The Good Life From Now On

All addicts know the bottom exists, and they know someday they’ll slam against it. They just can’t predict when, where and how—or with how much force. The bottom nearly killed Justin Townes Earle in July 2004. Twenty-one at the time, he’d been staying with a woman in her late 20s whose drug habit had grown to catch up with his. Crack cocaine fired their bond, but they were equal-opportunity abusers: They didn’t limit themselves to one way of getting high.

At a particularly hazy juncture, the woman hadn’t returned to her residence for three days, nor had she called. Earle continued to crash there when he wasn’t hustling to score. Then the landlord appeared in the doorway to boot him out. His girlfriend wasn’t returning, Earle was told. She’d suffered a breakdown and was getting help.

So he called a friend—another woman—who, a few days earlier, had said she’d lend a hand if he wanted to straighten up. He’d spent enough time crisscrossing the line that he wasn’t sure of his motivations—one week he’d ache to live differently, the next he’d gleefully get buzzed again. But he was tired, he hurt and he needed a friend.

After a night of troubled sleep, he woke the next morning with a burning in his lungs that grew more severe until he started gasping for breath. His friend insisted on taking him to an emergency room. At Vanderbilt Medical Center, Earle was shuttled into intensive care, unconscious for most of his seven-day stay.

Released in the morning, he took his first hit from a pipe that evening. When his lungs burned, bending him over at the waist, he dropped the pipe. “I realized something had to change,” he says, recalling the moment with matter-of-fact clarity. “I checked into treatment, again. Only this time…well, I haven’t used drugs since.”

As he tells his story, the lanky, blue-eyed Earle paces his Inglewood apartment, a second-floor walkup above a home owned by another second-generation musician, Bobby Bare Jr. “I’ve basically met two kinds of people who are from Nashville,” he says. “They either come from a working-class family, or they’re musicians’ kids. I’m both. My mother grew up Nashville blue-collar. My dad’s a musician.”

His father is Steve Earle, a significant figure in Nashville’s music scene since the early ’80s. Steve’s work still draws rebel singer-songwriters to Music City, even though he moved to New York a couple of years ago with his seventh wife, singer Allison Moorer.

Justin’s mother, Carol, was his father’s third wife. She grew up in Germantown and, later, off Charlotte Avenue in an area once known as Ford City, because of its proximity to an auto plant. Steve Earle was married to Carol when he signed his first record deal in 1983, shortly after Justin was born. That would make the younger Earle the subject of “Little Rock & Roller,” which closed his father’s 1986 debut, Guitar Town.

Justin Townes Earle’s second namesake is his father’s mentor, the late Townes Van Zandt. He doesn’t have to explain that his father and Van Zandt are two heavyweight artistic figures who cast imposing shadows, both as musicians and as independent icons who struggled publicly with their own debilitating drug habits. But he tries not to let his father’s critical acclaim affect him.

“I don’t really think about it or worry about it, because his music is so different than mine,” Earle says. “It would be kind of foolish for anyone to compare us, because what we do is so different.”

Asked what it means to grow up in Nashville as one of those musicians’ kids that he references, Earle laughs. “Mainly, I’ve learned there’s a whole subset of women in this town who won’t go out with musicians because they hate their own musician-fathers,” he says. “But that’s the nature of this town—a lot of pissed-off kids.”

He saunters to the kitchen table to tap a cigarette from a pack, then walks back to the futon that’s pushed to the living-room wall. As he lights his smoke, he says, “I’m leaving the pack in there, otherwise I’d light one after another. Self-regulation, man.”

To his left, propped against the wall, is a framed print of Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper. On the other side of the entrance door is a photo of Martin Luther King. Guitars form a line next to the wood-framed futon, which is loosely covered with a red bed sheet. A small-screen television sits next to a stereo, with DVDs, CDs and tapes in haphazard piles in front of it. Amps, speakers, wires and other musical paraphernalia are scattered around the room and kitchen.