Lonesome Dove

Rip It Up, Issue 137, 1 December 1988, Page 16

Lonesome Dove

STEVE EARLE'S NASHVILLE SKYLINE

"Ring Steve Earle," said the message. "Area code 615..." That number has a romantic ring to it, like cruising Sunset or taking the A train.

Area code 615 is the prefix for Nashville, immortalised when the town's top session plaers used it as a band name. Nashville is the Mecca of country music, with many of the best— and worst — musicians

feeling the romantic pull of "Music City USA." Among them are Steve Earle, battling the country

establishment with songs that owe as much to Springsteen and

Mellencamp as Hank and Lefty. One of the young turks of new country, Earle has the longesttrack record. Like a character out of

Robert Altman's patronising parody Nashville, he was drawn to the

town as an aspirant songwriter in his teens. But instead of falling in with the

purveyors of countrypolitan schlock, he hung out with the 70s' most respected songwriters, fellow Texans Guy Clark and Townes. Van Zandt. "I'm more of the last of that wave

than a newcomer," he told RIU last year. "I was the kid of that group, but I must have been passed out or drunk when they handed out the record deals!"- ••\

Now 34, since the mid-BOs Earle has been making up for lost time.

Since his 1986 debut Guitar Town, Earle has pushed his music further than his conservative

contemporaries Randy Travis and DwighfYoakam. Earle's latest album Copperhead Road, ranges from

stadium rock to traditional bluegrass, even incorporating some Celtic folk with the assistance of the Pogues. Earle's aiming his country-influenced sound at the rock audience, a decision emphasised by hisshiftfrom MCA Nashville to its subsidiary in New York. "This record would have stayed the same if I'd stayed with

MCA Nashville," he explains, "Uni's designed to be a more edgier rock • label than MCA, whose forte is stuff like Tiffany. "I knew I was going to have to crack rock radio. You gotta get ' played on the radio somewhere, . that's the whole deal. You're

constantly trying to balance marketing and politics against art. You have to find a way to come up with money to make the record, but the deal with me is, not to let people with the money dictate to me musically."

Earle says the title track, with its' bagpipes and mandolin, is the core of the album, and the most representative of his current sound. "I feel people who don't listen to country music aren't going to be put off by it. Butin lots of ways Copperhead Road has the most

traditional things I've ever done. If you took bluegrass instrumentals you

could make a real straight hillbilly record out of it."

real concern that all the kids wanted to do was play electric guitar and keyboards. San Antonio is a big

Despite the big rock punch of many of the tracks, Copperhead Road reflects Earle's passion for

heavy metal town, most of the Chicano kids are into heavy metal, and people were worried that the baja sesto and the accordion were going to die. But Los Lobos made it hip again. By the same token Terry Woods was getting calls from kids in Dublin wanting cittern lessons. "I'm farfrom being totally purist about it, that can be just as damaging. To me the best way to preserve the old instruments is to find out what their limits are and combine them with newer forms." Earle is no Luddite when it comes to technology. "I believe in digital recording, I use Midi stuff on my

traditional music. His fascination for the way Celtic music developed into' country led to his enlisting the Pogues to play on a couple of tracks. "The Pogues are real important for the same reason Los Lobos are

important. Both David Hidalgo and Terry Woods have expressed the same thing to me —the kids are getting interested in traditional

instruments again. Tm from San Antonio where Los Lobos' brand of Mexican music

comes from — it's more from South Texas than California. There was a

records, and the Fairlight 3 on

'Copperhead Road.' People

shouldn't be afraid of the new

technology. You con preserve old instruments and old forms, and should, but at the same time you have to look to the future."

Nashville has always suffered from the conservatism of the country music establishment—which is why the young bucks of the 80s made such an impact— but when it comes to digital recording, "Nashville's way ahead of New York and LA," says Earle. "I produced the Bible in London, produced Charlie Sexton and got chance to record in LA And I saw a lot of things went wrong with what they do, things I'd rather do as we do in Nashville. We cut the Bible live, and in England now you set up a drum kit in the studio and hell, people think you're cutting SgtPepperor something. The majority of engineers considered to be hot over there can't even record a sound out of the air anymore, it's all Midi. "But at the same time, we need to open up to things around here. We were all under the impression that we would change things more than we have. A lot of young turks in Nashville were just about dislocating their shoulders patting themselves on the back about how much we'd changed things in such a short time. "But then the dust settled and the guy who came out on top of the three of us—Randy Travis, Dwight Yoakamand me —was Randy. He's the one that went platinum. He was the mainstream, doing the most conventional music. We changed

things a little, which is good — but now it's time to go back to work."

When Earle first arrived in Nashville in the mid 70s, he was fortunate to mix with and learn from two of country's finest contemporary songwriters, Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt. Earle played bass in Clark's band and sang backing vocals on his classic Old No 7. Clark, who tours New Zealand in February, introduced Earle to Van Zandt, who ►

► visited here in October:

'What I do is closer to what Guy does. It's a form of journalism almost — short story songs. There's nobody better at it than Guy Clark, so I drew very heavily from his writing style, the conversational aspects. He's real good at writing people talking.

