Steve Earle once recorded a song wishing that Woody Guthrie – Bob Dylan’s original hero – would come back, claiming that we urgently needed a strong voice of protest like that again. I’d give anything to have Dylan back in that mode, if only for one good song – not for nostalgia’s sake, but because if Dylan of all people had performed the musical call for sanity on Saturday at Jon Stewart’s rally instead of Kid Rock, the whole world would have heard it.

When he inducted Bob Dylan into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988, Bruce Springsteen recalled riding in the car with his Mom and hearing “Like a Rolling Stone” for the first time. “On came that snare shot,” he said, “that sounded like somebody kicked open the door to your mind…I sat there, I didn’t say nothin’, but I knew that I was listening to the toughest voice that I had ever heard…When I was a kid, Bob’s voice somehow – it thrilled and scared me. It made me feel kind of irresponsibly innocent. And it still does. But it reached down and touched what little worldliness I think a 15-year-old kid in high school in New Jersey had in him at the time.”

What pressure to be endlessly called the “New Dylan.” To be fair, Springsteen barely deflected the comparison when he kicked off the first line of his debut album with the rather Bobesque “Madman drummers bummers and Indians in the summer with a teenage diplomat.” As the album rolled on, though, a song like “Spirit in the Night” hinted at a different world view. Dylan was never the guy heading out to Greasy Lake with Hazy Davy and Crazy Janey. He was never part of the party, even when he was slyly singing, “Everybody must get stoned.” Dylan – at least in his first incarnation – was the bright-eyed young folkie hopping trains with his knapsack and guitar, à la Woody Guthrie.

Dylan brings his latest blues-drenched working unit, which features longtime guitarist Charlie Sexton, into the Mid-Hudson Civic Center on Tuesday, November 16 at 8 p.m. Tickets for reserved seats cost $55 and $45 and are on sale now. They can be purchased at the Mid-Hudson Civic Center box office at 14 Civic Center Plaza in Poughkeepsie, and through TicketMaster, which can be reached at (800) 745-3000 or at www.ticketmaster.com. A limited number of discounted tickets will be available at the box office for students who attend Marist and Vassar Colleges in Poughkeepsie and SUNY-New Paltz. Students must present valid college identification. For more information, you can also visit www.midhudsonciviccenter.com.