Steve Earle – Photo credit: (c) Rick Landers 2022
At fourteen years old, Steve Earle left school to find Townes Van Zandt, his Holy Grail. What kind of kid does this kind of thing? A good guess is, a romantic who hears a lyrical phrase or a melody that reaches down, gets embedded and rattles one’s bones.
Or maybe it’s the full-blooded carriers of such tunes, many or whom embodied the gnarly roots of American music that captured the kid’s imagination.
Townes, of course, was special, and rocker, balladeer and troubadour Steve Earle finally met him and hung out with him, as well his musical cohorts like Jerry Jeff Walker, Guy Clark, Willie Nelson and other now legends who created original songs that feel like some gold gifted to us all.
Today, Steve has earned his own iconic status, not only by writing his own songs and performing to thousands, but by deep digging into the roots of more contemporary music, studying the wherefore and why of the musical traditions of songs and styles ingrained in and beyond American shores.
Like generations before him, his own journey is part of both a land mass of musical traditions, and a migration of hard tack songs for future generations.
A couple of nights before, I watched and listened as he rolled out song after song of his own, as well as songs of his heroes, long gone. And, his presentations of their songs wasn’t filler for his own, it felt like he was honoring them; and it felt even more like loyalty to old friends, than fuel for his gig. Cool, well-known songs like: “Lungs,” “Pancho and Lefty,” “Mr. Bojangles,” and more, wafted throughout the now legendary Birchmere in Alexandria, Virginia.
“I’m just trying to stay out of trouble,” says Earle with a laugh. “If I stay busy, then I’m OK.” – Steve Earle
Steve Earle’s recent release, Jerry Jeff
Earle’s life has had its ups and downs, and it’s self-evident that he’s had to dig himself up after digging himself down. Still, starting from ground zero and rebuilding one’s self, one’s career, one’s life takes some of that true grit many only hear about. As Steve suggests, his stories have been told elsewhere and we’re here, in the here and now to talk about this working man where he’s now planted.
With twenty-two albums notched on his belt, Steve Earle has gifted us with song after song, like his cool growly, “Copperhead Road,” a song loved in juke joints and large venues around the world, the crowd favorite, “Guitar Town,” as well as those on his latest release, Jerry Jeff, an album of choice songs by the great Jerry Jeff Walker. including “Getting By,” and, of course, “Mr. Bojangles.”
Steve’s more recent projects include his Sirius XM’s The Steve Earle Show: Hardcore Troubadour Radio, a couple of books and his second play. As the pandemic rolled through our country, he hosted Steve Earle’s Guitar Town, a YouTube series about his 200-plus guitar collection.
In our Zoomed conversation while he was on the road, I pulled out a couple of old guitars of mine to set up some time to talk about his love of guitars, and when I showed him my black ’31 Gibson L-00, it didn’t surprise me that he knew the model and owns one, one more rare than mine made in the ’30s with an elevated or ‘Torres” fretboard. Good thing we weren’t huddled in his shed of guitars going over his collection noting key details, otherwise we would have ended up as skeleton remains, surrounded by his vintage axes.
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Rick Landers: Great concert last night at The Birchmere, and The Whitmore Sisters were terrific, and you guys were terrific. Your band, The Dukes, was spot on.
Steve Earle: Yeah.
Rick: What I liked was, you’ve got this growl to your voice, and I see that you’ve got a lot of shows, and you’re doing sometimes consecutive shows one night, one the next. I’m wondering, how do you manage to do that without ripping out your vocal chords? Do they get raw?
Steve Earle: When I have trouble with my voice, I have some COPD, which is in pretty good shape these days. So I quit smoking, I guess 17, 16 years ago, something like that. But, the way I sing, I don’t know. It just doesn’t, my voice is like that. I don’t have much voice trouble. We do four, sometimes five shows in a row.
Rick: Do you? Wow.
Steve Earle: The way I sing. I guess it’s just not that demanding.
(Ed: Steve’s connection is glitchy, so he moves from his tour bus to his hotel room.)
Steve Earle at The Birchmere – Photo credit: (c) Rick Landers 2022
Rick: Oh, while you’re walking, I should show you some guitars.
