Or was the theme really “weddings” at all? Wouldn’t the word “marriage” have been the more correct title this week? I mean, only a few of the songs Dylan played could be said to be about wedding ceremonies. Dylan’s line of patter during the show was certainly mainly about marriage too, or, as he described it in the opening, “that greatest of institutions, holy matrimony.”

In any case, let’s get straight to the jokes. He attributed this one to Minnie Pearl:

Getting married’s a lot like getting into a tub of hot water. After you get used to it, it ain’t so hot.

Quoting Rodney Dangerfield:

My wife and I were happy for twenty years.

Then we met.

Later in the show some unattributed gags:

All marriages are happy. It’s living together afterwards that’s rough.

My friend was happily married for ten years. Too bad he was married for thirty.

Married men don’t live longer. It just seems longer.

Later he did a string of Zsa Zsa Gabor jokes (she’s been married a few times; who knew?), before finally describing her as “one of the mechanisms of evolution.”

Before playing Dave Edmunds doing “I Knew the Bride,” he offered this description of the band Rockpile’s sound:

A funky, fusty, noisesome, putrid, rank and reeking, reeky sound. Stenchful and stinkin’. Bad and foul. Nauseating and decomposed. Fuggy and rotten. And I mean all that in a nice way.

He also described the song in question as an “update” of Chuck Berry’s “Never Can Tell.”

Dylan clearly relished playing Etta James’ “Stop the Wedding,” followed by the “answer record,” by Ann Cole, called “Don’t Stop the Wedding.” He quoted the lyric of the latter with a more than an ounceful of feeling and expression:

Don’t don’t don’t don’t stop the wedding. Let us be happy too.
You just can’t face the facts, baby, that he’s happy here without you.
He made his choice, now beat it.

In advance of the spirited and bopping Roy Brown track, “Miss Fanny Brown,” Dylan told us that Roy was …

… a tornado of singer who could rise to great heights, but with a diameter of only a few hundred yards or less. He wrote and recorded the original version of “Good Rockin’ Tonight.” Roy successfully sued King Records in nineteen and fifty-two for unpaid royalties. Go get ‘em, Roy!

The email this week was “from George Clooney,” who said, “My auntie used to sing; how ’bout playing a record by her?” And so we heard Rosemary Clooney’s “Get Me To the Church On Time.”

In the guest spot was the “very funny comedian” Mike Birbiglia, who delivered what were some pretty darned lame musings on the subject at hand, I must say. A few more borscht belt gags from Bob himself would have been far preferable. These guest spots are problematic, let’s face it, but blessedly short.

Frank Sinatra holds the title so far, I think. That is, the title of most repeat appearances in Dylan’s playlists. Three, to be specific, with this week’s selection of “Love and Marriage.” (Several artists have made two appearances, including Merle Haggard and Ry Cooder.) Dylan told us the song was …

Written by Sammy Cahn and James Van Heusen. Became a top 5 hit in the year nineteen and fifty-five. A song greatly admired, adored, esteemed, revered, cherished, prized and treasured.

Really? I do like lots of Cahn/Van Heusen songs myself, but that description of this one seems a mite hyperbolic, exaggerated, puffed-up, overstated and excessive. Still, Bob’s entitled to his opinion.

In a show dominated by songs that don’t exactly make marriage sound like a bed of proverbial roses, the most debilitating was probably Charlie Poole’s “The Man Who Wrote ‘Home Sweet Home’ Never Was A Married Man.”

He never had no loving wife to greet him with a frying pan.
She’ll meet you at the door when you gonna come in
She’ll knock you down with a rolling pin
And the man who wrote “Home Sweet Home” never was a married man.

Dylan made up for all this gloominess somewhat at the show’s closing, by reciting part of William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116:

Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

But don’t cheer up too much. Next week’s theme: DIVORCE

Playlist:

Fred Rich & His Orchestra - Wedding Bells Broke Up That Old Gang of Mine
Prince La-La - Sending Out Invitations
Darlene Love - Today I Met the Boy I’m Gonna Marry
Ry Cooder - A Married Man’s a Fool
Laura Lee - Wedlock is a Padlock
Dave Edmunds & Rockpile - I Knew the Bride When She Used To RocknRoll
Etta James - Stop the Wedding
Ann Cole - Don’t Stop the Wedding
Roy Brown - Miss Fanny Brown
Rosemary Clooney - Get Me To the Church On Time
Johnny Tyler- I’m A Married Man
Jimmy Cavallo - Leave Married Women Alone
Big Joe Turner - Married Woman
Frank Sinatra - Love and Marriage
Charlie Poole - The Man Who Wrote “Home Sweet Home” Never Was A Married Man
Lloyd Price - Where Were You On Our Wedding Day?

Theme Time Radio Hour with your host, Bob Dylan, on XM Radio.

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