Earle: "I like my job. It's better than the alternative."

"From the beginning I realized I wasn't going to have a career within the confines of traditional country music," the Virginia-born Earle says over the phone from his adopted hometown of NYC. "We didn't do well in country venues but we did well in rock clubs. And Canada was one of the reasons we believed in what we did - our songs were played on rock radio [there]. And when Copperhead Road came out, we began playing arenas. It's always been my biggest audience, Canada."

Earle returns to Montreal to headline Théâtre Outremont this weekend. But Earle has travelled a long and winding road to get here since Copperhead topped the charts 20 years ago. The seven-time married Earle's life bottomed out in 1993 when his heroin addiction landed him in prison.

Earle recalls his scariest moment in the slammer. "This one guy got his arm broken over hair clippers, and it became immediately racial because there were only three white people in the 50-man dorm I was in," Earle says. "Most people in jail are working-class and poor people and, in America, people of colour. That's how it is. [A friend] told me I didn't jail well. 'You make the mistake that we're living here. But we're just jailin'.' After that I did better."

Since his release in late '94, Earle's comeback has been nothing short of extraordinary. And Earle, who performs over 200 concerts every year, owes it to his disciplined work ethic. "It just keeps me out of trouble. And I like my job. It's better than the alternative."

Earle's songs have been used in innumerable movie soundtracks and have been covered by everyone from Johnny Cash to Emmylou Harris; he's dueted with everybody from Lucinda Williams to Sheryl Crow; recorded Johnny Come Lately with The Pogues; is a published writer; has written and directed a play; and appeared as a recovering drug addict in the HBO series The Wire. His life has been chronicled in Amos Poe's documentary film Just an American Boy and in NYC music writer David McGee's acclaimed biography, Steve Earle: Fearless Heart, Outlaw Poet.

Then, finally, earlier this month, Earle won a Grammy (Best Contemporary Folk/Americana Album) for his critically hailed 2007 album Washington Square Serenade.

But when other artists were scared to challenge the Bush administration's "war on terror," Earle - who has also long campaigned against the death penalty - pushed the envelope with his 2002 antiwar album Jerusalem. In fact, about the wave of American patriotism in the wake of 9/11, Earle says, "I think [it was more] people using the issue of patriotism to discourage any discussion of what happened. That's fascism."

When the first jetliner crashed into the World Trade Center, Earle recalls he got a phone call from his late father, Jack Earle, who used to be an air traffic controller. "I was in Tennessee. He called and said, 'Are you watching the TV?' I watched the second plane go in while I was on the phone with him. He knew immediately what was going on. And I had managed to radicalize my father by that time."

Earle - a self-described "live socialist" - says America must now accept "moral responsibility" for Iraq. "We broke it and we have to fix it. But I don't think we have the money."

And he won't run for office either. "Absolutely fucking not! Maybe in the next lifetime. It's hard to aspire to. I admire some of the people who do it for the right things, but they are so rare."

Before hanging up, I have to ask Earle why Elvis Presley didn't record Earle's song Mustang Wine back in 1975. Earle doesn't miss a beat. "Elvis was making a record in Nashville for the first time in several years and, I found out years later, Elvis never left his hotel room, [which] had foil on the windows. I was pissed off at him for years - 10 years after he died! He cost me a lot of money."

Steve Earle
w/ Allison Moorer
At Théâtre Outremont (1248 Bernard W.), March 1

 
 

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About Steve Earle     Last year Steve Earle, on a live radio broadcast during the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas Steve Earle said the reason that he moved from Nashville to New York was because he wanted to live in a place where he could "walk out {his} front door and see a gay interracial couple walking down the street and know nobody was going to mess with them." While you did mention that Steve Earle was Virginia-born he was raised in, and is most identified with being from, Texas. The fact that Steve Earle is both a "live socialist" and one of the most ardent, and articulate, anti-war musicians but also from Texas is not an aberration. Steve Earle is one of millions of Texans (that is not hyperbole), as am I, who are both sickened by what the Bushies have wrought in Iraq and mortified by the fact that George Bush's name will always be associated with Texas. I am hopeful that, though he has lived in Nashville and is now a resident of New York, folks will remember that Steve Earle is a Texan.
Jen Bowles		February 28th, 2008
No Kidding!     i just pray steve doesn't collapse on elvis' throne
George Oakes		February 28th, 2008

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