Steve Earle: Yeah, well, yeah. I don’t have much out here. I don’t carry vintage stuff on the road. I’ve got a lot of guitars.
Rick: Yeah. I’ve heard you’ve got more than a few. I’ve probably got 15.
Steve Earle: Yeah, I’ve got more like 215. I’m a pretty serious collector. It’s just where I put money, whenever I manage to make it, and I had to start all over again at one point, but it’s something I understand and I love them, so yeah, that’s what I do. I put money into that, instead of something that I don’t even quite understand.
Rick: Let’s go back to the idea of your voice and how do you keep it in shape night after night of playing? And I heard part of that, but I didn’t hear a lot of it.
Steve Earle: I don’t do anything. I don’t have a lot of trouble with my voice the way that I sing. Usually when I have trouble it’s because of, I don’t have allergies per se, but I have COPD, and when the pollen’s really heavy. I don’t make records in May anymore, for instance. I learned not to do that, because the pollen’s so heavy that it’s going to affect, my chest closes.
My voice is more chest voice than it sounds like. So, if I have any trouble, it’s because my chest is closed up due to what they call environmental allergies. I’m not allergic to anything. It’s not really hay fever. I just am sensitive to some kinds of pollen and dust and stuff in the air. So that can affect my voice some, but I started practicing yoga about, I don’t know, seven years ago now, something like that. And it’s a daily Ashtanga practice, and it’s helped my breathing a lot. So I’m singing better, I think, than I ever have.
Rick: Yeah, you sounded great last night. Just terrific, as did everybody. I see you’re headed up to Winnipeg at the end of the U.S. leg of this tour to the Burton Cummings venue.
Steve Earle: Yeah, that’s been the gig. I played that theater before it was called Burton Cummings. Yeah, we’ve been across the border twice already. We’ve already played the Calgary Stampede, and then we went across, came back in the States for a few gigs and then we went back across and played a big casino called Rama. It’s in Orillia, Ontario, the closest town, which is actually where Gordon Lightfoot was born, but this next trip, we’ll go back across, and we’ll go from Winnipeg west, and then exit the country at Vancouver and come down to the west coast of the United States.
Rick: It’s pretty over there. So, do you find the audiences maybe distinctively different or any different than American audiences?
Steve Earle: I’ve always done better in Canada than I did any place else. So, they’re different in that respect. The only place I ever played arenas was Canada.
Rick: Oh, really?
Steve Earle: Yeah. In the ’80’s, but I think they’re very singer-songwriter oriented there. I think they’ve always have been. And I think that’s one of the reasons I did as well as I did there. They like songs. The part of it that’s not French is as much Scots and Irish as it is more than it is English, when it gets right down to it. And I think that oral tradition and that tradition of songs and storytelling is pretty intense in that culture, and it is on the French side too, but just in a different language, so that’s not really my audience there.
Steve Earle: Absolutely. Gaelic and then also Eastern European, which everybody forgets about, because it was all about mining. So, when they discovered coal in those mountains, they imported the coal industry over from England, which meant the skilled workers, the so-called skilled miners were English, the engineers and stuff, but the laborers were Cornish and Welsh and Irish. And that’s the first wave, and then other miners from other parts of Europe started coming.
There used to be a pretty good Kosher deli in Knoxville, Tennessee, and one in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, that were owned by brothers because of that, but yeah, that’s the reason that that Irish and Scottish thing is in the music and that part of the world, which I was exposed to to some extent growing up in Texas. My mom was born in Tennessee, and we used to go visit her grandmother. So I went to the Grand Ole Opry the first time when I was seven.
And I guess that’s what stuck with me the most out of that trip. And it’s always been in what I do. That’s why “Copperhead Road” started with that idea of the bagpipe at the front of “Copperhead Road” was, there’s always a groaning in almost always in what I do anyway, and I was just trying to come up with that.
It was just a way to set that story up that the idea was isolation, and bagpipes are an interesting sound, because the Irish say, the joke in Ireland is that the Irish gave the Scottish bagpipes as a joke and they took it seriously, because they’re the same people and they’re two migrations of Celts into that part of the world, one earlier and one later and the Irish came, the Celts, whoever they were, came to Ireland first and then over the top of that island and settled in Scotland. The Cornish and the Welsh came much later.
