Bob Dylan looks for commercial success as Secret partner
By CLIFFORD PUGH
Copyright 2004 Houston Chronicle

The secret is out.

Scantily clad models in a new television ad for Victoria's Secret are prancing around the palazzo Palazzo in Venice with an unlikely companion: Bob Dylan.
The music legend, whose songs fueled the 1960s counterculture, even sports dark facial hair that looks like a bad dye job in the ad, which first aired on during American Idol Tuesday night.

It may seem a bit disheartening to longtime Dylan fans -- the New York Post dubbed the bizarre pairing the "sellout sell-out of the week" -- but the singer apparently had his reasons for appearing in the ad.

"We asked him to be in the commercials and he said yes, he would gladly go off to Venice with the supermodels," the underwear firm's CEO, Grace Nichols, recently told students at Colorado State University.

The Dylan connection was established last year when Victoria's Secret creative director Ed Razek sifted through the music of more than 50 singers, from Tom Waits to Luciano Pavarotti, hunting for a tune for an ad featuring a lingerie-clad model with angel wings.

"We put everything against the track, and nothing worked like Dylan," Razek recalled.

The song, a remixed version of Love Sick from Dylan's 1997 album Time Out of Mind, "captures everything relationships are about," Razek said.

For the ad's sequel, which will air for the next three weeks, the company used the same song -- and snagged Dylan to appear on-screen for the first time in a commercial. A nine-track CD of Dylan songs is available at Victoria's Secret stores for $10.

The odd combination opens the door to all sorts of grizzled rock star/product pairings. Will we see Aerosmith's Steven Tyler for L'Oréal hair-care products in the future? Or maybe Neil Young for Maybelline?