“Roll over, Kerouac, and tell Woody Guthrie the news …” - Steve Earle, “Down the Road I Go, Pt. II”
It is by some lights a measure of the success of the American Experiment that so many of us are free to live a historically - unconcerned with, or frankly dismissive of, the past. We can afford to act like forgetting is a good and necessary thing, that what’s behind us doesn’t matter. The past is, after all, an imaginary realm. It is no more real than any other notion, than any other dream. We’re supposed to live in the moment; the past is ours to use as we see fit. What was it that Justin Bieber said? Too bad Anne Frank didn’t get to be a belieber?
Most of us don’t really care for history because history scolds our species. We like nostalgia though, the wishfulness and amended story of our youth. That’s fair, I guess. Dead people don’t get a say.
Steve Earle had any number of chances to die over the past 30 or so years, but he didn’t, so he gets a say in how his story gets told. He has been alive twice as long as Hank Williams, and I imagine that if you said Earle has had half as much influence as ol’ Hank, he would feel flattered and it maybe wouldn’t even be the truth. There are a lot of people - a couple of hundred thousand probably - who would buy anything Steve Earle put his name on. But Hank Williams was Hank Williams. Even though most people don’t know much about him, he was one of the five or six most important Americans of the last century.
While Earle is just a singer-songwriter, I happen to like him a lot.
I met him when he was in his 20s, when he was in trouble for allegedly assaulting an off-duty police officer who was providing security at one of his shows in Dallas on the last night of 1987. For a little while, it looked like Earle might do prison time. Though when we looked a little closer, it became apparent that the cop - who’d choked the singer with his nightstick - had a pretty poor record of dealing with the public. There had been a lot of complaints against him, and witnesses suggested he’d had as much to do with the escalating unpleasantries as Earle, who eventually got off with a $500 fine and a year’s probation.
Earle would go on to other arrests, many of which he probably deserved, seeing how he was at various times addicted to heroin, crack cocaine and Dilaudid (which is an interesting drug for a musician to use because it is rumored to affect your hearing). He did hard time on a drug and weapons charge and didn’t emerge from his narcotic purgatory until the mid-1990s. At that time he began a string of remarkable albums from 1995’s Train a’ Comin’ to 2004’s The Revolution Starts … Now. Washington Square Serenade (2007) was more interesting for its sonic textures than its songwriting. Even at his best, Earle tends to repeat himself, but much of WSS feels inchoate and vague; the songs aren’t as detailed and precise as his best work. But I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive (2011) and recently released The Low Highway (New West) re-established a grayer and gruffer Earle as a viable candidate for the best living songwriter (country music division) sweepstakes, if you want to credit those kind of hierarchical rankings.
Which maybe Earle does, at least to the extent that he’s willing to allude to the icon Williams in those album titles. “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive” was a song written by Williams (and Fred Rose) that went to No. 1 on the Billboard Country Singles chart in the weeks after Williams’ death on Jan. 1, 1953. It is also the title of Earle’s 2011 novel, which is a fascinating read about the ghost of Williams haunting the quack who may have supplied him with a fatal dose, that produces the same kind of lonesome - not lonely - ache as the best country music. The Low Highway is an allusion to “Lost Highway,” which may be the best country song ever written. It was not drafted by Williams (whose version made it famous), but by “Blind Balladeer” Leon Payne, whose original version has a slightly different lyric and swings more than Williams’ plaint.
The ambition of Earle’s latest album is plain. Earle not only invokes Williams but “The Low Highway” - the song - echoes Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” in that it sets out to be nothing less than a portrait of America, with the narrator setting off across the country (“three thousand miles to the Frisco Bay/ ’cross the rivers wild and the lonesome plains”), cataloging despair but ending in measured hopefulness (“ … a cry for justice and a call for peace/ Force of reason in the roar of the beast”).
Earle has always exhibited a novelist’s empathy and his best work delivers us an outsider’s perspective. He may indeed lose a distribution channel over “Burnin’ It Down,” delivered from the point of view of a small-town fatalist contemplating setting off an I.E.D. in his local Wal-Mart (“Ten gallons of gas and a bottle of propane/ I took the lighter off my grill and I still can’t/Say for certain that this thing’ll blow/But if it does I’m gonna be the first one to know/ I’m thinkin’ bout burnin’ it down, boys …”), but it explicates a rationale for terrorism better than any Noam Chomsky argument .
Elsewhere Earle touches some familiar bases - “Calico County” is a Gothic Breaking Bad story driven by a grinding electric guitar riff reminiscent of Elvis Costello’s “Pump It Up” (both songs contain the DNA of Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues”). “That All You Got?” and “After Mardi Gras” reflect Earle’s New Orleans experience. Those tracks and the fiddle-driven “Love’s Going Blow My Way” were featured on David Simon’s HBO’s series Treme, in which Earle had a role as a street musician. “21st Century Blues” is a relatively lightweight, if catchy and rousing, restatement of the American imperative for reinvention (which Earle, a serial recoverer, knows something about).
The remarkably poignant “Remember Me” may be an older father’s song for a newborn child. Maybe the oddest track is a nod to the late billionaire (and accomplished bluegrass banjo picker) Warren Hellman.
In the devastating “Invisible,” Earle’s voice finds something of his old tenor spookiness as he limns the story of a homeless man with a few timeless lines that evoke the Great Depression - “Brother can you spare/A dollar and a dime?/The cupboard’s bare and I’m invisible” - and the accelerating contractions of boom and bust occurring outside Earle’s tour bus window. Earle understands how history informs conscience, how we live among ghosts whether we acknowledge them or not.
I heard someone say The Low Highway wasn’t a political record. Maybe not to someone who lives in the moment.
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Style, Pages 49 on 05/26/2013