It’s a different language group and a different migration of Celts, and they don’t know who the Celts were or where they came from. The bloodlines are largely Scandinavian, because those people conquered everywhere in Ireland, except Galway in the west coast. It has a separate history mainly because of primitive sailing, that the boats took you where they could take you. So Galway’s a Norman town rather than a Viking town. The only city in Ireland that is, so it has a different history and different culture.
Rick: Did you do a lot of research on mining, because you did the song about mining and you learned about the Irish coming over? Is that where you got that?
Steve Earle: No. I’ve known that stuff for a long time, and I’ve written other stuff about mining. I made a record called, The Mountain, which was a bluegrass record years ago and it has two songs, “The Mountain” and “Harlan Man” that are just a little suite that are the same character years apart in his life talking to you in two different songs.
But, I just made a whole record that was largely about coal mining. My last record of original material was called, Ghosts of West Virginia, and that song that you’re probably talking about, that you heard, that happened 12 years ago, and that happened because of a play that some friends of mine wrote, and they asked me to do music for it. That’s how I found out about that situation.
Well, I heard about it when it happened, but that’s how I got connected to it. I do a lot of research on everything that I do, but I know a lot of that explosion in West Virginia. I have developed a relationship with some of those people. All of us involved, in there was a play called Coal Country that was up at the Public Theater. COVID closed it down. We went back up at Cherry Lane with the Public producing, and that closed right before this tour started.
Steve Earle: That’s interesting.
Rick: It’s called Dawson. It’s a ghost town now.
Steve Earle: I know where it is. I know exactly where it is.
Rick: I’m going to play to 100 and then 500 people in September and I’m going to play at the grave of the only Scottish guy there. I wrote that song after I took a camp with John McCutcheon. About six months later, I wrote it, not thinking of John, other than I wanted to write a folk song. And then I found out the only Scottish guy who died was named McCutcheon.
Steve Earle: Huh. That’s interesting. Yeah.
Rick: Its kind of strange. So do you know Burton Cummings?
Steve Earle: No. Never met him.
Rick: Neil Young or Joni Mitchell?
Steve Earle: I know Neil Young. I’ve met Joni Mitchell. I rode in a van with her once at a festival. That’s the only time I met Joni Mitchell. I’ve known Neil Young for a long time. I know Lightfoot really well.
Rick: My wife saw him last night. We had to split up. So, she went to see Gordon, and I went to see you.
Steve Earle: Oh, cool. Where was Lightfoot?
Rick: He was up in Frederick, Maryland.
Steve Earle: Oh, cool.
Rick: The Whitmore Sisters, how did you meet them?
Steve Earle: I’ve known them for a while. Eleanor has been the fiddle player in my band for 12 years. Her and her husband, Chris Masterson. They make records as The Mastersons, as well, and I’ve known Bonnie about the same amount of time, a little less time than I’ve known them, but they just happened to make a record.
This past year they decided that’s what they were going to do. Normally, The Mastersons open my shows, but the Whitmores had made a record, and so we gave up our junk bunk and Bonnie’s on the tour, and so the Whitmores are opening.
Rick: They were terrific. Their harmonies reminded me, the closeness, the tightness of their harmonies remind me of the Everly Brothers and some of the Beach Boys harmonies.
Steve Earle: Well, that’s what happens with people that are related sing together.
Rick: Yeah. Or the Bee Gees. Same thing.
Steve Earle: Yep, yep.
Rick: Well, let’s talk a little bit about guitars. So, you’re not an accumulator, because I’m sure you’ve heard that some people accumulate and some people collect, and it sounds like you’re a collector and you dig in, and you research, right?
Steve Earle – Photo credit: (c) Rick Landers 2022
Steve Earle: Yeah. One time I might have been bordering on being the accumulator. I didn’t really mean to be, but I bought some stuff that I probably wouldn’t buy now. I pick and choose it a little bit more. I learned a lot. The first several years I was in New York, first five years, I lived right behind Matt Umanov’s shop.
