WE CAN WORK IT OUT

THEME TIME RADIO HOUR WITH BOB DYLAN - SEASON 3
#11 "WORK & JOBS"
Broadcast January 7, 2009

At a time when jobs are getting harder to find, Bob works in a lot of tunes where people are complaining about their employment situation. Seems that nobody ever writes songs about wanting a job, but perhaps among the millions who lost their jobs recently, there may be a budding songwriter who's been freed to write a few tunes about the desire for work.
The set punches in with The Burnadettes singing First You've Got To Recognize God, (which, pray tell, may or may not be a prerequisite to being hired these days). But listening to it, I was reminded of how The Beatles used to admire the sound of US girl-groups of the early sixties, and how they not only covered some of the best (Please Mr. Postman, Boys, etc.) but maybe un-self-consciously copied the structure and feel of the songs as they penned their own tunes at the start of their career. They easily could have covered this one, had it not been such a out-and-out gospel number. But I have a terrible feeling that the Fabs would have continued to write such pastiches, and might even have become the world's first 'boy-band' had Mr. Dylan not introduced them to the wacky weed. Oh, how history was changed by one doobie!
Complaining about having to go to work made great fodder for AM radio hits back in the day, and Bob gives us a right old lunchbucket full of them. The boppin' and bitchin' by T-Bone Walker, Merle Haggard and Jimmy Reed is only relieved somewhat by Sarah Vaughan's jazzy take on Nice Work If You Can Get It, as the playlist begins to take a slight metaphoric detour. We have to work through a bit more job-kvetching before getting to a very early Ray Charles platter I'll Do Anything But Work (which may or may not be a gigolo's anthem). Brother Ray is almost unrecognizable, vocally, as I guess he was still working on his style. Nice job, though.
At least one positive view of work sneaks in as we get to hear - I'm not kidding - Whistle While You Work, the version (complete with sound effects) from the Disney cartoon, Snow White, as sung by the forgotten Adriana Caselotti. Divorced from the visuals, it seems less childish and
more of a timeless standard, except towards the end, when I started seeing those damn Dwarfs in my mind's eye. As Bob tells it, the writer of the song apparently committed suicide years later, an image that will now, unfortunately, stand alongside the diminutive Disneyites in my head if I ever listen to that tune again, which I promise not to.
Toward the end, we get back to music about how crappy jobs can be, as Tom Waits grunts through one of his extremely perceptive songs about work, I Can't Wait To Get Off Work(And See My Baby On Montgomery Avenue). Did this guy really have broom-pushing jobs? He sure sounds as if he did - last week, in fact. He's great, but thank goodness there's no such thing as 45 RPM singles anymore, as Waits' paragraph-long title would leave little room on the label for anything else.
Dylan, without resorting to playing worn-out cliches like Take This Job And Shove It and Get A Job, realizes this week's theme with his familiar mix of rarer Soul, Blues, Country and Novelty sides that really work, without being too laborious. In one of his informational filler-segments between songs, he gives us a list of jobs that you can't get anymore, or soon won't be able to get anymore, like milk man, travel agent, typesetter, sewing machine operator, elevator operator and Polaroid Plant Worker. Bob could have added yet another job to that list- a person who plays the music they want to on a over-the -airwaves commercial radio station. In other words, a deejay. Stay on the satellite, Mr. D.