Steve Earle’s songs honor an old friend
STEVE EARLE HONORS THE MUSIC OF GUY CLARK.
A small crowd gathers around Steve Earle as he sits inside Rockin’ Robin Guitars & Music on Shepherd and strums a 1962 Gibson J-50 guitar once owned by blues great Lightnin’ Hopkins.
Earle slides easily into a little blues tune while talking to shop owner Bart Wittrock about the instrument’s provenance.
“You think about selling it?” the songwriter asks.
“I’ll put it this way, I don’t want to die with it,” Wittrock says.
The Gibson goes back on the wall, but it’s easy to imagine Earle at some point using it as a point of entry for an album. He’s in town for another project that has him looking back: “Guy,” which finds Earle and his band running through a selection of songs written by Guy Clark, one of his songwriting mentors.
At 64, Earle continues to operate with a recovering addict’s restless energy. Since 2009, he’s made seven recordings, starting with “Townes,” his tribute to Townes Van Zandt, his other songwriting mentor.
He says of Clark, “I don’t know what I believe in, but I couldn’t risk running into that (expletive) on the other side, having made a Townes record and not one for him.”
The Hemingway connection
Those who have followed Earle — who has lived in Houston, San Antonio and Nashville and now calls New York home — for any amount of time are aware of the profound impact both Clark and Van Zandt have had on his work. Van Zandt’s influence was applied more through Earle’s observation of his songs. Clark took a more active role teaching a young apprentice.
“Guy’s critiques were quite simple,” Earle says. “It would either be, ‘Good work’ or, ‘Needs work.’ One or the other. But it was more than that, too. He showed me how he laid out songs on a page. Little things. ‘Why are you writing with a pen? You need a pencil. With a big eraser.’ ”
Earle credits Clark with teaching him how to compress time in a
song, a skill Clark mastered in some of his narratives that packed lifetimes into three minutes.
“It was the opposite of Raymond Carver, where time was expanded — where one second of time could take up a whole book,” Earle says. “Instead he found a way to get a beginning, middle and end in there to cover a lot of history in a narrative. There are tricks to it, and I learned them from him. 1. Fear not the obvious. 2. Fear not turns of phrase that aren’t yours. They put people in a place, and then you can worry about the important stuff.”
Earle says Clark’s work reminds him of correspondence between Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos.
“There’s a letter Hemingway wrote to Dos Passos. He said, ‘I liked your book, but where is the weather?’ ” Earle says, laughing. “But weather is important. Guy
was so good at all those little things.”
He recites the intro to Clark’s “Texas 1947”: “Now being six years old, I had seen some trains before. So it’s hard to figure out what I’m at the depot for.”
“A lot of work gets done in just those lines,” Earle says.
He marvels at how short Clark’s masterpiece “Desperadoes Waiting for a Train” is.
“It’s a way shorter song than people think it is,” he says. “So much happens.”
Good tacos
And he’s right. In the song, Clark covers a boy’s relationship with an old man across years.
“I paid attention to all of it,” Earle says. “And I knew if you wrote songs like that, I knew what you were up against. People would tell you it needed to be a certain length, that it needed this kind of chorus and da da da da da.”
Earle’s own work would follow Clark’s disregard for rules. His “Guitar Town” and “Copperhead Road” each had a refrain; neither had a chorus.
“Guy could hammer nails with his integrity,” Earle says. “And it wasn’t just him being hardheaded. It wasn’t as simple as, ‘Don’t do commercials.’ Somebody got on his ass about doing a Taco Cabana commercial. His point was, ‘Those are good tacos.’ And they are good tacos. They’re still good tacos. Better than the overwrought pieces of (expletive) I had in the Heights this morning.”
But discussing Clark, Earle doesn’t spill only reverence.
“I can get angry about it if I let myself,” he says. “Guy didn’t do anything he was asked to do. He didn’t stop drinking until chemo made it impossible to drink. He kept smoking cigarettes and pot. That stuff didn’t help. A lot of things killed him. And my being sober estranged us for a while. He had utter contempt for it.”
Not preaching to the choir
Earle has always been frank about his own addiction, which landed him in prison in the early 1990s. He mentions missing “the Muhammad Ali years, roughly 35 to 40 — for intellectual years, that’s a lot of prime time. So I’ve been trying to make up for it since.”
That 25-year period of sobriety has brought with it 15 albums, a couple of books, plays, thousands of performances.
Clark died in 2016 at age 74, a decidedly longer run than Van Zandt, who died at 52 in 1997.
Though the two songwriters were lifelong friends and both spent years awash in reverence for their work, each went about his career differently. In addition to his early exit, Van Zandt did much less songwriting through his 40s, whereas Clark remained active building guitars, writing songs and occasionally releasing an album.
Even in death, Clark found a way to be immersed in art. He expressed his wish that his ashes be used in some sort of sculptural project by Terry Allen, the Texas singer, songwriter and visual artist. Included in the art for Earle’s “Guy” is a painting by Allen — a crow with the word “ashes” — that offers clues to what has become of Clark’s remains. Earle says Allen created a large bronze crow to hold Clark’s remains.
“We’re trying to find the right place for it,” Earle says. “Guy didn’t want it where a lot of people would come looking for it.”
With “Guy” released in the spring, Earle is already looking ahead. His next album should be out next year. Its core will be a set of songs used in a theater production written by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, who wrote the 2002 play “The Exonerated.” The play and the songs are informed by the Upper Big Branch mining disaster in West Virginia that happened in 2010.
Earle sees the album as connected to political issues but differently than the protest records he’s made in the past.
“The center of the record is about trying to speak to people in the middle of the country who voted for Donald Trump,” he says. “That it doesn’t have to be this way. This isn’t another preaching-to-the-choir record. I’ve done that a few times. I wanted to do something different this time.”