Here’s the general understanding of country music – which makes it shockingly exactly like hip-hop music in the live setting: those paying for tickets don’t really care if they get a show or not and that gives all performers license to wilt, to just stand there like artificial plants. These patrons will open their wallets, squeeze out the bucks and stand or sit there as they’re given the hits in a thorough, professional and timely manner. There should be little sweating – unless there’s no helping it as was the case Thursday night in Davenport, Iowa at the Great Mississippi Valley Fair with 94-degree temperatures that turned everyone into puddles of stink and sticky slop – and there doesn’t need to be much more than standard, standard action. You just need to show up, pick on a guitar for an hour and a half or so and snag your six-figured paycheck as you leave the dusty grounds. Alan Jackson is once again the man of the hour in Nashville. He’s topping the charts this week with the title track from his latest record, Good Time, but his idea of a good time should probably involve lawn chairs and a cooler full of beer at a family picnic for all of the energy he tried hard not to expend. You can talk party, letting people know that it’s 5 o’clock somewhere, but prove it. Jackson is an exemplar of the country tongue – the way that you can turn a location and a lifestyle of agriculture into the strongest, most adamant rallying cry of any. If you’re a country boy or girl, it seems to mean more than being a Jet or a Blood. It means that you are FOR the United States Military and all of its deployed or formerly deployed with impunity. You are FOR chain restaurants, cowboy boots, certain types of cars, big pick-up trucks and – oddly enough – heavy, sappy romantic melancholy. You are given freedom to sing your brains out to love songs such as Jackson’s “Remember When” and “Red On A Rose” – in front of all your friends, pounding beers against one another in celebration, but hearing someone else sing along to the same exact kind of song by a singer such as Karen Carpenter or Carole King would be like given them permission to call those singing total pussies. It’s okay though. It’s just an observation. Jackson strolled out onto the stage Thursday, sluggishly, like a man just awoken from a nap. He lumbered up to the microphone in stone-washed blue jeans and an untucked white dress shirt, way longer than it needed to be, hanging half a foot below his ass. He picked up a guitar and amidst overpowering bass, burst into “Gone Country.” He was there and people were glad. An all-time fair record attendance of 31,200 were there to soak it in and one couldn’t help but think that they didn’t get their money’s worth – even if they thought they did. There must be more than just getting to hear the songs that you hear on the radio. There must be some kind of “show” that you can put on being a man who’s been nominated as the Country Music Association’s Entertainer of the Year numerous times in his career. What he was able to do was sing impeccably and throw out guitar picks like finger frisbees as if they were going to be the things that granted the receivers all the fun in the world. He would just casually lean back and flip them into the adoring audience, walking a slow pace across the stage all night. He commented about the rowdiness, game-fully remarking that it was only Thursday and these people must just certainly be out of control. He’s a great songwriter, capable of twisting all of his mundane experiences of love and barrooms into quips that go on to make him millions of dollars and solidify his status as a man of the rural people, but the giving of more than is necessary just isn’t there – after all these years. And it’s not really his fault. He’s doing what his heroes did before him. He’s in classic mold and the country in us loves him. The person in us that wants to ACTUALLY have a good time listens to the albums in a bar and plays some pool or goes out on the jet skis. Jackson could respect that, I think. It seems to be where he wanted to be Thursday night – back taking that nap or with his buddies, not having to throw “Davenport” into his songs in place of the actual cities they were written about and sweating buckets just standing in one place. We can agree to like him, but he does not rock the jukebox.