Earle, Steve

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STEVE EARLE

Born: Stephen Fain Earle; Ft. Monroe, Virginia, 17 January 1955

Genre: Country

Best-selling album since 1990: Transcendental Blues (2000)

Steve Earle's self-destructive ways nearly ruined a career touted early on to be one of country music's most prolific since Hank Williams Sr. He survived, however, and advanced into the 1990s as a passionate artist whose nimble songwriting has turned increasingly political, at times lending voice to people and issues that unsettled his listeners.

Earle was born in Virginia, where his father, a Texan air-traffic controller, had been temporarily relocated. The eldest child of five children, he grew up less than twenty miles north of San Antonio in the small town of Shertz, Texas. Earle started playing the guitar at age eleven, progressed rapidly, and left home at fourteen to live with his uncle in Houston. Soon thereafter he met a fellow Texan and songwriter, Townes Van Zandt, who became a mentor for Earle in music and fast-track living.

Earle moved to Nashville in 1974 and eventually signed a songwriting deal with a division of RCA Records for seventy-five dollars a week. He played in various bands around Nashville and garnered a reputation as an edgy but talented songwriter/performer. He was slated to have his song "Mustang Love" recorded by Elvis Presley in 1975, but Elvis failed to show up for the session. Carl Perkins recorded it the following year. Earle also appeared in Robert Altman's film Nashville (1975).

Backed by his band the Dukes, Earle toured and recorded from 1982 to 1985 with marginal success until he set country music on its ear with the release of Guitar Town (1986). The album is a powerful blend of raw country-rocking story songs featuring familiar ill-fated characters. The album earned him two Grammys in 1987 for Best Country Male Vocalist and Best Song for the title track. In 1986 Rolling Stone magazine's critic poll hailed Earle as the Country Artist of the Year.

Subsequent recordings were highly acclaimed, but the music industry as a whole was having difficulty defining Earle, whose country-rooted style started to mix with a harder rock sound, particularly on his Copperhead Road (1988), an album of self-described "heavy metal bluegrass" that he boasted would shake up the country music establishment.

Earle's personal life shook them up as well. His repeated brushes with the law and longstanding drug problems flew in the face of country music's insistence that its artists maintain squeaky-clean images. By 1991, drugs had torpedoed his career. Driven to poverty by a five-hundred-dollar-a-day drug habit, he took to living on the streets of downtown Nashville, where he was eventually arrested for heroin possession. He served a prison sentence until his parole in 1994 following the completion of a drug-rehabilitation program.

Earle ended a four-year absence from the music scene with a cathartic solo effort, Train a Comin' (1995). The album features acoustic versions of older songs that he had written in addition to a few from other artists. It earned a 1996 Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Folk album. The recording initiated a drug-free comeback that included acting, playwriting, writing a book of short stories and the draft of a novel, ceaseless political activism, and six album releases.

In a style that careers among various genres—country, bluegrass, folk, rock, and Irish—Earle will often write the lyrics in the persona of the song's main character. He has portrayed rednecks, small-town losers, a backwoods marijuana grower, a hometown athletic hero, an old-time bluegrass picker, a death row inmate, and an American Taliban. Prophetic intimations of doom pervade many of these songs.

An avowed borderline Marxist, Earle does not hesitate to write songs that voice his opposition to the political and social status quo. "Good Ol' Boy (Gettin Tough)" from Guitar Town was Earle's response to President Ronald Reagan's breaking of the air-traffic controllers strike in 1981. Earle's father lost his job during that chapter in American labor history. "Amerika vs. 6.0 (The Best We Can Do)," from his album Jerusalem (2002), railed against the nation's healthcare system. "Ashes to Ashes," another cut off the very political Jerusalem, warned of the eventual crumbling of the United States after the events of September 11, 2001. Earle has also been a fervent and outspoken opponent of the death penalty and contributed the song Ellis Unit One to the soundtrack of Dead Man Walking, a movie about the death penalty. Earle sponsors benefits and protests, appears at Capitol Hill, raises money, visits inmates on death row, and once accompanied and witnessed the execution of a convicted murderer he had counseled. In October 2002 his play Karla, about Karla Faye Tucker, the first woman executed in Texas since the 1860s, opened on a Nashville stage.

Another whirlwind of controversy arose from the Jerusalem track titled "John Walker's Blues," which reimagines the story of the so-called American Taliban John Walker Lindh. The American media and politicians lam-basted Earle for extending sympathies to someone widely regarded as a traitor. Earle contended that he was only doing what he has always done in his songs, which is to let his listeners see a character's particular point of view.

By the year 2000, while many of Earle's contemporaries were winding down, he seemed to be picking up steam. In addition to recording and touring, Earle successfully published a book of eleven short stories titled Doghouse Roses (2001), and in 2002 he was working toward the completion of a novel. Earle also took a turn as an actor in 2002, playing a drug counselor in several episodes of the HBO series The Wire. In 2002 he was living in Nashville with his fifth wife; he is the father of three children, and his sister, Stacey Earle, is also a successful recording artist.

Earle has emerged from career purgatory with a renewed vigor. He uses his ample talent without apology to speak out on what he believes. This boiling undercurrent of empathy for the oppressed and outcast has landed Earle only on the fringes of music's mainstream, which is about as close as he seems to want to wade.

SELECTIVE DISCOGRAPHY:

Guitar Town ( MCA, 1986); Early Tracks (Epic, 1987); Exit O (MCA, 1987); Copperhead Road (UNI, 1988); The Hard Way (MCA, 1990); Shut Up and Die Like an Aviator (MCA, 1991); Train a Comin' (Winter Harvest, 1995); I Feel Alright (E-Squared, 1996); El Corazon (E-Squared, 1997); The Mountain (E-Squared, 1999); Transcendental Blues (E-Squared, 2000); Jerusalem (E-Squared, 2002).