What do you do if you're XM Satellite Radio and you want Bob Dylan to host a radio show? First, you have to track the once-reclusive rock poet down. Figure on spending a few years doing that until you luck out and find an acquaintance of Dylan's business manager.

After several years of pelting him with offers, some dialogue ensues, and finally, a deal.

"Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio" debuted several Wednesdays ago on XM's Deep Tracks, Channel 40, an hour-long escape in which Dylan manages to impart some of the mystery of the kind of radio programs he grew up hearing.

It helped that Dylan was emerging from decades of seclusion.

"The stars were lining up," says XM programming chief Lee Abrams. "He was doing the Scorsese film ("No Direction Home," on PBS), planning a "60 Minutes" interview, writing his book ("Chronicles") and he had a bunch of XM radios and really liked what he heard, he was a fan. He grew up listening to those great 50,000-watt stations from many miles away, from that very romantic time in radio.

"It's part of his musical roots, that sort of earthy, organic radio that was around in the '50s," Abrams says. "He saw that XM was a place where he could do that kind of radio without compromising it for mass consumption."

Dylan, who turns 65 on May 24, grew up in the Iron Range in northern Minnesota, where those distant radio stations were a vital form of entertainment well into the '50s.

Unlike a lot of celebrities who phone in their radio shows, Dylan puts a lot of and thought into each week's show, says Abrams says.

"Rather than sitting in a studio saying you have an hour do a radio show, he pieces them together and he really thinks out the playlist."

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