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Home  Archive Steve Earle’s Blues by Lauren St. John
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Steve Earle’s Blues by Lauren St. John |
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Written by Bryan A. Hollerbach
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Saturday, 01 February 2003 |
Hardcore Troubadour, Lauren St. John's new biography of
singer-songwriter Steve Earle, derives both advantages and
disadvantages from timing.
In the U.S., the HarperCollins imprint Fourth Estate will publish the
volume-here reviewed from that imprint's British edition-in February
(on whose second Saturday, coincidentally, Earle will play the Pageant).
Timing favors it because St. John's subject, who's never shied from
social and political controversy, raised a major furor on his 2002
release, Jerusalem, which No Depression recently called "as calculated
a collection of agitprop as any album since Public Enemy's It Takes a
Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back" (and which Jim Dunn praised in last
October's issue of Playback St. Louis). The furor specifically focused
on "John Walker's Blues," a song from the viewpoint of "American
Taliban" John Walker Lindh. At the risk of echoing an ancient ad
campaign, inquiring minds will thus want to know more about Earle.
Conversely, timing foils the bio because such inquiring minds may read
it more closely than they might have otherwise, thereby marking that a
more judicious edit would have benefited the book a great deal. More
specifically, typos litter Hardcore Troubadour, as do grammatical
gaffs. Moreover, marring it here and there are clumsy foreshadowing and
digressions so poorly integrated they seem non sequiturs.
A few choice examples warrant mention. Early in the text, the name of a
Texas restaurant where Earle was playing changes spelling within the
space of three pages, and at one point late in the bio, singer Terri
Clark transforms, from one paragraph to the next, into painter and
songwriter Susanna Clark. Elsewhere, regarding a party celebrating the
release of Pink & Black, Earle's four-song EP from 1983, St. John
notes, "Ron and Kelly and Steve's little brother Patrick was there"-to
which anyone fond of subject-verb agreement will growl, "Was they
really?" One final example toward the end of Hardcore Troubadour
features both a dangling modifier and an unthinkably peripatetic penal
institution: "Constitutionally incapable of spending more than thirty
days in the same municipality, jail grew increasingly claustrophobic."
That said, the bio, which totals 300-plus pages, perforce makes
fascinating reading because its subject fascinates. After sketching
some family background, St. John relates that Stephen Fain Earle was
born Saturday, January 17, 1955, at a U.S. Army hospital in Fort
Monroe, Virginia, where his father was stationed as a company clerk.
Foreshadowing much of Earle's life to come, it was a breech birth. To
anyone at all familiar with him, the following early passage in
Hardcore Troubadour should also seem emblematic:
It was in Palestine [Texas] that Steve first walked-or at least, that
his parents first saw him walk. He was sixteen months old. He never
crawled or tottered or took a few tentative steps. He simply stood up
and strolled the full length of the house.
St. John recounts Earle's youthful promise-especially in the areas of
history and politics, he "absorbed books with a sponge-like ease"-and
his musical bent-he was playing San Antonio coffeehouses at the age of
14-as well as his teenage introduction to drugs. Regarding that last,
an uncle only five years his senior both gave Earle his first guitar,
in 1967, and acquainted him with heroin, as he told St. John:
"I couldn't inject myself-Nick [his uncle] had to do it for me. I
didn't throw up, which most people do. I should have known I was in
trouble right then. It kind of really agreed with me."
From that period of his life, St. John also chronicles Earle's first
meetings with his two main songwriting mentors, Townes Van Zandt and
Guy Clark, the former of whom Earle initially encountered at a party at
3 a.m.:
"He had on this gorgeous white buckskin jacket with beadwork on it that
[singer-songwriter] Jerry Jeff [Walker] had given him for his birthday
two weeks earlier.... And Townes started a crap game on the floor in the
kitchen and lost every dime he had and that jacket within forty-five
minutes of arriving and then left an hour after that. I thought: ‘My
hero!'"
Of Van Zandt-the namesake of his first son, Justin Townes Earle, born
in 1982-Earle mordantly told his biographer, "He really had a gift for
sabotaging himself."
St. John likewise sketches Earle's first encounter with Clark, at a
Nashville watering hole called Bishop's Pub: "Guy also warmed to Steve
himself-his quick intelligence and fizzing energy-although on the whole
he preferred him when he drank because ‘he didn't talk so much.'" Clark
secured Earle a songwriting job at an RCA division, and for a time,
that helped to normalize a singularly nomadic and ragtag existence. (At
one point, Earle washed dishes at a Mexican restaurant that featured
boxing matches. "It didn't last very long," he told his biographer. "I
mean, people don't want to eat next to the spit bucket.")
Almost necessarily, St. John covers her subject's recording career from
Pink & Black to the present, detailing the trials and triumphs
surrounding such works as 1986's breakthrough Guitar Town (which was
recorded in two weeks and mixed in the same time frame), Exit O (1987),
Copperhead Road (1988), The Hard Way (1990), and Shut Up and Die Like
an Aviator (1991).
Necessarily for today's scandal-loving audiences, moreover, she details
Earle's many marriages-over time, he's wed five women, one of them
twice. The picture that develops of his connubial entanglements, it
almost goes without saying, scarcely flatters him. "He frightened me
and he knew it," one of Earle's ex-wives told his biographer. "He just
knew it instinctively and adapted to it and became whatever I wanted.
And I know that makes him sound like a predator-so be it." Hilariously,
two-thirds of the way through the bio, St. John relates:
When the news circulated that Steve was embarking on yet another
divorce, the proverbial [sic] hit the fan. Steve's parents were
distressed that he was abandoning the mother of his baby, his lawyer
was in a state because he had barely completed the paperwork on the
last divorce, and his business manager quit.
If Earle's marital misadventures border on black comedy, though, the
narrative of his escalating drug addiction approaches tragedy. On that
topic, in fact, Hardcore Troubadour makes harrowing reading. St. John
notes:
At one stage in 1988, his answering machine informed callers: "This is
Steve. I'm probably out shooting heroin, chasing thirteen-year-old
girls and beatin' up cops. But I'm old and I tire easily so leave a
message and I'll get back to you."
The dark humor of that passage fast evaporates, however. "Every damn
spoon in the house was black," Earle's sister Stacey, who for a time
served as his factotum, told St. John regarding his heroin use, and a
subsequent passage reads like something from David Lynch on a
particularly depraved day:
Shortly thereafter Steve could be observed standing on a street corner
in South Nashville in a blood-splattered paper robe, his head a grisly
mess of seeping stitches, holding out a $10 bill to buy rock.
Moreover, the nadir of Earle's addiction was yet to come. "I thought
about putting a pillow on his face," Stacey confessed. "I wanted for
him to stop hurting." In the mid-'90s, that addiction eventually led to
his (brief) incarceration for possession of heroin-as well as to
rehabilitation and rejuvenation. Since rehab, as St. John narrates,
Earle has seemingly exorcised his personal demons and turned his
energies once more to music, with such releases as Train a Comin'
(1995), I Feel Alright (1996), El Corazon (1997), The Mountain (1999),
Transcendental Blues (2000)...and, of course, Jerusalem (one of this past
year's most significant discs for more than one reason).
"He who fights against monsters should see to it that he does not
become a monster in the process," the German philosopher Friedrich
Wilhelm Nietzsche once wrote. "And when you stare persistently into an
abyss, the abyss also stares into you." Its textual shortcomings
notwithstanding, Hardcore Troubadour paints a riveting portrait of an
artist who, for good or for ill, has made it his practice to stare into
that abyss-and who has survived to tell the tale.
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