Blonde on Blonde and Okey Dokey, a Review(?)

Also if you'd like a primer on country-rock, check out a playlist I made just for you

Growing up in the early 2000s, when alternative rock dominated my sonic worldview, the thought of listening to any sort of rootsy, country-fried Southern rock seemed anathema to me and my friends. I was bouncing back and forth between gothy industrial (Manson, Nine Inch Nails) and emo/pop-punk (Starting Line, Early November, Alkaline Trio, Matchbook Romance, and Brand New). So don't get me wrong, I was no connoisseur of roots music as a teenager. I was playing violent video games and listening to music that would label me either A) a potential active shooter or B) a potential suicide risk. Something about teenage angst did not work with music my dad would tolerate listening to on the ride to school. So I'd grab the CD player, pack it with Brand New's Your Favorite Weapon and the Matchbook Romance/Motion City Soundtrack EP, and take the bus instead.

But once I got to college in 2008, my teenage angst would gradually morph into ennui, and the emotion-de-jour was no longer anger but instead ennui. This transition from a powerless teenager to a powerless twenty-something with a lot of book knowledge meant a mellowing of my rebelliousness. Basically, as a teenager, all you want to do is vandalize structures of power (the school, dad's vintage roadster) and skate off into the distance. As a twenty-something with a bachelors degree in the humanities and no job prospects, you just want shelter and a good meal. If you're a thoughtful, reflective, and depressed person, you can go from raging against machines to raging against yourself pretty quick. To wallow in your self, Anti-Flag and NoFX will not do. One needs to slow the tempo down and swap out that distorted guitar for something softer around the edges.

It helped that a folk revival exploded onto college scenes beginning in 2008. And all the girls I was trying (unsuccessfully) to court were listening to this new self titled album by Fleet Foxes. This specific young woman would play it in her dorm room and I would pretend to like the jangly Byrds-inspired folk tunes as I privately derided it as 'hippy shit.' Still, I was gradually getting into the softer side of alternative music via my discovery of Kurt Cobain's MTV Unplugged set. And the more I listened to college radio, the more I became inundated with soundscapes that envisioned bucolic pastures rather than urban rioting. Despite the folk revival of recent years, it would be the sounds of late-sixties Bob Dylan and Neil Young that finally turned me onto roots music. Young and Dylan, always the genre benders, have bounced from the softest of navel-gazing folk music to genuinely raucous electric-blues numbers throughout their half-century careers.

One album of that era I always go back to is Dylan's 1966 Blonde on Blonde. The album features a Bob Dylan transitioning from his electric rock sound (that began with '65's Bringing it All Back Home) to a country-influenced Nashville sound featured more prominently on John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline. While he still employed an electrified instrumentation, Dylan began the music tradition of employing country session musicians in an attempt to serve up rock music with a side of deep-fried Southern hospitality. Because the sound still remains electrified for most of Blonde-on-Blonde, the album remains a great balance of folksy, country Dylan drawl and his most accessible rock sound perfected on Highway 61 Revisited.

Most of the songs on Blonde on Blonde speak to some sort of alienation, a sense of being adrift in the sea that is your own tumultuous life. Many of Dylan's best songs paint vivid vignettes of jilted lovers, worn out old men, and people on the run seeking shelter. I argue that Dylan's process of transitioning to Nashville studio musicians and flirting with country rock in 1966 helped him reach his most evocative heights as a songwriter. The visions Blonde on Blonde leaves in your mind, - even if you only half pay attention to the lyrics - linger long after the final note dissipates. The wailing Hammond organ, trebly Nashville guitar, and Dylan's Guthrie-esque ramblings make the album's sound hard to pigeon hole. It's not quite Greenwich Village folk, Southern rock, country, or straight-forward blues rock. Instead, Dylan seems to flirt with all of these genres simultaneously. Starting with "Visions of Johanna" and ending with "Stuck Inside of Mobile," the album hits its apex for me as Dylan fuses various roots genres together in a way that has been hugely influential on the Roots Rock Revival of the 21st Century.

