Ramblings About Country Music

I grew up on bad AM radio. And I loved it. My favorite songs were the stupid ones. "The Night Chicago Died" and the not so stupid ones with similarly good melodies and like "Brandy."

I could be had by a great melodic hook or a spectacular lyrical one. I heard on that AM station everything from Gallery's "It's So Nice To Be With You" and Joe Tex and the Sex-o-lettes "I Gotcha" to carol King's anything and everything Tapestry.

I could be wrong but that's not what I get on the pop music stations these days. I find neither decent melody nor important lyric. I'm sure it's there. From time to time. Just too few and too much time between them.

What I used to find on AM radio -- the mix of humor and pathos -- the over-the-top melodrama and the right on emotional experience is now found on the country music station.

Now I have no interest in promoting country music. In fact any good word I say only makes me look more foolish to my longtime friends as I, too, vomited out the cliches about country music. It's all about losers singing in some kind of twang about, as Howard Dean -- the very voice of my old party would say -- guns, God and gays.

But it's not. It's funny. It's clever. It's powerful. And, to my friend Seth, my hero of melody -- it's melodic.

Now I'm a words man. And the words are brilliant. And I'm a comedian. That's how I made my living for the past two decades. And it's funny as hell. I'm not a musician. But I have been a consumer of music from the time I made mom buy me "Honey" by Bobby Goldboro at the age of eight. And it IS melodic.

AM radio -- at its best -- offered blocks of songs that ran the gamut from the Tin Pan Alleyesque to what was new and threatening and in the end utterly disappointing. In one sitting one would be rewarded with Bo Donaldson and the Heywoods, Roy Orbison, Glen Campbell and Joe Tex and the Sex-O-Lettes. Another hour would bring Michael Jackson, The Bee Gees and Anita Baker. And at any time one might by handed a little gem of self-consciously silly humor along the lines of a Ray Stevens or a novelty song like CB McCall's "Convey."

So it is today with country music. It now is what runs the gamut the way AM radio used to. It's fun. It's funny. It's filled with pathos and heartbreak. It's rock and it's pop and every now and then once can find dance. It's funny -- with a sense of humor unseen in any of the other formats these days and especially needed for anyone who numbs their brain with the hate and self-inflicted misery that is rap.

It's Lonestar's hilarious "Mr. Mom" and Alan Jackson's snide "Talking Song". It's Terri Clark's pseudo-feminist nugget "Girls Lie, Too" and the real man's tears of John Michael Montgomey's "Letters From Home." It's Dirk Bentley's paean to the reckless fun of youth and Blaine Larson's "How Do You Get So lonely" about youth lived in the darkest shadow.

And then there's Toby Keith. As I naively told my son the first time I ever heard him sing: "he's going to be a big star!" Keith is everything Bruce Springsteen was before Springsteen became a caricature of himself. He is Springsteen with an appreciation of life instead of a bitterness. He is Springsteen except that, to him, being "born in the USA" is a blessing and not a curse.

In one "kick ass" show Keith is the self-confident American ("Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue") unwavering in his conviction that freedom is right (a far cry from the leftists who whine mealy-mouthed, always ignoring our goodness and picking at our misdeeds to justify the evils that are visited upon us) and painfully aware of the cost to our soldiers of defending that freedom ("American Soldier'). Unlike the Beverly Hills -- or Rumson, New Jersey -- pop song writer, Keith's songs about America are real, self-confident and exactly what America really is.

Springsteen is not the real troubadour of America (anyone who knows me knows how painful a sentence that was to write.) He's a self-pitying grump -- exactly the opposite of an American -- he is a malcontent who looks at a glass that is 99.99 percent full and spends the next thirty years whining about the missing .o1 percent. The miserable "Devils and Dust" -- at a time when American heroes are so plentiful and the smell of freedom is wafting through the last dark corners of the world -- is just another example of a never-grown-up child locked (in his mind) in his bedroom in his daddy's house in Freehold, New Jersey, unable to write about anything real because everyone is Douglas, his disappointed and supposedly beleaguered daddy, Doug.

Springsteen is brilliant -- and I do not for a moment take that back. From my own "teenage angst" years, when I found a kindred spirit in Bruce's morose take on the American dream, to my more mature years when the craft of the artist was just so stunning I could still buy into his 30 and then forty and then fifty year old teenage angst, I belonged to the church of Bruce. But anyone who wants to know the real chronicler of the real America -- from all sides and in real proportions -- one needs to reject the works of the self-pitying multimillionaire that define Modern Liberalism (Springsteen, John Kerry, Howard Dean, Michael Moore and John Edwards to name just a few) and spend just a couple of minutes with the real America that is Toby Keith.