"Have you ever watched those old clips of Steve Allen interviewing people, when he plays the piano?"

Bob Dylan's business manager asked Alan Pasqua, the jazz pianist who ended up providing the background music for Dylan's Nobel speech. Pasqua said yeah, and Dylan's business manager said, "Well, we need some of that kind of music."

Here's the audio of Bob Dylan's speech, with Pasqua playing in the background.

Here's what Steve Allen was like, interviewing while playing the piano. I picked the one where he's interviewing Jack Kerouac:



The first tinkling notes and I thought: "If Dogs Run Free." That's the spoken-word piece on the great 1970 Dylan album, "New Morning." That's Al Kooper on the piano, perhaps taking instruction to play like Steve Allen. Or... it says here the Dylan wrote that the piano playing was in the style of Teddy Wilson, and it seems that Steve Allen learned some things from Teddy Wilson.

That last link goes to a Rolling Stone list of the 10 worst Bob Dylan songs (based on a reader poll), which put "If Dogs Run Free" in 6th place.

"Try to refrain from musical tones."

Says the unknown, young Frank Zappa on "The Steve Allen Show" in 1963, orchestrating noise on the bicycle.

UPDATE: I've removed the coding for the 2 videos that had been here, because they've been removed from YouTube. Too bad!