larger view

Listen to musicians and poets on the street.  Look at the blogs of late.  Listen to the buzz.  Everywhere you go on the streets of Bakersfield today, there is a burgeoning restlessness among members of the underground music community.  Local musicians of today are no longer content to rest on the accomplishments of yesterday's heroes.  They no longer want to ride the waves.  They want to make their own waves on the music scene. 

Social theorist/psychologist Erich Fromm's theories have a lot to say about the renewed interest in the Bakersfield Sound on the blogs, and the hunger, and renewed longing for a new Buck or a new Merle to come around and awaken the country rebel in all of us. 

Consider the following paragraph as it pertains to the initial freedom and independence that was declared with early stages of the Bakersfield Sound movement, and the later stages, when crass commercialism and the institutionalization of the Sound began to threaten the creative spirit of the movement.  

For Fromm, we both long for independence, and run from it.  We crave freedom, and do everything we can to keep ourselves boxed in.  As musicians of this community, we want to box ourselves in the old sound, or color so far outside the box that we become alienated from our roots.  

We want a return to something completely new and fresh, and yet we take comfort in playing the same old songs in the same old way.   We chase our dreams even as we run from them.  Fromm said it better than I ever will:

To have faith means to dare, to think the unthinkable, yet to act within the limits of the realistically possible; it is the paradoxical hope to expect the Messiah every day, yet not to lose heart when he has not come at the appointed hour. This hope is not passive and it is not patient; on the contrary, it is impatient an active, looking for every possibility of action within the realm of real possibilities. Least of all it is passive as far as the growth and liberation of one's own person are concerned....