by Monte Dutton
I think Earle is the most talented and intriguing performer on the American stage, and I respect him as much for his guts as his talent. My admiration is only amplified by his controversial song "John Walker Blues," about the so-called American Taliban, John Walker Lindh. First of all, it's a great song; in it Earle delved into what might make a kid from an upper-middle-class Bay Area background wind up being a radical Muslim fundamentalist. It's similar to the way he got inside the mind of a murderer in his song "Billy Austin." The notion that our troops are "defending freedom" is undermined by having controversial views suppressed on the home front. Freedom is antithetical to a society in which the political views of Steve Earle—or Toby Keith, for that matter—can be shouted down. As Earle frequently says at his concerts, his definition of patriotism apparently differs from that of his detractors.
"Some people say I'm paranoid," he'd said from the stage that night. "I can't say for sure that y'all are being watched, but I know for damn sure that I am."
Earle is often quoted for his remark that he would go to Bob Dylan's home, stand up on his coffee table, and tell Dylan that the late Townes Van Zandt was a greater songwriter. Given the opportunity, I might make the same claim on Earle's behalf, which, by the way, isn't meant to be disrespectful to Dylan.
Steve Earle is a difficult man to categorize, which means that he falls between the musical cracks to land in the realm of Americana. His songs run the gamut from country, blue-grass, rock, and folk to the blues. I think he's brilliant, but what do I know? As with most everyone else I like, mainstream radio remains uninterested.
Earle is passionately opposed to the death penalty, but his concert was free of the political diatribes some of the people around me expected to hear. At one point, however, late in the concert, he said: "This is what I think is really cool about my fans. I know that a lot of you don't agree with me, but I think you do believe that there ought to be a dialogue."
When I was eleven or twelve years old, my father took me to Columbia, South Carolina, to see the "Johnny Cash Show, the touring troupe that included Cash and the Tennessee Three, the Carter Family, Carl Perkins, the Statler Brothers, and Tommy Cash, the singer's brother. It means a lot to me that I saw Cash in his performing prime (it was probably a bit past his songwriting prime), along about the time of the recorded prison concerts at Folsom Prison and San Quentin.
I've seen Earle perhaps a half-dozen times over the years, but for the first time, as he stood on the stage in Charlotte, he reminded me of the Johnny Cash of my youth—not in sound, not in musical style, but in attitude. He had that lean, hungry, and energized look of Cash way back when. I told him this after the concert, and Earle said he had been out of the country when Cash died but that he was looking forward to the tribute concert, then just a few days away, in Nashville at Ryman Auditorium.
What country music has lost is its populist streak. All the songs on mainstream radio now seem to echo the same tedious themes. No one takes any chances. Patriotism becomes big in the music when it becomes big in the country, and, of course, it just so happens that patriotic songs tend to be a reliable way to make money. I'm not saying that all of this music isn't heartfelt; I'm just saying that the timing is awfully convenient.
Yet no one sings about the day-to-day problems of average people. Johnny Cash sang about the life he lived, which was full of highs and lows, triumph and heartbreak. So did Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie, Loretta Lynn, Merle Haggard, the Louvin Brothers, the Carter Family, and dozens of others. Now the singers are cowboys because they happen to wear the boots and hats.
I listen to the old concert albums from Folsom and San Quentin. Can you imagine Garth Brooks playing to an audience of convicts? Can you imagine him sympathizing with their plight?
I'm disturbed about the direction of the country right now, mainly because all the creative decisions seem to be made by people who only have business in mind. It's all so calculated, and that's true, it seems to me, of just about everything. I can see a common thread that runs through everything that af-ffects my life, from newspapers to sports to entertainment to politics to simple day-to-day events.
I think it's a vicious cycle. I think the Founding Fathers would be appalled.
I don't agree with everything Steve Earle has to say either, but I'm getting tired of the notion that he doesn't have the right to say it. I'm getting tired of the notion that some important people don't believe a controversial film account of Ronald Reagan's presidency is fit for public view. I'm getting tired of people who speak into a microphone on talk radio and TV stations across the country, many of them owned by a few huge conglomerates, and refer to "the media" as if they were not a part of it.
It seems to me that's what the knob on the radio or television set—ok, the remote control—is there for. This isn't about ideology. This is about freedom.
"Reckless Kelly" was Ned Kelly, the ill-fated Australian bandit whom Mick Jagger once played in a mostly forgettable movie.
Reckless Kelly is also the name of an Austin, Texas, band, although the Rolling Stones's Jagger really had nothing to do with it.
"We heard the name in school," recalls Cody Braun. "Willy [my brother and band mate] thought of it one day. We had a gig coming up that weekend, and we needed a name for the band. We found out more about [the bandit] later."
School was in Bend, Oregon, the band's home before moving to Austin and its vibrant musical scene about a decade ago.
"I guess we've played with every band in town," says Cody Braun. "It's great to be able to play with them as friends and people. There's so much music in Austin that has influenced and inspired us."
I'm particularly fond of the CD Under the Table and Above the Sun. With bows to Roy Orbison and Buddy Holly, Reckless Kelly mines the fields of elusive love and unreachable beauty.
"Everybody" strolls down the same street Orbison walked in "Pretty Woman." A lost love is so haunting that it intrudes upon every memory, every scene, every casual encounter.
