#BLM #MeToo and Other Hidden Themes of Theme Time Radio Hour
By: Fred Bals
Tags: Diana Krall, Theme Time Radio Hour, Bob Dylan, Whiskey

Our Host is careful to call out Rogers’ “Good Whiskey (And a Bad Woman)” lyrics as extremely politically incorrect, even for 1946, and especially for 2020, but unless you were listening carefully you might miss Dylan’s aside, “[Rogers] says, ‘Be sure you get a young chick, because gals do not improve with age.’ An adage he shared with Errol Flynn.”

From left: Errol Flynn, his wife Nora, Rita Hayworth and her husband Orson Welles, 1946

If he didn’t invent the saying, “I like my whiskey old and my women young,” adventurer, actor, and all-around rake Errol Flynn was at one time the person most associated with the phrase, especially after being accused of statutory rape by both a 17- and 16-year-old. Flynn’s 1942 trial on both charges was a full-blown circus, with the press reporting the trial with more amusement than outrage; Flynn’s attorney accusing the young women of cutting a deal with the prosecutor to avoid felony charges for “oral copulation”; and the judge telling the assembled court “I hope you’ve enjoyed this case as much as I have” after the jury found Flynn not guilty.

The phrase — “in like Flynn” — became a national joke and Flynn himself went on to marry a 19-year-old who he had met at a candy stand during the trial as well as conducting an affair with a 15-year-old. Whiskey, teenagers, and hard living finally caught up with Errol Flynn eight years after his trial. He died at age 50, looking like the living embodiment of “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”

His cronies buried him with six bottles of whiskey.

Bugsy’s Missing Statue

“Some booze was brought into the country illegally by Bugsy Siegel, who later founded Las Vegas. But, isn’t it strange, there’s no statues of him there.”

Bugsy Siegel Memorial Plaque

One of the weirder Dylan non sequiturs of the show is during a segment on Prohibition where he notes that there are no statues of Bugsy Siegel in Las Vegas, even though, Dylan continues, Siegel founded the city.

Mobster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel had nothing to do with the founding of Las Vegas some hundred years before his arrival there. But he was a driving force behind the development of the Las Vegas Strip in the late 1940s, an obsession that would eventually lead to his murder.

There are no statues of Siegel — whose checkered career included arson, rape, armed robbery and Murder, Inc. — in Las Vegas… nor would you expect there to be, even in a country rife with statues celebrating figures whose histories include secession, slavery, and the founding of the Ku Klux Klan. The most you’ll find memorializing Siegel is a plaque dedicated to the gangster at the original site of his Flamingo Hotel.

Toppled statue of Charles Linn, a city founder who was in the Confederate navy, in Birmingham, Alabama, on June 1, 2020.

So what can we make of Dylan’s remark? In the widespread Black Lives Matter protests that followed the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police on May 25 2020, statues of Confederate leaders and soldiers as well as of Christopher Columbus and of several U.S. Presidents and other public figures who were slaveowners were toppled, defaced, and in some instances proactively removed by authorities. Some criticizing the protesters’ acts argued that the destruction of statues was part of a “left-wing cultural revolution” to “wipe out our history” and to demonize our Founding Fathers.

And isn’t it strange that there are no Bugsy Seigel statues in Las Vegas?

The Case of the South American Waxy Tree Frog

“There’s even a powerful painkiller opiate that trainers discovered can be administered by having the horse lick the back of a South American Waxy Monkey Leaf Frog. Hmm.”

South American Waxy Monkey Leaf Frog. Hmm….

Truth is often stranger than fiction in Theme Time-land. What sounds like another Gorodetsky/Dylan joke about licking frogs to get high (an actual thing) is true, although happily, no horses are being forced to lick frogs. However, according to a 2012 story in the New York Times, shady trainers in Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and New Mexico were giving their horses a powerful performance-enhancing potion drawn from the backs of frogs whose scientific name is Phyllomedusa sauvagei, commonly known as the waxy monkey tree frog, native to South America.

“That would be an awful lot of frogs that would have to be squeezed,” opinioned a testing laboratory scientist.

It’s More Important to be Great than to be Perfect

“I want you to listen to the beginning of this record. There’s a call and response section. Tiny goes ‘Boodow!’ and the whole band goes ‘Boodow!’ Then Tiny goes ‘Booday!’ and the whole band goes ‘Booday!’ Except for one guy who still goes ‘Boodow!’ Nowadays, you’d just take Pro Tools and take that guy out, or maybe you’d re-record the whole track. But back then, it was more important to be great than to be perfect.” ~Bob Dylan, “Trains,” Theme Time Radio Hour

Tiny Bradshaw, “The Train Kept A-Rollin”

“Everybody’s so busy fixing their mistakes, and auto-tuning, they wouldn’t know how to make a record like this anymore,” says Bob Dylan of Byllye Williams’ “Hangover Blues” played in the “Whiskey” episode. Dylan’s disdain for modern recording techniques was a regular theme of the Theme Time series, including his amused commentary on Tiny Bradshaw’s “The Train Kept A-Rollin.” You can hear the one lone band member shoutin’ “Boodow” about 10 seconds into the clip above. But don’t stop there. It’s a great song, as Dylan says on the “Trains” episode, made even better by the mistake.

Everybody makes mistakes — the hundred-odd episodes of Theme Time contain enough errors that Dylan once responded with a tongue-in-cheek rant when a caller named Tim Ziegler informed him that he got a record label wrong.

“You know, sometimes we don’t get it right. I mean, it’s important to remember, this isn’t a classroom here. This is music we’re playing. It’s music of the field, of the pool hall. The back alley crap game. The bar room and the bedroom. We don’t want to make it dusty and academic. It’s full of sweat and blood. It’s like life itself. If every once in awhile we get a name wrong, or we tell you it’s on the wrong label, it’s not going to kill anybody, Tim. Just listen to the music.”

In the “Whiskey” episode Dylan misspoke when he said Charlie Poole’s version of “If the River Was Whiskey” was recorded in “19 and 20.” It was actually recorded about ten years later and released in 19 and 30 on the Columbia label, making Dylan and Charlie Poole the label-mates he says they are, albeit separated by several decades. And he gets the name of the Charles Bukowski book he quotes from wrong as well. And weirdly, he claims Joshua Soule Smith’s ode to the Mint Julep is titled, “The Sweet Dreams of Drunks,” although that last is likely another Dylan/Gorodetsky in-joke, a word-play on the poem’s actual title: “The Very Dream of Drinks.”

Apparently no one on the Theme Time team noticed the errors, and they certainly wouldn’t stop any listener’s enjoyment of the show, unless that listener’s name was Tim Ziegler.

In the show’s last few minutes, if you listen to Dylan’s closing commentary on Byllye Williams through headphones, you’ll hear a plane overhead, the sound not edited out.

Perfect.

I like to think of Our Host and Eddie Gorodetsky together sitting outside in Malibu, recording the show, telling jokes, laughing together, and sippin’ whiskey.

Maybe they’re out there right now.