Steve Earle
All songs are political, machines are taking over, yoga is great for the voice, all acid-heads believe in God, Shakespeare was a fraud, the Sex Pistols were terrible live… These and more shape his world view.
All songs are political, machines are taking over, yoga is great for the voice, all acid-heads believe in God… Find all this and more in The Gospel According To Steve Earle.
Steve Earle’s life has hardly been short of incident. Now in his 65th year, America’s original hard-core troubadour has been through prison time, drug and alcohol addiction and more marriages than seems feasible. Except for a fallow period in the early 90s, when his personal issues came to a head, the prolific roots-rocker has amassed a remarkable body of music, in addition to his work as a playwright, novelist, poet, actor and political activist. His latest album with the Dukes, the moving and fiercely brilliant Ghosts Of West Virginia, centres on the Upper Big Branch coal mine explosion that claimed 29 lives in 2010.
THE UK LOVES ME MORE THAN MY HOMELAND DOES
I sell more tickets in Britain than I do anywhere else in the world. I don’t know why, but it’s always been that way, except for a moment in Canada in the eighties, when I played arenas during the Copperhead Road cycle. I started coming to England in 1986 and it was weird. There was a bunch of broken phone boxes, so you couldn’t even fucking call home back then. I’d stay at the Royal Garden, because it was the only hotel in London that had showers; I’m not a soak-in-the-bath kind of guy.
NOT EVERYONE WHO VOTED FOR TRUMP IS AN ASSHOLE
My political writing has always been about the way politics affects regular people. Writing Ghosts Of West Virginia meant trying to figure out how to make a record that speaks to – and for – people that didn’t vote the way I did. Like everybody else, I’m sometimes guilty of being insular, hanging out with people who think the same way. And that’s not what America is. It’s the same in England. I didn’t think that Brexit would happen or that Boris would get elected. We’re in the same position in the States. If you start thinking that everybody who voted for Donald Trump is a racist and an asshole, then you’re fucked, cos it’s simply not true. Looking back, Guitar Town and Copperhead Road are pretty fucking political records, but sometimes the people speaking in those songs are not like me at all, politically. So I wanted to get back to that.
THE WORKING MAN DOESN’T KNOW WHERE HE STANDS ANY MORE
One of the new songs is It’s About Blood. I wrote a similar one in 1986, Good Ol’ Boy (Gettin’ Tough), which is more or less about the same thing. But this is more specific, and the writing’s better because I’m older and better at what I do. The first verse comes directly from interviews with the miners themselves and one character in particular, Tommy Davies. His son, his brother and his nephew were all killed in the explosion that day, but he survived. In rural areas of the States, coal mining used to be the one job where anybody could make a decent living. But there just aren’t that many jobs in coal any more. The machines do most of the work, and those people who do have jobs aren’t allowed to organise. The powers that be have been trying to break the heart of trade unionism in the United States since the Depression.
SONGS AREN’T FINISHED UNTIL YOU DO THEM LIVE
The greatest advice I was ever given was that songs aren’t done until you play them for others. Guy Clark told me that when I was nineteen years old and I took it to heart. I’ve been practicing it ever since. Songs can be educational. That’s one of the cool things about being involved with the New York theatre piece [Coal Country] that goes with Ghosts Of West Virginia. For example, most people in New York don’t realise that West Virginia was the most unionised place in the United States until the 1990s.
NOTHING BEATS YOGA FOR IMPROVING YOUR VOICE
I have a hard time listening to my voice back in the eighties. I didn’t really consider myself to be a singer, and knew I wouldn’t be able to accept myself as one if I hadn’t been able to write really good songs in those days. I can do way more with my voice now. I think it’s got better since I got out of jail, beginning in the nineties with Train A Comin’. I smoked for another ten years after I stopped doing all the other drugs. It was the hardest thing to quit and I had COPD [a lung disease] already. Then about five years ago I started doing yoga. Now I’m hard-core – I practice six days a week. And I’m singing way better because I’m breathing way better.
WITHOUT DECENT LYRICS, ROCK’N’ROLL IS JUST ABOUT SEX
My theory about rock’n’roll as an art form begins with Bob Dylan wanting to be John Lennon, and vice versa. I think the greater emphasis on lyrics elevated rock’n’roll to an art form. Without that it’s still about pussy. It’s interesting, but it’s not necessarily art [laughing]. And of course there is a prejudice involved here, because lyrics are what I do. It’s my craft.
