By Tony Attwood
- Happy anniversary, Theme Time Radio Hour. Still offering us fun
- Episode 2: Mother
- 20 years of Theme Time Radio part 3 Drinking
It is only after three episodes of this series that I have realised what an enormous task I have set myself in terms of reviewing Bob’s “Theme Time” radio series in any way other than by touching briefly upon what he did. Indeed, as I finished Episode 3 (linked above), I called it Episode 3 part one, realising how much more there was to the “Drinking” episode than I had covered.
But now I’ve thought maybe I should just scoot through the episodes with a few recordings and thoughts that strike me, and then maybe in years to come I can go back and add some more, if I have any brain power left by that time. We have been running this site since 2008, so maybe there’s hope that we can keep going for a bit longer.
So I am going to leave “Drinking” and move on to episode four – although this gives me a few more problems since I am English, and have lived most of my life in the UK, and although I have visited the USA quite a few times I have never been to a baseball game.
However, I am going to do my best – but also use a bit of flexibility. Baseball is not a major sport in the United Kingdom, although I have watched one match on the island of Guernsey, where part of my mother’s family comes from, and where baseball is or was a popular sport.
And faced with uncertainty, I thought I would cheat, and introduce the song that all supporters of my football (soccer) club sing at the start of each game. It is “North London Forever” and if you want to hear it you can click on the link which takes you to my other blog “Untold Arsenal” where you will find a recording of some 50,000 or so fans, including me, singing at the start of each game. It’s there at the top of the page. The full title is “The Angel (North London Forever)” and was written by the English singer-songwriter Louis Dunford.
But now back to Bob. I don’t feel competent at the moment to review episode 4, Baseball, but if you would like to do it, complete with links from the internet for the songs, well, you know the style of the site, so please do write it up, add the links, and send it to me at Tony@schools.co.uk If you are not sure about your writing style, just write a bit with a couple of songs included and email me as above, and I’ll give you my thoughts. Please put in the subject line UNTOLD DYLAN THEME TIME.
So now I am skipping on to Episode 5, Coffee, a subject on which I have a greater amount of contemporary knowledge. And immediately I saw that one of the songs was “40 Cups of Coffee” which I knew as a youngster through the recording by Bill Haley, who I did actually go and see a couple of times.
Bill Haley performed fairly basic rock n roll, and was famous in England, at any rate, for recording the first rock n roll song most of us heard, “Rock Around the Clock”.
However, Bob Dylan in fact chose the Ella Mae Morse 1953 version as his preferred version…
One of the many great things about Bob’s show is the sheer variety of songs on each theme. The next track was released in the year I was born, which of course explains why cigarettes could be openly mentioned. (I don’t know about the situation in the US, but you couldn’t get away with this in the UK these days.)
Of course, most of the songs come from the 1950s and 1960s and that includes a Lightnin’ Hopkins song that I must admit I had not heard before. It’s a 12 bar blues with a real bounce and an extraordinary amount of power and energy. It is Coffee Blues recorded in 1951.
And then jumping forward, the most recent of the songs on Bob’s coffee list came from Blur…
… but I was particularly taken by “Let’s Have Another Cup Of Coffee” which comes from the American TV show “Face The Music” but not the UK TV show of the same name. As ever, this is a song celebrating coffee as virtually the elixir of life. Which of course, it actually isn’t. (I wonder, did the Coffee Marketing Board promote these songs, or were there so many songs about coffee because they couldn’t sing about drugs?)
I’m going to finish with Black Coffee in Bed. I don’t know why Bob chose it, and I find it quite an ordinary song, but with one of the silliest videos of the era. Ah well, just my feelings and me being old. Although not as old as Bob.
There’s an indexs to all our current series on the home page of the website here.