Mick Hartley

Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour is in its second season, and he’s up to no. 56, on the subject of Cadillacs.

If you’re making a show based on a commercial brand, you might as well make the most of it. So that’s what the man’s done.

Here’s a shorter version, and here’s the shortest. What he says at the end – and god knows it’s not easy to hear – is “What’s life without taking a detour?”

On Theme Time Radio 53, Days of the Week, Dylan read out an e-mail from a (most likely apocryphal) listener knocking Sheryl Crow for using a Buddy Holly song (Not Fade Away) in a hair dye commercial: “I felt the most awful stinging disappointment…I felt betrayed by Crow.” “Well Jackie,” drawls Dylan, “I have to disagree with you. How often do you hear Buddy Holly on the radio nowadays. There aren’t too many programmes like Theme Time Radio Hour… How many people never heard of Nick Drake until he was in a car commercial? A lot of musicians have always been proud to have commercial affiliation. Sonny Boy Williamson sold flour. I can’t imagine Sonny Boy saying, “My blues is too sacred. I wouldn’t sell flour.” Jimmie Rodgers sold biscuits. Sheryl Crow sells hair dye. More power to her. And Jackie, have you ever seen a Victoria’s Secrets ad?”

RightWingBob is a happy man, mainly because it’s bound to annoy Dylan’s “spokesman of his generation” left-wing fans. Posts here, here, and here (with a surprise reference to William McGonagall).

Me, I expected it to happen. I knew he’d lost control.

It’s an ad full of Americana – blues, highways, wide open spaces, oil……and Cadillacs. And at the end he gets out, of course, at the crossroads.