Leave it up to Earle, though, to find a glitch. Nothing in his world has ever been perfect. He reads the caption next to the guitar, and a little while later, he wanders back and reads it again. His mood goes from upbeat to agitated. “They got some s— wrong here,” he gripes. “I wonder who wrote this crap. ‘Scaled-down model of the Gibson Everly Brothers’ model.’ It’s a lot bigger than an Everly Brothers model.”
Earle belongs to all old-style country tradition: that of talented, reckless, onetime drug abusers like Hank Williams, George Julies and Johnny Cash. In 1986, he was one of country music’s brightest hopes, a self-proclaimed hillbilly who combined rock and-roll swagger with meticulously literate songcraft, booming drumbeats with twangy guitars. Along with Dwight Yoakam and Randy Travis, who also made their debuts that year, Earle helped galvanize Nashville out of its post-“Urban Cowboy” cheeseball slump. He couldn’t croon like Travis, and he wasn’t as much of a looker as Yoakam, but Earle had something country had been missing for a long time: tough-guy attitude. “I got me a fearless heart,” he boasted on “Guitar Town.” “Strong enough to get you through the scary parts.”
But until a few weeks ago, Nashvillians couldn’t mention Earle without shaking their heads sadly, A severe drug habit began to derail his career around the time of his fourth album, “The Hard Way,” in 1990. In 1992 and ‘93 he was arrested three times on misdemeanor drug charges. His label had dropped him, and he toured only sporadically. Last July he was caught with three rocks of crack in a Nashville parking lot and charged with drug possession. By late September he’d finally landed in jail, but was soon transferred to a rehab center to ease his withdrawal symptoms. He came out of treatment and served 19 more days behind bars. He’s been a free man since Nov. 11.
The music business has left Earle for dead so many times that no one really expects him to bounce back anymore. So in his utmost ornery fashion, that’s exactly what he’s doing. He’s just released his first studio album in five years, “Train a Comin’,” on a new Nashville independent label, Winter Harvest: it’s a spare, beautifully tender acoustic effort recorded in loose, back-porch jamboree fashion. He regular attends treatment meetings and sellers dedicated to staying clean. He’s put on some weight. a relief compared with his emaciated state a few years ago. He laughs a lot. “If I had known I was going to live this long,” he jokes, cornpone- style, “I would have taken a lot better care of myself.”
And clean or not. Earle is still a hellion. Stomping around the Hall of Fame in blue jeans, lug-sole Fila shoes and a black leather jacket with a cattle skull on the back, Talking a mile a minute and -waving a pair of reflector shades around, he strikes not a single mild-mannered tourist as anything resembling a star. But staffers greet him respectfully. “Good to see you,” they say. " Good to be seen," Earle replys. Talk turns to “Trains A Comin” and Earle gets on a rant. The record company, he says, changed the song sequence behind his back, so he’s making them do a new pressing with the songs in his order. “It’s only my sixth album- I think I can figure out how to sequence an album by now,” he says. " I was talking to the guy on the telephone and I just blew up. I went nuclear. He said, “If you’re going to have that kind of an attitude, I’m going to hang up.’ I said, “If I were you I’d keep me on the telephone, ‘cause then you know I’m not coming out to kick your ass’.”
Earle’s incorrigibility has always been his charm and his downfall. He has a back-against-the-wall complex: he Comes out shooting, even when there’s nothing to shoot at. It’s a theme that runs through his music. “The Rain Came Down,” from his 1987 album, “Exit O,” tells the story of a small farm owner threatened with foreclosure. “Don’t you come around herc with your auctioneer man “cause you can have your machines, but you ain’t takin’ my land,” he snarls. “Tom Ames’ Prayer,” written in 1976 but just released on Train a Comin’,” follows a killer trapped in an alley with the cops closing in. How does it end? “He cocked both his pistols and he spit in the dirt/And he walked out in the street.” His 1988 album, “Copperhead Road,” includes a boogie-rock anthemi, “Back to the Wall.”