I’ve known George Gruhn since I was 19. So when I got to Nashville and I just learned a lot about it over the years, and I collect both acoustic and electric guitars, but more acoustics, more Martins than anything else. I’m pretty close to a complete collection of Gibson acoustics. There’s only a few things I don’t have.
And I’ve got an embarrassingly good collection of archtops for somebody that really doesn’t deserve to have them, because I’ve got the last New Yorker special that Jimmy D’Aquisto built.
Rick: Oh, do you?
Steve Earle: I’ve got a D’Angelico that Steve Gilchrist restored and it’s incredible. It’s an Excel, from the Thirties. Non-cutaways are the old man’s best guitars. I think pretty much everybody agrees with that, but I’ve got one of Gilchrist’s 16-inch archtops, and I’ve got an L-5. It’s a transitional L-5. Its got bar markers. Gibson has that order number thing and serial number thing. It’s probably a guitar that was built in ’35 and sold in ’36, because it’s a 16-inch L-5, which isn’t supposed to exist in ’36, but the serial number is a 1936 serial number. So, it’s one of those confusing Gibson things that happens.
Rick: Yeah. That’s not uncommon. I’ll show you a little guitar. You might have one, it’s a 1931 L-00? [Rick grabs his guitar and shows it too Steve.]
Steve Earle: I have an L-00. Mine’s a ’33, because I’ve got one of the ones, the only year they had the elevated fretboard.
Rick: Oh, yeah. This is a 12 frets to the body.
Steve Earle: Yeah. Mine’s a’33 with an elevated fret board. Yeah. Yeah. Elevated fret board only happens one year, and I think Tom Crandall figured out why. Tom Crandall, who has TR Crandall in New York.
He’s an archtop guy. He’s actually building some L-5’s right now, and I’m going to get one just to have another guitar that he built. I own one guitar he built, but he’s the best repair guy in the business, as far as I’m concerned.
I’ve had this L-00 for a while, and it has the raised fretboard, and they only happened that one year. And then he figured out that, we’re both fans of L-10s, which is supposed to be the poor man’s L-5. I have a really good one that used to belong to Tom.
The best one I’ve ever played belonged to George Gruhn. He’s had it for since the ’70’s, and he’s never turned loose of it. And Steve Gilchrist bases his archtops on that L-10. That’s what made him want to build it, and he won’t build anything, but the 16-inch archtop. He won’t build the 17-inch guitar, because he doesn’t like them.
But, jazz guys want 17-inch guitars for the most part now. The elevated fretboard probably came about, and this holds up, I think, because they’re L-10 necks that they were lying around. They had partial L-10s and no orders for L-10s, and so they just re-purposed a bunch of necks or studied L-10s that were being built and built L-00s, and used those necks and adapted them for them. That makes sense, because it’s the way Gibson did things. No doubt about it.
Rick: Yeah. Even the early 1952 Les Pauls, they used really good archtop wood on the tops. I had one, and somebody had taken the finish off, and the top wood was gorgeous, rippled.
Steve Earle: Yeah. And later, the Bursts had that kind of wood later, and they didn’t last very long. That’s the reason they’re so valuable. I’ve got a ’50, as early as a Humbucking Les Paul gets. I’ve got a ’57, no stickers, no Patent Applied For, but no stickers on either pickup. Double white…
Rick: Yeah. My ’52’s P-90s were probably the most monstrous pickups I’d ever had on a guitar. But, it had that weird bridge and I was like, “Eh, can’t play this.” But here’s here’s one more. [Rick shows Steve an old Gibson] It was built in 1949. It’s a 1950 CF-100, but it was made in 1949.
Steve Earle: I’ve got a ’51 that’s probably, it’s the best one I’ve ever played. It’s really good.
Rick: This belonged to a family until I bought it about six or seven months ago. And it’s from a Emmett Lundy. If you ever heard of Emmett Lundy, who won of the first gold coin at Galax for fiddling. His family won some gold medals. On the back of the neck it’s etched From: Dad to Joy Lundy (1949).
Steve Earle: Right. Cool.
Steve Earle: Yeah, they can be good. They usually fall apart. They sound great, when you find one that’s intact, but they quit making them because when they put the cutaway in, it weakened the design and the adaptation they made. So you get them a lot, and they’re pretty much basket cases, but I’ve got a good one.
