Steve Earle, as I wrote elsewhere, is a unique talent and a unique individual. Though known today for his radical politics, his raspy voice, and his time in jail, we tend to take for granted Earle’s ability to play guitar. We shouldn’t. Earle backed Lucinda Williams on her greatest record, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, and he plays rhythm guitar the way some men swing a hammer — relentlessly.
But what Earle’s emphatic nature and his hell-raising past have obscured is a great love for the roots of folk music, specifically, for early Dylan, in his Greenwich Village days. A terrific piece in the New Yorker earlier this year brought out the depth of Earle’s commitment to the Village, which is where he meant to go when he left Texas as a teen, though it took a while for him to make it:
Earle turns out to be a historian of the early folk scene in the
Village. (He and his wife are planning to publish a walking tour.) He
has read everything written about the era, and can tell you the address
of Izzy Young’s Folklore Center on MacDougal (No. 110; it’s now a nail
salon) and the location of Gerdes Folk City (corner of West Fourth and
Mercer), where Dylan played his first big gig. “This is where they
invented what I do,” he said. “And it happened only because there were
these three groups—the folksingers, the musicologists, and the
writers—who happened to be living in this several-block radius. If that
scene doesn’t happen, then rock and roll never becomes literature. It
just stays pop.”
In "Tennessee Blues," the first song on his terrific new record, Washington Square Serenade, Earle puts all that in the past. "Sunset in my mirror," he sings, "Pedal on the floor/Bound for New York City/Won’t be back no more/no, won’t be back no more/goodby guitar town."
But it’s the second song that ought to appeal to enviros. Powered by a bodacious guitar lick, he evokes a hawk’s life, soaring high over Manhattan, pitiless and proud:
Pale male, he’s cool see,
because he knows his breakfast ain’t going nowhere
so he does a loop to loop for the tourists
and the six o’clock news,
got himself a penthouse view from the tip-top of the food chain, boys, all up and down Fifth Avenue —
and he says "God, I love this town…"
Great song, folks, really and truly. Before this record, to tell the truth, I liked a couple of Earle songs ("Transcendental Blues") but mostly found him grating. This one has changed my mind. Check it out:
Download 02_down_here_below.mp3
Kit Stolz 