A newer album has been released since these words were written, 2005's Wicked Twisted Road. It's splendid too.
Willy Braun's voice evokes the splendid style of Buddy Miller. Says Cody, who plays the fiddle and sings harmony: "We've been listening to [Miller] for the last three or four years. We even talked to him about producing a record. Our
schedules haven't worked out yet, but he's somebody we'd like to work with.
"It's so hard to write songs these days with any new sort of substance. There are so many love songs out there. It's difficult to write a love song. Willy [who either wrote or cowrote all twelve songs on the aforementioned CD] does a good job. I guess it's not just a matter anymore of just flat out saying stuff. You have to think about it."
Of his own craft Cody adds: "I guess [playing the fiddle] hasn't really changed much over the years. There are lots of different styles, but I think I've really stuck to the roots with my playing. I try to take the traditional stuff, the old-time styles, and throw it in there where I can. It's nice, in our music, to throw that country stuff in there."
"That country stuff" is etched in the band's background. Cody plays the fiddle, he says, because he got one for Christmas at age seven. Willy got the guitar, and the rest is history. Their father, a musician, enlisted the boys in the family band. They were playing "western music and honky-tonk stuff" from the time they were kids.
What they're playing now, though, has the edge of revolution in it. They're moving the music not away from its roots but sort of parallel to them. It's a sharpened edge on an old blade.
Never was a man so talented and yet, at the same time, so humble.
The great Billy Joe Shaver is now well into his sixties. One of his recent albums, Freedom's Child, is so soulful, so moving, and so personal that, of course, it has no chance at all of being played on mainstream country radio.
Plainly, Shaver is too hot for country radio to handle, and what a shame that is because he speaks with the raw human emotion that used to d
efine the genre. That Shaver is a throwback to Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, the Allman Brothers, and even Elvis is underscored by the fact that each one of them recorded his songs at one time or another.
Now, however, Shaver is mostly alone. In recent years he lost his mother and wife to cancer and his son Eddy, a guitarist of world-class skill, to a drug overdose. That Shaver has figured out a way to come to grips with so much tragedy comes across in the simple tranquility of some of his recent songs.
A Shaver concert is characterized by variety. At regular intervals he allows his band to drift into the background as he sings either a quavering a cappella or accompanies himself only with his downsized acoustic guitar. That voice! Gruff, timeworn, and unapologetically twangy, it, like everything else about him, is too good for radio. Radio can't understand him. Radio doesn't get it.
Here is a man whose religious convictions have been tempered by stern tests of enduring tragedy and the consequences of his own temptations and failings. One gets the impression that the battle between good and evil that lurks within every man has etched and shaped the very character of Shaver, yet with age he has found a certain fleeting serenity, the kind that envelops opposing armies as they wearily observe a lull between skirmishes.
Some songwriters imagine. Shaver reflects on what life has taught him. His songs are about the lessons of life, some learned and some regretfully ignored.
It's not unusual in concerts to see Shaver perform one set composed mainly of songs from recent albums and another dominated by old standards. He wrote almost all the songs on Jennings's finest album, Honky Tonk Heroes (1973). The title track is about the dive Shaver's grandmother ran in Waco, Texas. Freedom's Child includes a song dedicated to the late Johnny Cash, "That's Why the Man in Black Sings the Blues."
Partway through a Charlotte concert several years ago, soon after the release of Freedom's Child, when Shaver sang "Tramp on Your Street," an obviously autobiographical tune, the audience spontaneously rose to give him a standing ovation. Shaver said such a thing had never happened to him before. He descended to his knees several times to acknowledge the simple adulation. Once he sang a song with one knee on the ground and the other supporting the little guitar.
Like many of Shaver's songs, "Wild Cow Gravy" mixes humor with wisdom as he ponders just how he managed to live so long through "all the reckless ramblin' and the crazy stuff I've done."
In my regular job I travel around the country writing about automobile racing. My general unsettledness from living many days and nights on the road probably has a great deal to do with the somewhat random nature of this book. I've tried to include the singers and songwriters whom I consider true to the roots, but I've had to settle, in too many instances, for the interviews I could arrange and the concerts I could see. It's surely not wise to cite all the artists I wish I could have interviewed—undoubtedly, I'll manage to leave important figures out—but here goes anyway. I wish I'd had the chance to profile men like Kinky Friedman, John Prine, Guy Clark, Todd Snider, Rodney Crowell, Ian Tyson, and Ray Benson.
I saw Benson perform with his band, Asleep at the Wheel, at Austin's Broken Spoke, but there wasn't time for an interview. It's tricky to talk to performers before or after their shows. They're concentrating on the upcoming show beforehand and exhausted and itching to get the bus—or van or motor home—on the road afterward.
My deepest regret is the absence of female subjects upon these pages. I tried very hard to interview Kimmie Rhodes, the exceptional Austin vocalist. It was a distinct pleasure to see Lucinda Williams in concert a few years ago in Los Angeles, and I admire her work like I admire Steve Earle's. Robbie Fulks wrote an essay devoted to Williams that is probably more eloquent than anything I could muster. Iris DeMent has a voice even more plaintive, if that's possible, than Williams, and no one stirs my soul like Kelly Willis. Among others I wish I could've interviewed are Caitlin Cary, Tift Merritt, Allison Moorer, Cheryl Wheeler, Alison Krauss, and Shelby Lynne.