I’M STILL MAKING UP FOR TIME I SQUANDERED IN THE 1990S
Some of what continues to drive me is the fact I lost five years. Those were my Muhammad Ali years, from age thirty-five to forty. They’re the prime years, creatively, for most people. I’ve witnessed some of my heroes stop writing in their forties and fifties and I’m terrified of that. I’m sixty-five now, and I think
“The greater emphasis on lyrics elevated rock’n’roll to an art form. Without that it’s still about pussy.”
I’m writing as well as I ever have, if not better. That’s one of the reasons why I do theatre – I enjoy homework, having an assignment. I think the best dramatic writing is being done for television these days, so I’m very interested in possibly being involved as a producer/writer.
SHAKESPEARE WAS A FRAUD
I recently set Sonnet 29 to music as part of the New York Public Theatre’s ‘Brave New Shakespeare’ challenge. It might piss off some people in the US, and a lot in England, but I’m an Oxfordian [the theory that Shakespeare wasn’t the real author of his plays and poems]; I believe [Elizabethan peer] Edward De Vere wrote that stuff. So I subtitled it Edward De Vere’s Coronavirus Blues, cos it’s kind of a minor-key thing.
I HAVE AMBITIONS TO WRITE A WEST END MUSICAL
I’m just trying to do anything I can to make a living. I want a musical that runs on Broadway and then the West End and makes a lot of money, just because I love that stuff. The musical is an original American art form, just like bluegrass. That’s one thing we kind of invented. I love the idea of a play that functions and holds up on its own, with songs that people will go around singing for the rest of their lives. That’s what I want to write, and I think I’m good enough to do it.
THERE’S A CONSPIRACY AGAINST ARSENAL FC
I love watching Premiership football, but it’s been a rough few years for my team. I started following Arsenal in 1986, when I was doing some production work in London. The whole point of the Premier League was to attract players from all over the world and create a calibre of football that hadn’t existed I’ve seen a lot of stuff in the last few years that’s really fucking dodgy, from the same three or four referees, and that drives me nuts.
DON’T TRY IT, BUT LSD CAN BE GOOD FOR YOU
I hate talking about it on one level, because I’m so anti-drugs, but I was addicted to LSD at school. I took it as often as I could and it became a problem. Then I went through a whole period of my life where I didn’t trust anybody who’d never taken LSD. I’m past that now, but I do think there is an advantage to having done it. I remember once having a discussion with Ram Dass [the late psychologist and spiritual guru, aka Richard Alpert] and saying to him: “I don’t know anybody that ever took real lysergic acid diethylamide 25 who doesn’t believe in God.” And that’s probably true if people are being honest. RD really belly-laughed at that.
THE SEX PISTOLS WERE TERRIBLE
Going to see the Sex Pistols in January 1978 was a total accident. I wasn’t even that interested at the time, but I was staying at a friend’s house and he said: “Someone says the Sex Pistols are playing at Randy’s Rodeo in San Antonio. Where the fuck’s that?” I said: “I know exactly where it is, because it’s about a hundred yards from where I used to live.” It was part of this thing where Malcolm [McLaren, Pistols manager] thought playing these country joints would be cool. San Antonio was the show where Sid Vicious got hit in the head with a beer bottle. There was space for two songs, the rest of his contribution was staggering around and bleeding a lot. It was a really bad show, even by the Pistols’ standards.
MUSIC AND POLITICS ARE INSEPARABLE
Pete Seeger said all songs are political. But what it boils down to is that I grew up in an era when no one suggested that politics was off limits in a song, so it never occurred to me not to write that way. It’s just one of a lot of different types of song to me, though. I write story songs that are historical, I write love songs – happy ones and sad ones – and I probably write more songs about girls than anything else. I just think it’s hard enough to write songs as it is, without limiting yourself.
EVERYBODY IS COMPETITION, EVEN MY OWN FAMILY
One of the songs on the new record is John Henry Was A Steel Drivin’ Man, which is about men against machines, drawing a parallel between that and the Upper Big Branch mine. The other thing is that I’ve always been jealous because Justin [Earle’s son] wrote a fucking John Henry song and I didn’t. So I managed to finally do that. Justin’s best songs are as good as anybody’s, which means I’m in competition with everybody out there, including that fucker.
Ghosts Of West Virginia is out now via New West Records.
“I write story songs that are historical, I write love songs and I write more songs about
girls than anything else.”