So, let's give a listen to two of my favorites from Blonde on Blonde ("Visions of Johanna" and "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again") and then compare them - both sonically and thematically - to two songs from an album that came out a little over 50 years later, Natural Child's Okey Dokey. Music has become so dense and complex that scores of new albums are released daily, many of them rootsy with a sound that could be described as reminiscent of Dylan. Hell, if I had any self-respect, I'd just do a review of Drive-By Truckers lauded 2016 album American Band, a far better country-rock album than Okey Dokey. Nonetheless, 2016's Okey Dokey and 1966's Blonde on Blonde discuss similar themes and suggest interesting conclusions. Putting albums in conversation with one another helps demonstrate the cyclicality at the heart of popular and roots music as well as offering up insights into a society's cultural mentalities and political economy. In English, I'd say Okey Dokey and Blonde on Blonde could pair together well and make you go 'hmm.'

~Couldn't find a studio version from Blonde on Blonde. This bootleg version is uptempo but still features a noticeable country twang.

"Visions of Johanna" begins with jangly acoustic guitar and Dylan's distinctive harmonica shriek. A shuffling drum beat keeps the song going but at its own leisurely pace. Hammond organ wails over the top, softly strummed acoustic guitar and a throbbing bass line carry the rhythm, while trebly electric guitar pops in here and there to emphasize Dylan's cryptic lyrics. Without being boiled down to one single genre, the song's vaguely 'down south' sound reflects its recording in Columbia's Nashville studio and the prominent use of seasoned Nashville studio musicians. It also shows the beginning of an American love affair with the South that has not abated much in recent years. Fitting Dylan, the song's first stanza paints an image that could be describing a shitty apartment in the Lower East Side or a dive bar in the Heart of Dixie:

"Lights flicker from the opposite loft In this room the heat pipes just cough The country music station plays soft But there's nothing, really nothing to turn off Just Louise and her lover so entwined And these visions of Johanna that conquer my mind"

The song is notorious for being opaque, even by Dylan's standards, perhaps helping it join the pantheon of Dylan's masterpieces. By being deliberately abstruse in his verses, Dylan could remain evocative and emotional without being self-absorbed. This style of storytelling has proven profoundly influential in our contemporary world of sarcasm, irony, and emotional distance. Bands like the Silver Jews, the Mountain Goats, and Pavement have built careers and cult fan bases upon enigmatic lyrics and quirky songwriting. I'm not saying Dylan invented everything you like, but he certainly helped popularize it and spread it around to the masses.

For me "Visions of Johanna" induced some lingering visions within my mind, of 30-somethings drinking themselves to death in dive bars, pining over lovers that they can't let go of and of memories they just can't shake. I also envision a forlorn salesman on the road alone in the blistering summer heat. He's gone one too many days without a good meal and one too many exits without a stop for gas. As the engine garbles on the last of its own fumes, his car putters to a stop on the side of a country highway in the windswept plains of central Montana. He grabs a beat up gas can from the trunk and begins the hike 15 miles back towards "Jordan, Montana," praying there is a gas station in the sleepy little hamlet. What do you envision?

Now, flash forward 50 years and to Natural Child's Okey Dokey. While Dylan was at his most lyrical and cryptic with Blonde on Blonde, Natural Child is far more to the point with the messages in their songs. It's befitting their no-nonsense approach to Southern rock. The way they have plyed their craft since 2011 is a testament to the ways constant touring can sustain bands without any sort of 'wow' factor. Listening to "Now and Then," its sound speaks directly to the sorts of environments - tinroofed honkytonks and dusty county roads - that Dylan and countless progeny have described in country rock over the decades. And despite the less profound lyrics, Natural Child still strike a vivid image with lines like:

Doing weird things with my time Far away from my peace of mind Taking things that are not mine I gotta clear my honky tonk mind So I’m out in the street Gotta get right back It’s easy to keep track Now that I’ve been there and back

In a more direct way, Natural Child illuminates the same sort of listless bastards I picture in "Visions of Johanna," people that are hanging on but just barely. I picture a more rustic version of gutterpunks, those with little to their name besides an old Chrysler New Yorker, a case of sardines, and an open road in front of them. While living out of your car can hardly be described as an envious lifestyle, it certainly leaves an impression. Some poor soul, his mind not quite right, "far from peace of mind' needs to "clear [his] honky tonk mind." The street has become his home and he needs to get "right back," confident he knows how to do that. Personally I interpret his confidence in getting right back as being a result of his reputation as a survivor rather than from any real idea of what his trek home will entail. I'd argue this song is emblematic of the ways in which the white working class is in crisis (opioid addiction, obesity, persistent unemployment, etc.), but looks for cultural solace in Southern pride, whiteness, and nostalgia.

