Steve Earle
Steve Earle’s always been an outlaw, in the Music City sense of the word. When he came to Nashville in the 1970s, he ran opposite to the Nashville mainstream, playing with his heroes Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt and appearing in the beloved documentary Heartworn Highways. In 1986, he released his debut album Guitar Town, a major touchpoint for alt-country. Over the course of more than 20 additional studio albums, he’s pushed past established conceptions of country, from fuzzed-out guitar rock with The Dukes to bluegrass with The Del McCoury Band and beyond, all while maintaining an intense political consciousness. Â
With a decades-deep catalog of poignant songwriting to draw upon, Earle is going out on a solo retrospective tour this fall that he’s described as a kind of return to the earliest gigs he played as in coffeehouses. Before stopping at the Ryman on Wednesday, Earle spoke with the Scene, discussing his political roots, activism and past tours. Our interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What sort of things come to mind when you think about your childhood and growing up in Texas?
I grew up the oldest of five kids, and we were solidly middle class. My dad was an air traffic controller, and you know, which would be upper middle class if you didn't have five kids — but we did. We did fine, and it was chaotic but happy. But I still ran away from home a couple of times. I didn't run away from my family. … I read Bound for Glory, and took it literally. [Laughs] I started hitchhiking places, and I got into playing coffeehouses when I was too young to play bars, so that kind of turned me towards more acoustic music.Â
But I was exposed to a lot of great country music too, just because of where I was. Arguably, some of the coolest country music around was in South Texas, where I grew up, because most of the music that people went out and danced to was based on Western swing. It was all about dancing. So it was a very high level of musicianship: great steel players, great fiddle players. I loved all that stuff too. You know, I was very conflicted about “Okie From Muskogee” because I knew how good Merle Haggard was — that kind of thing. So I kind of grew up with all that and, you know, long hair and cowboy boots. And then I met Townes when I was 17. I met Jerry Jeff [Walker] the same year. And then met Guy Clark when I got to Nashville when I was 19.
What was it like moving to Nashville?
Well, I had to run away. I was 19 when I went to Nashville. I'd been on my own for three years, and I was married — I got married and I was playing clubs. And you know, Austin never made any sense to me at that point. I kinda knew it was a refugee camp for people who had been in the music business in New York and L.A., and they came back there, and that's why they were able to have careers there. So I felt like I needed to go somewhere, and I originally I thought I'd probably go to New York. But then I knew that Guy Clark was in Nashville. My wife went to Mexico with her parents, and I wasn't invited. So I went to Nashville to reconnoiter the joint, and I came back the day she got back from Mexico; I said, “We're moving to Tennessee.” What actually happened was that she moved back in with her parents. When I went to Nashville, it took a while to find a job and get a place — it took, like, a couple of months, and then she came up and joined me later.
When was the first time you remember politics being a part of your life?
I got in a lot of trouble because I was seen on the Channel 5 news singing “Feel Like I'm Fixin’ to Die” on a flatbed truck in front of the Alamo. It was a rally that Vietnam Veterans Against the War put together. I played a coffeehouse at a service club too, in Houston, and that was in the middle of MTC — the Medical Training Center, where nearly every combat medic in the Army was trained during the Vietnam War. So it was all these guys who were probably all going to Vietnam, but some of them were really talented. There were some GIs performing there, and then all of the local folkies performed there, and I did too. That kind of got me in with these guys up in Philemon, Texas. ... Vietnam Veterans Against the War was kind of formed there. Those guys invited me to sing at this rally in front of the Alamo, and of course, my dad was a federal employee. ... He got called into the office, and I got in trouble.Â
When I grew up, there was no question about whether music could be political or not. It was. That's a newfangled idea, the idea that politics are off limits in music. Pete Seeger said something [like], “All music's political, because lullabies are political to babies.” That’s just the way I do it.Â
How do you think your political views have changed over time?
Not very much. I mean, at my core, I'm a hardcore lefty. I've never believed we practiced the purest form of democracy in the world, because I've traveled all over the world, and I know better. But I also think that the Constitution is kind of a masterpiece by accident. It wasn't intended to be a Bill of Rights for people. It was intended to be a Bill of Rights for property owners — for certain property owners — but they just went too far past the decimal point, and it turned out to be more than they intended it to be. I'm very defensive of that, and I think we have some things that we're losing, these very American things that we're losing.Â
We’ve gotten so far apart, and we forget that most people are really in the middle, and it's supposed to be OK for them to be in the middle. It's the way most people are. It's a very natural thing to be centrist. It's a pain in the ass to be radical. I've been radical all my life, and I can testify to that, but that's the way I am. I'm unfortunately a registered member of the Democratic Party. I didn't do it for years on purpose, but I moved to New York, and in order to vote in a primary, I had to be there. Three cycles back, I thought it was necessary to vote for Bernie Sanders in the primary. You know, during the Obama administration, people would say, “Oh, he's a socialist.” That was my job. I could say, “No, I'm a socialist. He's not even fucking close.”Â
This is not a left-of-center country, it's a right-of-center country, and it was built to be that way. And I wish I could say it became something else. It looked like maybe it was becoming something else when I was growing up, but it didn't turn out to be true. But, you know, when you go to Austin and you land at the airport, you walk past that statue of Barbara Jordan. That's the Texas I grew up in. Nobody could imagine a Republican president. But these things change, and I think the Republican party may have backed itself into a corner, and we may be seeing the end of it as we know it. It's going to be there, but it's not going to be what it always was.Â
“Fort Worth Blues” has always stood out to me in your discography as the ultimate tribute to Townes Van Zandt. Could you talk about writing that song?
I was touring in Europe, the first European tour I did after I got out of jail, trying to get that market back together. Justin was with me on that, and he traveled with me, and The Delavantes opened all those shows. We started as far east as Croatia, and we traveled all the way to Galway. That was my first trip to Galway in the ’90s … and I stayed at the end of the tour: that's what started that whole Galway winter trip every year.
I settled in, and I was just starting to write — “Over Yonder” was written there. God, a lot of the songs on the next couple of records — beginning with El CorazĂłn — a lot of that stuff was written there. But “Fort Worth Blues” … I played six or seven different places, including where Townes’ last gig that he got all the way through was, at the RĂłisĂn Dubh in Galway. The last time he appeared on stage was The Borderline in London. There's places in the Netherlands, France, Spain, that he had been through on his last European tour. And so that’s how it started. I just kept running into Townes — everywhere I saw him. When I settled down in Galway, I wrote that song about him.
