At 69, Earle reflects on his career
Country rocker prepares for solo Ryman show
Because country rocker Steve Earle is a Texas contemporary of artists like Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt, he’s also a storyteller able to set an entire mood with the inflection of his voice, raise of his eyebrow or turn of a phrase.
The “Copperhead Road” performer plays Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium on Aug. 28 for his “Alone Again: Solo & Acoustic” tour in support of his live album, “Alone Again (Live),” released on July 12. The 15-song record features live recordings from Earle’s 2023 dates.
The 69-year-old artist’s latest tour will occupy roughly as many dates as the years he’s been alive.
Saying it is physically more demanding to play with a band, he trades in the sonic volume for the power of the intimacy he can create solo.
“It’s still hard, though, playing solo — my arm gets tired,” he said.
Earle’s got jokes, too.
Learning how to set ‘a high bar’
The San Antonio native’s entire life can be best regarded as a conversation between the Jimi Hendrix-style experimental rocker playing in bars he always wanted to be and the coffee housestaged acoustic folkie his father forced him to become.
He was also a cowboy boot-wearing hippie who opposed the Vietnam War.
Serendipitously, Willie Nelson’s return to Austin swayed pop cultural trends in his direction.
“Suddenly, the guys who were kicking my a-- were standing in the middle of the same cow pastures I was and we were listening to the same music,” Earle offered about events like March 1972’s Dripping Springs Reunion event featuring Roy Acuff, Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, Loretta Lynn, Bill Monroe, Buck Owens, Hank Snow, Roger Miller and Kris Kristofferson, among many.
He also attended Nelson’s inaugural July 4 Picnic in 1973, which featured Waylon Jennings, Kristofferson and John Prine.
“I grew up in an era where music was the most important thing in the world to many people. From The Beatles, Elvis and Jimi Hendrix to what I saw in Texas, I learned the value of writing ingenious songs,” Earle said.
“Then, I came to Nashville and everyone from bluegrass players who frequented the Station Inn, plus post-Bob Dylan folkies at (manager) John Lomax III’s house to Guy and Susanna Clark, Rodney Crowell and Neil Young were setting a high bar in town,” he added.
Enchiladas and spit buckets
A decade later, Earle was in Nashville
with a publishing deal but nowhere near as successful as the artists he watched in the era before their run as The Highwaymen.
Instead, for regular work, he washed dishes at The Ringside Seat, a midtown Mexican restaurant offering live boxing as a draw.
“Nobody really wanted to eat enchiladas by the spit bucket,” he quipped.
Earle had also fallen in with the crowd at Phranks’ n’ Steins, a West End club mimicking something akin to “cowpunk” and New Wave’s Los Angeles rise by featuring acts like then-burgeoning Riders In The Sky, Athens, Georgia’s college-favored R.E.M. and Nashville acts including Cloverbottom, Ed Fitzgerald and Civic Duty, Jason & the Scorchers, The Ratz, The Rockin’ Rancheros and the White Animals.
Inspired by those bands, his childhood love of Creedence Clearwater Revival and seeing Bruce Springsteen play live at Middle Tennessee State University in Dec. 1984, he was eventually signed to RCA Records.
Songs like “Guitar Town” dialed into producer Tony Brown’s desire to discover the blue-collar soul in Earle’s tremolo- style picking (”I was just beating my electric guitar all to hell”).
“I was ready to sell out, but then the label bought in,” he said.
By 1990, Earle had moved from RCA to MCA and “Copperhead Road” arrived. A decade later, that track inspired a broad swath of acts —including Jason Aldean, Eric Church, Brothers Osborne and Chris Stapleton — to pursue Nashville success.
“I made a rock record with loud drums and guitars that wasn’t for country radio,” Earle said.
A challenging yet rewarding road
Of late, he’s keen to note that Austinbased rockers Reckless Kelly and California-born bluegrass star Molly Tuttle have found inspiration from his work. Modern correlations with artists whose stylings are rooted in clear inspirations but artistically deviate into other realms is par for the course for Earle.
For the first decade of his mainstream career, he was a country rocker navigating a raw and ironically experimental road away from the genre’s radio dial and commercial expansion into the genre’s core rootings. Did that include an intentional decision to honor Bill Monroe’s legacy in 1999 with “The Mountain,” a bluegrass album featuring the Del McCoury Band and two dozen roots-inspired bluegrass and country stars, including Emmylou Harris and Marty Stuart, plus Sam Bush, Iris Dement, Jerry Douglas and Peter Rowan?
“Going from country and rock to bluegrass was like me trying to be a fly fisherman or a jazz musician. It’s the toughest thing I ever did,” offered Earle. “I’ve never really mastered or made money from it, but when you can ask Del McCoury and his band to play on an album, you take four months to learn how to write those songs.”
Though challenging to create, the recording — like many of Earle’s career — simplifies, thus uniquely empowers, storied traditions.
“Earle rowdies up McCoury’s sharpsters till they turn all hairy and bounce off walls,” wrote The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau in a 1999 review.
‘I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive’
Sept. 11, 2001’s terrorist attacks piqued his longtime Socialist leanings. Earle’s 2002 album “Jerusalem” included “John Walker’s Blues.” Ripped from headlines of the era, the song’s protagonist — an American Muslim convert named John Walker, who pleaded guilty to aiding the Taliban regime in Afghanistan — is described as a young man rejecting a youthful diet of MTV’s “soda pop bands” and instead, discovering religion via the word of Allah.
For the past two decades, he’s dipped and dived between politics, reverence and self-irreverence as a trio of themes defining much of his work.
Despite such varying sounds and themes, one in every three Earle releases has achieved top-10 success for four decades.
Politically and socially, the off-Broadway play Coal Country’s 2020-released soundtrack “Ghosts of West Virginia” was a return to themes explored in 2004’s “The Revolution Starts Now” and 2007’s “Washington Square Serenade.” Inspiration-wise, a duets album with “Sunny Came Home” vocalist Shawn Colvin joins albums honoring Guy Clark, Townes van Zandt, Jerry Jeff Walker and his oldest son, Justin Townes Earle, who died of an accidental drug overdose in 2020.
2011’s “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive” is underpinned by a hauntingly poetic cover of Hank Williams’ 1952 classic.
A sample lyric? “Now you’re lookin’ at a man that’s getting kinda mad/ I had lots of luck, but it’s all been bad / No matter how I struggle and strive / I’ll never get out of this world alive.”
‘I did everything with my eyes open’
Ask Earle about his seven marriages and he points at their after-effects as leaving him unable to show much in accumulated assets from his critically acclaimed career.
Even deeper, ask him about his late ’80s and early ’90s drug addictions to cocaine and heroin that saw him sentenced to a year in jail in 1994 for failing to appear in court on a heroin charge and after sighing (”at the peak of my creative life, I was unable to write or release a single f---ing thing”), he offered a forthright response: “I did everything with my eyes wide open,” he said.
“I’m a self-taught musicologist with an eighth-grade education who had (the assistance of) Guy Clark, Jerry Jeff Walker and Townes van Zandt, who were doing that before I turned 19 and then I saw Lightning Hopkins play a year later,” he said. “I also had the wisdom to know that to grow my art, I had to go to Houston, then Nashville, to separate myself from how great Willie Nelson was in Austin — plus, in Austin, the beer was too cheap and the girls were too pretty to get anything done there.”
Without prompting, he offered his clearest-eyed and most straightforward take of an honest, hour-long conversation by summarizing the rawest value of his work.
“For 50 years, I’ve made a good living by making purposeful art that has kept me from working a regular job, he said. “I have the gift of singing things you can’t say.”