Rick: So let’s move on a little bit to your albums with about Townes Van Zandt, and your new one, Jerry Jeff. What was it like for when you first met Townes? Was he playing somewhere, because I understand that you went to meet him when you were 14, but you didn’t meet him till later. So how did that…
Steve Earle: I met him at the Old Quarter in Houston. It’s a pretty famous story. He was heckling me, and you can find that on-line…I was stalking him around. I was following him around, and we finally met, and for some reason, didn’t run me off. Because I knew him when I got to Nashville, they gave me an automatic introduction to Guy Clark.
I was in the same room with Jerry Jeff [Walker], but never really met him before I left Texas. But, then once I knew Guy, when Jerry Jeff came through, that gave me an introduction to Jerry Jeff. So, they were my three original guys. So, that was Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, Jerry Jeff Walker. And that’s why I made those three records.
Steve Earle: I was following Townes around. The first time I saw Townes, other than on stage was at Jerry Jeff’s birthday party, which I crashed. I wasn’t even supposed to be there. And he walked in and started a dice game and lost a jacket that Jerry Jeff had given him for his birthday, because their birthdays are about a week apart. And he lost every time he had on that jacket, and I thought, “My hero.” and I followed him around for a couple years before I went to Nashville.
Rick: Yeah. So what are your lasting impressions of him? When you think about him, is there something that pops up in your mind, like a nice guy or just a great singer-songwriter?
Steve Earle: There’s been a lot of stuff written about Townes, and I don’t want to even want to get into it. I knew him pretty well, and I named my firstborn son after him. He could be his own worst enemy, but he was a great songwriter. He was one of the best songwriters that ever lived, and that’s the way I want to remember him, and that’s the way I want to talk about him.
Rick: I understand. I guess there’s a lot of people who don’t know these stories and so…
Steve Earle: Well, I know, but somebody else will tell you those stories, whether they were there or not. There’s lots of people that tell those stories, and they weren’t even there. So, you can find one of those people.
Rick: Yeah. I just read a book about him, so I’m familiar, but a lot of readers may not be.
Steve Earle: Exactly.
Rick: Do you have any favorite songs that you like to sing of theirs? I know you did…
Steve Earle: Townes? I did a whole record of Townes’ records. I don’t know. I did “Mr. Mudd and Mr. Gold”. One of the ones that I go back to, there’s a song called,”Lungs”. I’ve done a lot of Townes’. I do “Pancho and Lefty” still. As obvious as that is, they’re not the obvious. I just did it at Willie Nelson’s birthday party. Guy, there’s a lot of his songs that I like. Probably “LA Freeway”, “Old Time Feeling” and “The Last Gunfighter Ballad”. I’m one of the few people that covers that. And Jerry Jeff, there’s lots of stuff. I’m getting to sing “Mr. Bojangles” again, as obvious as that is, I played that song the first time when I was 14 years old in a play in high school. So, now I get to sing it again. That’s the best thing about this project.
Rick: Yeah. That’s cool. I’m recording an album with Les Thompson, if you know Les, he’s a co-founder of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. He lives not too far from here. Nice guy. So, I sent him a short video of you doing “Mr. Bojangles”, and so I guess I’ll hear back from him.
Steve Earle: Cool.
Steve Earle: No. I’m doing music for, I’m writing a musical of Tender Mercies, which is a movie that was out in the ’80’s that, Robert Duvall was in. Horton Foote wrote the screenplay, and his daughter Daisy and I are writing a musical of Tender Mercies.
Rick: Yeah. I think Craig Bickhardt did some songs for that original movie. So there’s another one coming up?
Steve Earle: No, all the songs that were in the movie, Robert Duvall wrote.
Rick: Did he really? Huh? I didn’t know that.
Steve Earle: Yeah, Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
[Ed Note: Steve’s correct, two of Craig Bickhardt’s songs are on the soundtrack album, although not in the movie.]
Steve Earle: Oh, I think he was a better finger picker than I am, and I’m not bad, but he was really, really good at it. And he sorted me out on a couple of Mance Lipscomb songs that I’d been trying to play, and I’d been approaching them wrong. And he, for some reason, caught the wave on them, and so I learned how to play them correctly from him.