"Townes, especially his best stuff, is more along the lines of pure poetry. I'm very fond of saying Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the world, and I still think no-one has evertouched Townes at his best. I think poetry and imagery are a purer form of writing than narrative. Most of

what I do is narrative. "I'm best at songs like 'GuitarTown' and 'Copperhead Road,' but the songs I'm proudest of are 'Fearless Heart' and 'My Old Friend The Blues.' They come harder and take a long time to write. Townes went through a period of about 10 years when he just

lived in that zone. He cranked out some incredible stuff, he got down to the deepest darkest corners of himself and managed to get it all out on paper somehow. I still don't know howhe did it. To me it's still one of the most fascinating bodies of work." But one of the tragedies of the Nashville system is that the best songs don't get covered by the best singers. George Jones and, it seems Randy Travis, are just two great singers who have squandered their voices singing lousy material. "There's no doubt about that. George Jones to me was always a shame. You've got to understand how Billy Sherrill works [Sherrill is the foremost Nashville producer, who has "guided" the careers of Jones and Tammy Wynette. He also produced Elvis Costello's Almost Blue — under duress]. It's been hard for George to make a good album because Billy Sherrill is not a producer of albums. He'll have one song —usually something he's co-written—that he's prepared, and already decided will be a single. He'd stay there for three days if he had to, to get it right. And for everything else, he won't even go into the studio. He'd have speakers up in his office, and the engineer would cut the rest on his own. That's the way things were done in Nashville foryears—buddies cutting buddies'songs. "Those are the things I fought so hard against. So artists can make albums that are worth buying. Not a piece of plastic with two singles and a bunch of filler, and wonder why people don't wantto spend their hard earned money on your record." But even Randy Travis is falling into that trap... "It's inevitable if you work within that system. I think George Strait is an even bigger waste. The way he makes records, the business dictates — but he doesn't have to do it that way. Country albums don't sell that much, so an artist very rarely gets rich from selling records. So what they make money from is doing shows. It

goes back to the old mentality of keeping them on the road for 200 nights a year. "So they can't be very involved in preparing to record an album. The way George Strait makes records is, [producer] Jimmy Bowen chooses the material and screens the songs. George has approval but it's all done overthe telephone. He's there when they cut the basic tracks and the final vocals, then he goes out on the road. So he's not very involved. Reba Mclntire records this way, most of these acts. Because they have to go out there and work so much." When Earle took the summer off to write songs, Nashville rumours thought something was wrong—summer being the most lucrative period to tour. "We've always approached it more the way rock acts do, which is to take a lot of time. I think Nashville's beginning to realise that when you get into record stores, you are competing with Bruce Springsteen. We have to consistently produce IPs of substance, so people can put it on the turntable or in the carand listen to the whole thing. If you make them wear the fast foward out on their cassette players, then you're notgoing to sell many records. "There are a lot of political reasons why it happens that way here in town. The publishers here are very powerful, and a sort of good ole boy system existed here of everyone recording everyone's songs, and a huge amount of money is made in publishing. There are 2,400 country radio stations in the U.S., so you can make a lot of money and never sell a record if you have publishing." Atone point, says Earle, every head of a record label in Nashville owned a publishing company on the side—so the songs they owned were recorded. "That has changed quite a bit because people started to blow the whistle on 'em. That started the mentality of touring so heavily, and that this is a singles and songs town ratherthan an album town.

We're going through growing pains

right now. We've got to make LPs here or we won't survive." .* y Earle is no stranger to discussing politics. Songs such as 'And The Rains Came Down' (about the plight of the U.S.farmer) and, on the new album, 'Snake Oil' (about the Reagan years) are bitter tales of economic injustice. What was his response to the ¥ ’; \■" election of George Bush to the /. j; 1 . presidency? - ‘ "That's a sore spot," he says. "Bush scares me. I'm a little bit in shock. I didn't think it could be botched bad enough for George Bush to get • j elected. I spend a lot of time being mad at people, but right now I'm mad at Dukakis, because I think he dropped the ball. They screwed it up. "I think George Bush is dangerous. You're not dealing with Ronald Reagan, who was a figurehead with other people in control of the situation. Which was always scary, because we didn't have a clear picture of who they were. ■ [Slowly] "George Bush used to be the director of the CIA. He's determined to prove that he's not a wimp, because he's been called that publicly, and he scares me to death." When RlU spoke to Earle, he was about to leave for England to start a ■ nine-monthworldtourthatwill, c . eventually come to New Zealand. Then he'll return to Nashville, where his two sons live, and he likes to "hunt and fish and mess around with cars"—and "nickle and dime" his way to the next record. A distraction, though, is the novel he's writing at the behest of his girlfriend to "exorcise some demons." ■ "Itstarted as a shortstory called Wheeler Country'about a guy ■ hitchhiking in West Texas in the late 70s. He gets picked up by police for hiking on the interstate. He pays his fine and works around town to get some cash, and ends up staying for 10 years. The story finishes with him back on the highway, trying to remember how hitch-hiking goes and where 10 years went."

CHRIS BOURKE