COUNTRY MUSIC NEEDS A DOUBLE SHOT OF DYLAN

Heaven help us, we need a strong dose of Bob Dylan mixed into the mass pabulum that passes for country music in this urban century. When will a Joni Mitchell rise up within this genre to deliver us from rehashed rock fixated on drinking alcohol, back seat lap dancing, pickup trucks, and little else.

Nothing wrong with sex and rock n’ roll, mind you. More than a few of us grew up when rock was young and lyrics didn’t get much more complicated than One, Two, Three O’clock, Four O’clock Rock, at least for a time.

But then the Sixties caught fire; so did folk music lyrics and the rock songbook. Bob Dylan attained the iconic stature of an Elvis Presley, singing not about never catching a rabbit but about political and social strangleholds and urban isolation: “Once upon a time, you dressed so fine, threw the bums a dime, in your prime, didn’t you?”

Now country is king of the FM airwaves, and the capitals of the industry are in Nashville and Austin. But listen to the Top 10 country hits anytime, all year, and there is nary a hint that the citizens of the heartland and southland of the nation are brooding with discontent over the closing of tens of thousands of factories, the loss of millions of jobs, and the foreclosure of millions of homes since the new century dawned and the Great Recession exploded in everyone’s face.

Dixie and the industrial midlands were staggered by the blow of the great downturn. While the tech empires on the coasts have rebounded well and some of our greatest inland cities are thriving, small cities and many a rural hamlet are laboring in the shadows of dead factories, boarded up stores on Main Street, and the ever dollar-siphoning mega-stores in ugly strip malls 20 miles away.

Hear about any of that lately in a country tune? “The times they are a changin” sang Dylan at the height of ‘60s unrest, but you’d never know that circumstances for millions are worse by listening to the songsters playing their Fender guitars in the cabs of their tire-worn Ford F150s and Silverados. You don’t get Tea Party blowback, Occupy movements, the Other 99 percenters, a Donald Trump or a Bernie Sanders “political revolution” without some red blooded Americans somewhere sensing they’ve been burned rather badly by global corporate juggernaut blue-suits, mass-financial institution wizards, and political elitists that simply do not give a damn about the their fate.

But all is quiet on the country music front. “It’s five o’clock somewhere,” and that seems to be all that matters in Nashville.

And whose country is this, anyway? Why is Alabama the erogenous zone of country song destinations, followed by more Alabama, Alabama again, and Texas, and, just maybe, Tennessee. Last we knew the nation had fifty states. And the world carries, what, nearly 200 nations on its back.

You’d expect a Joni Mitchell to sing about Paris, New York and Frisco. James Taylor got a lot of mileage out of “Mexico.” But when was the last time you heard anyone other than John Denver sing the praises of a West Virginia or a Colorado? Johnny Horton sang “North to Alaska,” before you were born. And Johnny Cash sang “I’ve Been Everywhere, Man” and listed off most of the places on the map of the U.S. I suppose he blew all the oxygen out of the lungs of all the country lyricists to follow, once he penned that classic chant.

I live in Yankee country, bone cold, stone wall-riddled New England. The Australian super-band The Bee Gees harmonized over “Massachusetts.” Hard to fathom why they chose to sing about that commonwealth corner of the known universe. But no country singer in the last 70 years has recorded a tune that comes within the Mason-Dixon Line of stern Calvinist New England, even though we shoulder more Appalachian mountains in our midst than Alabama ever did.

And another thing, where are the pedal steel guitars, the dobros, and the banjos of yore? Where is there a Jerry Lee Lewis keyboard behind the vocalist?

Rock n’ Roll borrowed every single musical instrument on the shelf and in dust-bin museums to try to advance the sound, find an edge. The Troggs, of all garage bands, played an ocarina in place of a guitar for the solo riff in the middle of “Wild Thing.” An ocarina? The Beatles ran recorded tape backwards on “Strawberry Fields.” The backup musicians behind the Temptations’ hits played more than 100 instruments over the long career of that marvelous Motown Group.

But country music instrumentation today can be summed up like this: guitars, bass, violin (fiddle), drums. Period! It sounds like it. There is nothing challenging or spontaneous behind the vocals in country music today. The sound is deadening, it is so repetitious and uninspired. There are great county musicians among the riff raff, of course, but, goodness sake, I hope I don’t die of pulmonary edema before one of them breaks out and does something that revolutionizes what were once a very distinct genre and a folksy foil to the brash young rockers screaming into microphones.

How many of us long for baleful ballads about real places and strong or vulnerable characters, about tumbleweed towns, lonesome highways, and the good kid gone bad? Where are the Coal Miner’s Daughter, Big Bad John, Poncho and Lefty, and the Good Hearted Woman in Love with a Good Timin’ Man?

Above all, country music must find and anoint a brand spanking new Johnny Cash. It needs a phenom in a Stetson who can write a “Folsum Prison Blues” about the well’s-run-dry-hardships of the 21st century in small town and hip-pocket city America. Country music ought to start pushing the envelope, shaking things up, you know, instead of just sliding more cheap cold beers down roadhouse bar tops to good ole boys that can’t make their payments on their Dodge Rams that are due by noon tomorrow.