It’s easy to imagine Earle as a kid growing up outside San Antonio, dreaming up trouble to get into. He remembers seeing Elvis on TV when he was only 3, and claims that from then on he knew his calling: “I didn’t never want to be a cowboy or a fireman.” But what he really wanted was to be a rebel. As a teenager he grew his air long, and the rednecks beat him up for it. He ran away from home a lot,even though it sounds like a nice one: his dad worked as an air-traffic controller, and his mom a housewife, had the gift of gab. At 16, Earle hit the Texas coffeehouse circuit, and hooked up with the baddest dude he could find: the brilliant, misadventuring songwriter Townes Van Zandt. Van Zandt drifted to Nashville; Earle drifted after him. Van Zandt let him into his gang. “He was the kid in the group,” Van Zandt says. “We used to drink red wine and play our new songs every day. Steve always had one.”
In mid-‘7Os Nashville, Earle found he could get into a lot of trouble. Bill Also-brook, a longtime friend of Earle’s who produced “Train a Comin,” remembers the time. Alsobrook, who once won Van Zandt’s gold tooth in a crap game, is Nashville born and bred; he speeks real slow and he doesn’t drink anymore. “Jerry Jeff Walker was mixing one of his records, and Steve was there,” he says. “They were drunk and snorting…stuff. It soared getting so crazy that I crawled underneath the piano in the studio, because if somebody started shooting the floor was a good place to be. Steve followed me under there, then I went to sleep, and that must have seemed like a good idea because we woke up in the morning at about the same time.”
Earle was married then. By 1980, he was married for a second time. By 1985, he was married for a third time, and by 1988 he was married for a fifth time, to Teresa Ensenat, an A&R executive at Geffen. Earle had such a bad reputation around Nashville that his label, MCA, switched him to the pop division. Earle’s sound was considered too rock and roll, plus his stubbornness was fraying a lot of nerves. “He was not going to abide by the rules,” says Tony Brown, a coproducer of Earle’s first three albums and now the president of MCA Nashville. “Had he been a folk singer, whatever the rules in folk music were, he was going to do it his way.”
“Copperhead Road” was Earle’s bid for rock stardom. He moved to L.A. to be with Ensenat, leaving behind two children from wives No. 3 and 4. The bid, and eventually the marriage, faied. Earle returned to Nashville in 1990 and began driving himself into the ground. His longtime drug abuse (he first tried heroin at 13) finally began to affect his work. A mini-tour in ‘93 was a near disaster. “In Los Angeles, I just couldn’t get it together and get out of the room, says Earle. “I wasn’t sitting up there sucking on dope or anything, but I just couldn’t find the s— that I needed to into the goddamn shower and get out.
Earle calls the past two years “my vacation in the Ghetto.” He says if he hadn’t gotten popped by the cops, he wouldn’t have quit drugs. When he talks about his dark times, he sits back and stares at nothing, and his eyes narrow into tiny, knifeblade slits. “My lawyer negotiated my way into treatment because it was better than being in jail,” he says “I didn’t go for treatment voluntarily. And I intended to hit the fence the first chance and go to Ireland. No extradition treaty. But at some point I decided that wasn’t what I wanted to do.”
Earle decided to work. And now, his life is on the upswing. He’s married for the sixth time-to Lou Anne, who was also wife NO.4. His sons Justin Townes,13 and Ian 8, live with them in Fairview, 30 miles outside Nashville. He’s been working on a new album, and the songs, all written since his release, are as good as anything he’s ever done. “I feel all right,” he sings in one of them. “I feel alright tonight.” It’s not satisfaction, but it’s close.
(1986): A modern clasic. Wild and innoccnt, with twang to spare.
(1987, with the Dukes): Stellar songwriting set to a harder-rocking beat.
(1988): Arena rock comes to Nashville. Tales of bootleggers and Vietnam vets.
(1990, with the Dukes): Dark, scary, inconsistent. The best song is about a death-row inmate.
(1991, with the Dukes): Recorded live but was he? his voice is totally shot.
(1993): Hits and high points culled from the first three albums.
(1995): Songs dating from ‘74 to ‘95 put to a spare, bluegrass backing.
