HARD REIGN: DYLAN AS D.J.

Dear Readers,

After decades of living mostly in the shadows of fame, 1950's protest singer, Bob Dylan, has come out from the cold and got himself a job as a radio deejay.

Hopefully, this will end a string of hard times, bad luck and downright abuse that the 60-something folksinger has endured over his years of exile. Dylan, who's last big musical hit was his 1964 number one novelty single, I Like The Rolling Stones, has landed himself a show - not on AM, not on FM but on XM? What is that? Is that only two rungs up the showbiz ladder from ZM?

The program is called Theme Time Radio Hour With Your Host, Bob Dylan and runs about 1 hour a week. (Note to Bob: Shorten the title - one or two mentions of the name during the show, and you've eaten up about one-third of your time slot!)

As the title suggests, the music he plays each week has to somehow relate to his chosen theme, a concept most radio listeners may have trouble following, since standards of education have fallen off a cliff since Bob was last popular. Dylan's choice of 'themes' lately has been revealing - the last month has featured shows titled 'Bitterness', 'Envy', 'Regret' and 'Nostalgia'. I hear next week's theme will be 'You Were My Manager And You Cheated Me, You Bastard'. Bob may have to dig quite deep into the grooveyard of oldies to find music that falls under that particular umbrella.

We're all too familiar with the sad, predictable show-biz story that is Bob's. Coming out of Missouri during World War Two, he blazed a folksong trail from Newark, New Jersey to New York City, emulating and expanding on the musical legacy of his hero, Woody Guthrie (who Bob smothered to death in 1961, after stealing all of the folk legend's unpublished songs). Then protest hit after protest hit followed, leading to nationwide appearances on TV shows like Shindig, Hullaballoo and Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. The trappings of fame, however, caught up with Dylan after he invented marijuana, amphetamines and Boone's Farm wine to help ease the stress of success. Double tragedies hit him in 1965, when first, he was electrocuted on stage at the Nerdport Spazz Festival and later that year, he plowed his motorcycle into a group of musicians, killing Ritchie Valens, The Big Bopper, Buddy Holly, Patsy Cline, Cowboy Copas and half of the up-and-coming band Lynyrd Skynyrd.

While the civil rights movement and the anti-war protests swept the rest of the country, Bob (the 'voice of a generation') spent the rest of the 60's in court, paying out most of his fortune in lawsuits brought by widows and orphans of the lost singers. The hits stopped and the gigs became few and far between. Dylan was easy prey for rip-offs of all sorts, too. For instance, he received only $28.50 for his six-song appearance at Beatle George Harriman's benefit The Concert For Bangalore - and even that was pilfered by the promoter, Ravioli Shanker. Recently, flimmaker Martin Scoresezzey paid him the princely sum of $172 for the rights to make the PBS special, No Directional Homing Signal, which was about Bob's difficulty mastering his GPS device.

Today, Bob lives quietly in his 42-room beach shack in Malibu and commutes once a week (by hitchhiking) to his old home of St. Louis to assemble his show and present it to his dozens of fans worldwide. This XM station, though, I can't seem to find! I've tried all my radios - even shortwave - and I can't locate it anywhere. How his fans find his show, I can't really explain. But props to Bob, anyway. He's found a regular job at last and word is, he's happy. He's a man who played the A-side until it wore out, but has discovered that a pretty cool track was there all the time on the B-side.

I'm choked up now, and need some refreshment. It's a bit early, but I'll fill up the old Russell Hobbs anyway, plug it in, and make a nice cup of tea - safe in the knowledge that somewhere, it's 4 o'clock.