Country outlaw
Country outlaw channels Waylon Jennings on latest album
Steve Earle’s new album channels Waylon.
Just before moving to Nashville, Steve Earle played a lowbudget restaurant gig in San Antonio. That’s where he met the great country singer Johnny Bush.
In 1973, Bush, a Houston native living in San Antonio, was quite successful. The Country Caruso had put more than 15 songs on the country charts. He also was a notorious taskmaster.
“He was the Van Morrison of Texas,” Earle says. “He fired pretty much every musician in the state at some point. To the point where he’d forget he’d fired you and then he’d rehire you.”
One of the fired and rehired was pianist Joe Voorhees. Earle and Vorhees were drunk, stoned and hungry, and Voorhees had a key to Bush’s home, which was a mile from the gig.
“Jason thought Bush was in Vegas, so we raided his icebox,” Earle says. “I made myself some Rice Krispies with bananas. I should’ve known something was (messed) up because the bananas were fresh. So Jason’s face goes white, and he says, ‘J-J-J-J-J-J-John …’ And there’s Bush with a .357 Magnum pointed at my head.”
That’s the backstory to the new song “Walking in L.A.,” which finds Earle singing with Bush (who fortunately was clearer of mind than Earle on that night 44 years ago).
The album’s title, “So You Wanna Be an Outlaw,” makes plain Earle’s intent to double back to 1970s country music.
It’s a reference to a landmark album as well as a culture shift in country music in that era.
Outlaw country, Earle points out, wasn’t just about its stars, such as Texas natives Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson.
And “it wasn’t about the drinking and drugs and the things you hear about,” he says. “It was about guys who really just wanted artistic freedom.”
After surviving his encounter with Bush, the teenage Earle landed in Nashville in late 1973, mere months after Jennings released his now classic album “Honky Tonk Heroes” — almost all of its songs written by another Texan, a wildeyed poet named Billy Joe Shaver, who had just released his own debut, “Old Five and Dimers Like Me.”
That year also marked the beginning of Nelson’s hottest streak: “Shotgun Willie” came out in 1973, followed by “Phases and Stages” in 1974 and “Red Headed Stranger” in 1975.
This was Earle’s musical incubator. In Nashville, he found inspiration and occasionally shelter from fellow transplant songwriter Guy Clark.
Earle was a brash and confident kid in a circle of men. Not surprisingly, it took him some time to find his feet. He didn’t release his debut album, “Guitar Town,” until 1986. Earle was 31.
That album benefited from timing, though. Earle’s mentors had seen their fortunes fade. And Earle took what he’d learned from Jennings, Nelson, Clark, Bush, Doug Sahm and scads of others and made his own lane on a musical hillbilly highway.
“Guitar Town” and its follow-up, “Exit 0,” sounded far removed from what Nashville was selling in the mid-’80s. That’s because Earle’s points of reference were these musicians who were back on the periphery.
“Nowhere Road,” from his second album, today sounds like an obvious mash-up of Jennings and Sahm.
“That song totally was me doing a Waylon thing,” he says. “And the reason it probably got by you is that I played acoustic guitar on that record. Almost no electric at all. But if you play the riff from that song on an electric guitar really loud, it’s right out of ‘Honky Tonk Heroes.’ I’ve never claimed to have an original idea in my body when it comes to music. And I don’t aspire to that. I just aspire to write the best songs and come up with the best stories I can tell.”
Earle focused on “Guitar Town” last year on tour for the album’s 30th anniversary, leaning on his band — including Houston-born guitarist Chris Masterson and Dallas native and multiinstrumentalist Eleanor Whitmore — to pull him back to an old-school country sound.
“So You Think You’re an Outlaw” was a logical next step: “This is me doing that Waylon thing, playing the back pickup on a Fender Telecaster almost the entire record.
“The records I still always listen to are the same: The Beatles, the Stones, Dylan, Waylon and Willie. That was in rotation when I was young, and it has been through my adult life.
“So this is me channeling Waylon Jennings to the best of my ability. I just surrendered to that. That’s what my record was going to be.”
These days Earle is far removed from Nashville, having sunk roots through the sidewalks of New York, which he’s called home for the past decade. His gnarled, twangy voice still twists like a live oak, giving away his Texas roots.
On the new album, there’s a nostalgic glow from his return to the rudiments of honky tonk, the steel guitar and fiddle. But lyrically and thematically, he’s sitting under darker clouds.
“News From Colorado” doesn’t bear good news. And almost all of the songs touch on endings and farewells: “Sunset Highway,” “Fixin’ to Die,” “How It Ends.”
“Part of it is me coming off a blues record,” he says. “And, well, my divorce still figures into it, probably a lot. You can figure out what’s causing some of the songs to turn that way.”
Earle and singersongwriter Allison Moorer split in 2014. But the somber tone of the album extends beyond the end of his seventh marriage. Their son John Henry, 7, has autism, and Earle on more than one occasion mentions a need to provide financial security for him.
Earle is only 62, but in the ’70s and ’80s, he lived harder than most. One could view his body of work since being sprung from prison in 1994 as that of a sober man whose lost years motivated him to create.
He’s put out 14 albums in that time, published a novel and a short-story collection, appeared on TV’s “The Wire” and written a play. In April, he appeared in an offBroadway play for which he also wrote the score.
Another way to look at his productivity is less as a response to lost years and more as making the most of the time that remains.
At 84, Nelson appears impervious to time. Shaver, 77, has taken a licking.
But Jennings — the patron saint of Earle’s new album — died at 65. Sahm was just 58.
For decades, Earle has openly admired Townes Van Zandt, even recording an album of Van Zandt’s songs a few years ago. Van Zandt died at 52.
And Clark — who Earle says “helped raise me in a way” — died last year, at 74.
Earle’s new album closes with “Goodbye Michelangelo,” which he wrote for Clark.
“Townes was more about giving me a copy of ‘Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee’ and saying, ‘Read this,’ ” Earle says. “Guy showed me how to go about doing this work. I don’t do things the way he taught me 40 years ago. But it was a starting place. And I still do some of it to this day.
“But that song, all the metaphors in it, it’s about treating songwriting as an art just like literature. And Guy and (his wife) Susanna, they taught us to think of ourselves as artists.” andrew.dansby@chron.com twitter.com/andrewdansby