRH seems geared to specific times/dates - holidays and seasons and so on. But there are many shows that could be used at any time, and apparently which show that will be is sometimes a last-minute decision by XM. Go back and re-listen to various TTRH episodes, a pleasurable task in itself, and you'll hear several Outros where the name of the next show has obviously been edited in. The fact that the Theme Time home page has still not been fully updated - perhaps they laid off all the Web designers during the recent purge - and the reported turmoil in the XM Washington offices could lead you to believe that the task of adding the War outro fell through the cracks last week. I hope someone over over at XM is still keeping their eye on the ball with TTRH, but the evidence isn't pointing that way.
Outside of having one of the stronger TTRH playlists - although I could have lived without ever having to hear Buffy St. Marie's Melanie-like, wailing Universal Soldier again - the War episode was a unique TTRH in several respects...
* It was the first 90-minute show. There's been three 2-hour specials - 10 points to you if you can name them - and then there's the weird Time show, which ran into overtime, somewhere between 70-80 minutes as I remember, but never a full 90-minute show until War.
* It was the second show not to feature Ellen Barkin's voice (again, I'll leave finding the first as an exercise for the TTRH fan), and the first not to use the "Night in the Big City" intro.
As much as I love hearing Ellen Barkin, I think the intro could use a nice rest after almost 80 variations. Something like the audio collage used for War would be a welcome change - although obviously a lot more work. And what the hell would they do for a show like Fruit?
* Although it's now looking more like a glitch on XM's part, the missing Outro would have made War the second TTRH not to have closing credits (maybe I'll put together a quiz of TTRH production trivia), and I think the first to feature only Dylan's voice alone. There were no telephone calls or additional commentary from actors, comedians, or musicians. Again, kind of refreshing, although I was surprised that there wasn't a def poetry reading given the subject and Dylan's liking for poets such as Stephen Crane. And am I the only listener who misses regular def poetry? Bring it back, Bob! Not all of them have to be as long as The Raven.
* Regular Dreamtime correspondent Heddy points out another oddity that I missed: There was no "... sponsored by Cadillac" announcement before the show. Another XM glitch?
Enough rambling. The Dreamtime team is on holiday for the next couple of weeks, even the under-employed take the occasional vacation, so don't expect the next post or an update of the widget until early December. For those celebrating it, as does Jailbait, Curly, Bear, and Your Host, a very Happy Thanksgiving to our readers, and to all others, may you also have a very happy and productive next couple of weeks. Go hug your loved ones, if you haven't lately. They're the main thing to be thankful for.
If you're into taping TTRH, you'll want to give the upcoming November 12 "War" episode an extra 30 minutes. According to this Rolling Stone article, the show will be 90 minutes long, which would make it the first hour-and-half Theme Time ever aired.
As a piece of trivia, which is what Dreamtime is all about, there's been to date three TTRH 2-hour specials - "Christmas and New Year"; "Spring Cleaning"; and "President's Day" - and the unique "Time" show from Season 1, which ran into overtime at around 70 minutes.
If RS is correct, "War" should run from 11-12:30 pm this Wednesday, November 12.
The online version of Brian Braiker's Rolling Stone article on the return of Theme Time Radio Hour now includes a streaming 30-minute clip of the reportedly 90-minute War episode, targeted for official airing on November 19th. The link is:
I haven't listened to the excerpt. I'd rather wait for the official release and listen to the show complete. And given that the Money episodes coincided with a worldwide financial meltdown, I'm a little nervous about the War show already.
The page also contains about 20 minutes of selections from the first Money episode.
