Steve Earle Chases Ghosts
Once upon a time, a self-deprecating answering-machine message did most of the talking for Steve Earle: “This is Steve. I’m probably out shooting heroin, chasing 13-year-old girls and beating up cops. But I’m old and I tire easily, so leave a message and I’ll get back to you.”
He usually didn’t. Instead, he spent his hours in locked bathrooms plunging a needle into his arm and, later, passed out in crack houses in Nashville, all his guitars sold off for drugs, his reputation as an outlaw troubadour eating him alive. When he was finally hauled to jail for drug possession in 1994, he had his last $20 in his jeans.
If the Steve Earle of yore could see the Steve Earle of today, he’d scarcely believe his eyes. On a recent evening in Woodstock, New York, he’s padding around a two-story ranch house in a leafy subdivision originally built for IBM middle managers, showing off his heated pool. From the sleek modernist furniture and retro Fifties light fixtures to the flatscreen TV in the kitchen blaring Inside Edition (“Oprah’s puppy died,” reports Earle’s seventh wife, the singer Allison Moorer), it’s a vision of domestic bliss. (When I run into him at a nearby grocery store, Karle is buying a case of Diet Dr Pepper.)
Earle, being Earle, is slightly embarrassed by the Ozzie and Harriet-like scene. It was Moorer’s idea to buy a country house two hours from their apartment in Manhattan, he tells me. And he’s only holed up here to finish the novel he’s been laboring over for several years. “I’m pretty allergic to being in the city limits of any one municipality for more than 30 days,” he says. “I’m going fucking bugshit up here right now finishing this book. I want to go back to the city so bad.”
When he first broke out in the 1980s, Steve Earle seemed to live the same rootless life as the characters in his songs, a road warrior with a “two-pack habit and a motel tan,” as he sang in “Guitar Town.” Now he’s enjoying what one friend calls his “Renaissance man” period – writing plays and fiction, acting in TV and movies, refashioning himself as a Marxist alt-country bard a la Woody Guthrie and moving from Nashville to Greenwich Village to indulge a passion for folk musicology and expensive guitars (he owns 120 of them). Much of this was made possible when Earle sold the rights to half of his back catalog for seven figures in 2007 and managed to catch up with years of alimony, child support and the monthly costs of keeping assorted family members solvent, not to mention $500,000 in unpaid taxes.
Now, on his 13th solo disc, Earle has decided to check in with a younger version of himself, making an album called Townes, featuring 15 songs written by Townes Van Zandt, the late Texas country songwriter and cult legend who mentored Earle as a young man and shaped his rough-and-tumble life in music. Recorded mostly in Earle’s New York apartment last October, the record, he says, represents “the part of Townes that became me, that’s a part of me.”
Earle and Van Zandt met in the 1970s, and they remained friends until Van Zandt’s death in 1997, at age 52, by which time Earle had chosen self-preservation over Van Zandt’s dark path. If Earle once looked like a rangy Hells Angel, at age 54, happily married and 14 years sober, he resembles an avuncular poetry professor: balding, long hair, black-frame glasses studiously perched over his nose, abundant beard streaked with silver, a generous belly. But as he mines the myths of his own past to make peace with the present, he is also coining to terms not just with the legacy of excess anil art he inherited from Townes Van Zandt but with the thornier legacy he’s passing on to his son, the 27-year-old singer-songwriter Justin Townes Harle.
In 1972, Steve Earle overheard a man talking about a birthday party being thrown for Texas country legend Jerry Jeff Walker in Austin, where Earle was living. He crashed the party and, around 2 a.m., in walked the tall, lanky form of Townes Van Zandt, wearing a white buckskin jacket with fringe on the arms. “He started a craps game and lost every dime that he had, and that jacket,” recounts Earle.
By then, Van Zandt was already a legend to Earle, who had himself, at 16, dropped out of school in suburban San Antonio to become a songwriter, developing a taste for heroin and traveling with circus carnies. From the beginning, Earle recognized that his hero had given up everything for his music. “I saw something I didn’t count on,” remembers Earle, Hipping a large silver coin over and over on the table in his spacious den. “It was the beginning of me piecing together that Townes didn’t have any money and he wasn’t rich. And was doing this because he really wanted to do it.”
As Van Zandt once instructed, “You have to blow off your family. You have to blow off comfort. You have to blow off money. . . . You have to blow off your ego. You have to blow off everything except your guitar.”
Earle dutifully followed, becoming part of Van Zandt’s circle of drifters, drinkers anil guitar-pickers around Houston, and later Nashville, where the two eventually converged to seek their fortunes as professional songwriters. Over time, Earle became intimately familiar with Van Zandt’s bottomless-pit drinking and bizarre, even scary, antics. “I saw him eat a 50-dollar bill one night,” he says. “He literally put it in his mouth, chewed it up and swallowed it. He thought it was funny. But he didn’t have any money the next day either.”
From Van Zandt, Earle absorbed poetry, literature, fingerpicking styles and a sophisticated lyric sensibility, all while getting into legendary misadventures. Once, while visiting Van Zandt at his cabin in rural Tennessee in the late Seventies, Earle was bragging about his burgeoning gun collection when Van Zandt, exasperated with his young acolyte, loaded a single bullet into his .357-caliber Magnum, spun the revolver, pressed it against his temple and pulled the trigger. Earle was horrified — and angry. He “beat the hell out of” Van Zandt and left. “It was the only time I ever got physical with him,” he says. “It took me a long time not to be angry about it.”
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