Penn Jillette on Nobel winner Bob Dylan's 'breathtakingly good' music

Penn Jillette was elated to have heard the news that musician Bob Dylan had won the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday.

"None of us were surprised that Bob (Dylan) won the Nobel Prize — I've been saying he should win it for 20 years, but I knew he had been on the short list for the past five years," Jillette said. "I was thrilled to pieces."

Jillette, the longtime performer who is friends with Dylan's manager Jeff Rosen, said in a phone interview from his Las Vegas home that he was to see the award-winning musician and poet later in the evening at the Cosmopolitan.

"The night you win the Nobel Prize is the night you need to be playing on the stage in a casino in Vegas, don't you think," he asked.

I asked him which album or period of Dylan's music really resonated with him.

"It's funny because when you are talking about popular music, it tends to be very personal and you have these songs that you like that are deep in your heart, but with Dylan, it may actually be the literature," he said. "I don't appreciate Melville's 'Moby Dick' because of what it meant to me in my life, I appreciate it because it's literature and I think Bob crosses over into that."

But, as with any Dylan fan, Jillette said he does have some albums that he listens to more than others.

"I'm a huge fan of 'Street Legal,' I come back to it over and over," he said. "I'm also one of the people, and there are many of us, who tell people when they ask how they should get into Dylan to start with the 21st century — I don't think you do better than 'Love and Theft,' 'Modern Times' and 'Tempest,' I think those three records are breathtakingly good."