PUT THE BLAME ON FAME, BOY

THEME TIME RADIO HOUR WITH BOB DYLAN - SEASON 3, #9 "FAMOUS PEOPLE"
Broadcast December 10, 2008

In this episode, Dylan presents a theme he knows more than a little about: Being famous. I guess there are any number of songs about famous people, but judging by this collection, not very many of them are any good. The best example of this is the leadoff song, Jack Palance, by The Mighty Sparrow. I don't know if he's fallen off his twig, but a song about the resemblance between older street prostitutes(' I'm looking for youth, not experience', says he) and the fist-faced actor is not worth writing, let alone performing. Nice beat, though. Does anyone remember Janis Martin? No? Well, she was the 'Female Elvis', apparently, and her My Boy Elvis does no credit to old snakehips, in spite of the solid efforts of a great rockabilly backup band. King Stitt checks in with Lee Van Cleef, a tribute to a 60's movie hardman with the refrain ' I'm ugly, I'm ugly'. Not a great candidate to be your next ring tone.

Neurotic Belgian painter James Ensor gets an unmemorable tribute by They Might Be Giants, and flashy fifties fruitcake, Liberace, gets the country-and-western nod from Charlie Adams, a version he might have considered buying up the rights to and destroying, sparing all of us with intact hearing. One of those early-sixties 'response' songs, The Beatles Got To Go by persons named Ken Lazarus and Keith Lyn only comes alive when they parody a Beatles harmony at the end, reminding us again of how, back in the day, those lovable Liverpudlians stood out like a poppy in a field of corn. Bill Cox's The Fate Of Will Rogers And Wiley Post is my favorite track, a singin' newspaper account of the accident that claimed the lives of the stars who set the standard for celebrity plane crashes to follow. Bob wraps up the set with probably the worst song Simon & Garfunkel allowed to see the light of day, So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright, about missing the flamboyant modernist architect (missing an architect?). Simon must have wrote it after - in desperation - smoking a page torn from Jansen's History Of Art, then tripping down the aisles of Rizzoli's Books.

Artists are continually inspired by famous people, but not to write good songs about them. Once in a great while, a really good one comes along, though. As is becoming a frequent feature of TTRH lately, Dylan leaves out one of his own - Hurricane - that actually helped to get an innocent guy out of jail. Plus, it was a very good tune. Still, Bobby D. remains the most interesting and engaging deejay on the planet, in spite of turgid material, like The Clash doing their tribute to Montgomery Clift, The Right Profile. Gee, I was hoping it would be about John Barrymore, but it was just another song about a fame fatale.