Steve Earle is Awesome

I'll get back to that DBT thing before long, but I need to do a little Steve Earle posting first. Me and the Davis saw him in De Moines the other day.

By the way, I can't imagine a cooler idea than a Patterson Hood produced Steve Earle record with the Drive By Truckers as his backup band. They've done that before, for Bettye Lavette and Booker T. Jones. And can you imaging a DBT/Steve Earle tour? Holy God. That'd be the coolest thing ever. Steve's AA sponsor might not approve though.

First a little background for those who don't know who Steve Earle is. Steve Earle is a really big deal. He's widely considered on of the fathers of "alt-country" and of the whole indie roots rock thing, and his legacy as a songwriter makes him a towering figure. For some people, he's like Bob Dylan or Townes Van Zandt (whose name will come up a lot in this post). Because he's an ornery left wing agitator, other people consider him a huge pain in the ass, which is okay by him.

Steve began his career as a kid in the seventies. He was basically a folk singer who was a part of the Townes Van Zandt "cult," and he established a career as a somewhat successful professinal songwriter and a less successful performer. Mostly, he was woodshedding, learning his shit and wracking up experience. After a few false starts (including a shitty neo-rockabiliy album), his career got going in earnest with 1986's "Guitar Town," a a modest hit which is now considered a classic. Steve was kind of a cross between Dwight Yolkham and John Mellencamp: twangy, country-flavored rock music with a strong populist streak. He kept this up for a couple of albums, and then on "Copperhead Road," he upped the rock quotient in his writing and had a big crossover hit, mostly thanks to the song "Copperhead Road," a big ol' badass redneck rock song with some seriously smart lyrics about a Vietnam vet who decides to follow in his grandad's moonshiner footsteps by growing pot for a living.

Guitar town:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytHMQyJfVfg

Copperhead Road:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dc86_Weoye0


Then things got ugly. Earle's slowly deepening dependency on drugs got really bad, and he slipped into being a semi-homeless junkie before finally getting sentenced to a year in a rehab facility.

Don't do heroin kids.

He got so messed up that people pretty much expected him to die. He was so bad off that he got a couple of intervention-type lectures from Townes Van Zandt, who at that time was deeply involved with drinking himself to death. When Townes Van Zandt is worried about your health, you are in trouble.

Not all was a waste during this period though. He did write one classic song that showed some real growth under all the fucked-up-ness:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBtQcZx9gAo

Incarceration cleaned him up, when he got out he mounted a hugely artistically successful comeback that produece five classic albums that made him a cult favorite. His rep these days is pretty unassailable. His music also got a lot more diverse. He went deeper into hard rock and even punk rock, he also played more straight-up country and folk music, and he made a couple of bluegrass records. During the 2000's, he's gotten increasingly political (which has made some of his recent albums a little strident, even if he was mostly right about how bad the Bush administration sucked). He really got in hot water when he wrote a song about John Walker Lindh.

Here he is kickin ass in 1996 (BTW, MTV has really fallen in recent years. I can't imaging this being on MTV now):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhj5Y4gG1Ss

A sample of Steve in Irish folk mode:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7-PM_4aeE4


So that's who he is. . . . .

The show we saw was great, not only because it's Steve Fuckin' Earle, but because he's touring behind "Townes," his new record which is, for my money, the best thing he's done in ten years. Townes Van Zandt was one of the greatest country/folk songwriters ever. He was a seriously troubled guy who suffered from mental illenss (his teenaged years were defined by a disasterous enoucnter with electroshock therapy) and addiction, and his various problems meant he wasn't really willing or able to craft a successful career. He spent most of his life as an obscure cult figure, and only after Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard made "Pancho and Lefty" into a big hit did people start seeking him out. He died in his early fifties from a heart attack brought on by a life as a alcoholic. During the last few years of his life, his guitar playing suffered from the nerve damage that achohol had done. That's pretty bad, dude.

The show Steve Earle played in De Moines was in part a tribute to Townes, who was a friend and mentor, and this focus encouraged him to revisit some of the darker episodes in his own life. Before he went through rehab, Steve Earle looked to be on the road to being another Townes Van Zandt, but with faster and with heroin.

The show was an acoustic solo show, but Steve managed to kick it off with a bang. He took the stage and immediately dove headfirst into an intense version of "Where I Lead Me," followed by "Colorado Girl," followed by a bunch of other Townes Van Zandt songs (including, yes, "Pancho and Lefty"). He was in really great form, and his intense delivery and rapid fire approach was overwhelming. His last tour, in support of the relatively upbeat "Washington Square Serenade" (Steve's first album after moving to New York and getting married), got good notices, but the somewhat lighter tone of those shows didn't overwhelm people. (That tour was also marred by some semi-successful experements with a DJ and samplers.) This was something else. It was intense and dark. You don't expect folk music to feel like that.

After about half an hour of heart in the throat intensity, he backed off a little and the show started getting more diverse and more Steve Earle songs crept in. It was just a really good Steve Earle show, with folk songs, political songs, and personal songs mixed and mingled, and lots of stories and political ranting serving to connect things together. Steve stopped touring with a band a couple of years ago. I'd say he's gotten the hang of it.

The most interesting thing about this particular show was the way that Steve has managed to reconnect some of the different parts of his career. By focusing on Townes' life as an outisider and his own past problems, the set managed to connect Steve's political work to a broader interest in anyone who is marginalized. You might say that Townes and Steve brought there troubles on themselves, but Steve does a good job of pointing out that life in the gutter is something that can happen when you chose to opt out of mainstream society. Not that he'd endorse the life he led, but there is a connection between Steve's principles and his painful past.

A couple of moments deserve special attention. As I've said, this show started off pretty dark. One particular harrowing moment was Steve's telling a story about one of Townes' efforts at intervention. Steve gets home and Townes' truck is in his driveway. Steve finds Townes on the couch and Townes comments that Steve looks "like shit." Steve agrees. Then he comments that "your arms look like shit." Steve agrees. Then he asks if he uses clean needles. Steve claims he does. "Every time?" "Yep." "Okay then, I want you to hear this new song I wrote."

And then Steve procedes to play THIS:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feM4QT9_AmM

(That vid appears to be from the same tour, so you can kinda get a feel for what the setup was like.)

The other moment was the performance of "Fort Worth Blues." "FWB" is a Steve Earle song written a couple of years after Townes' death about Townes. When Steve wrote it, his son Justin was dealing with the kind of trouble that Steve and Townes had been through, and you have to think it was on his mind. In any event, its a beautiful song, and hearing it in this context made it more so. I like the line "you always said the highway was your home/but we both know that that ain't true." I also like the way the lyrics shift from second to first person in the last verse. It's like Steve is moving from a memory to the present, and the way the lyrics of the last verse echo some of the lyrics in earlier verses really connect the "I" to the departed "you."

This clip is an especially great performance of the song from a television show. It's kinda neat because you can see everybody's trying not to loose their shit. Seeing Steve Earle singing his song makes people loose their shit. There's a famous clip of Steve Earle playing this on "Austin City Limits," and Nancy Griffith is sitting next to him crying her eyes out. The poor guy at 5:10 almost makes it, but not quite. . . . The kid with the funny hat at 4:40 is Justin Earle. Actually, his full name is Justin Townes Earle:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMknbUBLu5E&feature=PlayList&p=BED976106B2BC81A&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=20


And just to screw up that perfect ending to this post, here's the Austin City Limits clip I referred to in the last paragraph:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4WOys7sWvU