Natural Child does not pontificate on these issues in their music. After all, good music doesn't really need any artistic pretensions or require political grandstanding. Some of the best music comes from journeymen (and women), those who work at their humble craft for years and churn out quality music with no expectation of financial success or critical accolades. Artists like Bob Seger and Lucinda Williams come to mind; those artists that work for years, decades even, in relative obscurity before they finally received any modicum of recognition. Some, like Townes van Zandt, only achieved critical appreciation posthumously. I'm not saying Natural Child are doing anything novel, but they make well-crafted country rock that recalls the golden age of Southern rock in the 1970s. One thing that sets Natural Child apart as sonic dinosaurs is that they have almost no call signs to alternative music. Unlike Drive By Truckers, who released a far more anthemic album this year (American Band), Natural Child make pretensions-free prole rock, deep fried in the sounds of the South. While Drive-By Truckers are artists, Natural Child are musicians. Drive-By would be Dylan, and the men of Natural Child are like Al Kooper and Robbie Robertson, the studio musicians he employed to make his grander artistic statements.

Natural Child, especially in a year as tumultuous as 2016, put out a record that is the antithesis of DBT's American Band. It is laid back, relatively positive, and non-partisan. Its album cover, is a some sort of Bojack Horseman-inspired wet dream of Sixties and Seventies psychedelic chic. It is vibrant and shows many people/animals in a flurry of motion. Things are happenin', things are outta sight. So the album cover and much of the album's sound is bereft of the kind of grit, distortion, and sadness that characterizes alt-country. In contrast DBT's American Band cover, with its Social-Realist black and white picture of an American flag at half mast, depicts an America in decline and mourning. While Drive-By has always admitted Southern and white working culture was on the skids, Natural Child exemplifies a tendency toward cultural nostalgia that is quite popular among many middle and working class whites.

Still, even a bunch of Tennessee good ol' boys can express, in their own subdued way, criticisms of the neo-liberal order and the fallacy of personal responsibility that conservatives have hefted upon the back of the working poor. The number "Self-Centered Blues" expresses the sense of class and personal alienation induced by late stage capitalism. "Self-Centered Blues," with its gospel stylings, points to the ways that "without no water those seeds never grew." "Those seeds" could be the working class in general or the singer as he fails to pull himself up by his own non-existent bootstraps. For the singer's friend, escape (a working class theme that Bruce Springsteen has ridden to stardom) seems to be the only answer in this age of personal responsibility over class solidarity:

I had a friend, he lost track He turned a corner and he didn't look back Didn't check the signs, didn't see the road Now the self-centered blues is all he knows They don't seem to go away

Dylan too spoke of the pressure to escape, articulating the sense of being stuck in place and on the run all at once with "Stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again." One of my/Hunter S. Thompson's favorite songs, and featured in Terry Gilliam's adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, "Stuck inside of Mobile" speaks to a very specific sensation of being trapped and at the end of one's rope. Every single verse is filled with esoteric references that express a sense of entrapment but one that stands out to me is verse 5:

Now the senator came down here Showing everyone his gun Handing out free tickets To the wedding of his son And me, I nearly got busted And wouldn’t it be my luck To get caught without a ticket And be discovered beneath a truck Oh, Mama, can this really be the end To be stuck inside of Mobile With the Memphis blues again

For me this verse signals being in a shit situation even as the world around you celebrates. Certainly Dylan did not write this song about the invisibility of poverty in America, but something rings so true in 2017 about a man getting discovered under a truck as the whole town celebrates the wedding of the Senator's son. There is a certain surreal quality to the American celebration of wealth as nearly half of Americans are below or near the poverty line, a surrealism mirrored by "Stuck Inside of Memphis." I think it's time we all ask ourselves, "can this really be the end, to be stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues again?"

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