Rick: What about your other kids? What have you learned from them? I’m just thinking of you as a father, what have you learned not only in the music arena, but about life in general?
Steve Earle: Well, we were parents, like one of those things. When people have kids and they think it’s going to complete them, I’m like, “No, no, no, that’s not what it does. What it does is, it tears out a piece of your heart, and it releases it into the universe and it goes out there and it breaks it every chance it gets.” And that’s the best case scenario. That’s something, like what happened to Justin doesn’t happen. So, you learn everything. It’s pretty universal what you learn from being a parent, and I have learned that I can’t parent adults, and, that’s probably the most valuable thing I’ve learned from having kids and having them over a period of decades, because I’ve still got a 12-year-old, and he has autism. So, I’m a full-time single dad nine months of the year.
Rick: Okay. Let’s move into lyrics. As a songwriter, when you’re writing lyrics, you find that there’s the epiphany when you come up with a lyric that you would go, “That’s a great lyric,” and you know it’s a great lyric? How do you compare that to being on stage and actually singing those lyrics? There’s got to be some different emotional feelings while you’re doing either one.
Steve Earle: Oh, you just try not to check out and think about baseball or something like singing them when you sing songs. And if I catch myself not being present, I try to correct that, and I’ve gotten to be more into that since I started doing a little bit of acting, which didn’t happen until relatively recently, the last 15 years, 16 years. But no, it’s a little longer, it’s about 20 years, but I think I’m a way more present performer in my day job than I was since I did a little bit of acting. I just learned that from actors. I paint, and I’m really bad at it, but I do it. And I write. I’ve written a couple of books and I occasionally write nonfiction pieces.
I know what I was put here to do, which is write songs, and that all just informs that’s my home base thing that I do. So just writing, I write every day, pretty much. I try to write, when I wake up in the morning, I try to work on something, and I’ll have two or three things going.
I’ve got a book going right now. I’ve got songs for Tender Mercies going. I’ve got a lyric that I’ve been struggling to get finished, just because it’s a little harder. I’m beat, because I’m out here, I’m on the road, I’m playing six shows a week, but I do write as much as I can.
Steve Earle – Photo credit: (c) Rick Landers 2022.
Rick: Yeah. Couple of songs that you did last night, I wasn’t really expecting. They were almost grunge, and I can’t remember the name of the songs, but it’s near the end of your performance. they were really heavy hitting songs that weren’t like country songs. What were those songs?
Steve Earle: You haven’t heard a lot of my records, obviously.
Rick: No, I have not. I have not.
Steve Earle: Yeah. So I was played on country radio for about 30 seconds in the ’80’s, and I had the number one country album, but my first two albums were marketed as country albums, but my third album, it was Copperhead Road, that was marketed as a rock record.
But, a lot of people thought it was too country, so it didn’t get universally played. Then I had to start all over again, because of my own stuff in the mid-’90’s. And from that point on, I essentially made what I thought were rock records for the most part, but they still turned out pretty country too.
I’ve never worried about those things, country and rock and folk. I see myself as a songwriter, and I made a bluegrass record and I made it with the Del McCoury Band. I made a blues record, because that’s always been in what I do because I’m from Texas, and I saw Mance Lipscomb and Lightnin’ Hopkins in the same room at the same time on more than one occasion.
I’ve known Billy Gibbons since I was a teenager. So, I just try to find a different way to write new songs, and sometimes that means getting outside of what I normally do, but I had a ridiculously loud four-piece adult rock band for a lot of the ’90’s, and I just drifted back towards having a steel player and having a fiddle player in the last 14 or 15…the steel player, I hadn’t had a steel player in the band since the ’80’s until a record called, “So You Want to be an Outlaw” that I made. I guess it’s six years ago, something like that now, and that’s when Ricky came along. Eleanor’s been in the band for 12 years, so fiddle’s been there that long, and it’s great because I can do this stuff. I can do the bluegrass stuff. This band [The Dukes] can do anything I’ve ever recorded.
Rick: Yeah. They’re like your own Wrecking Crew.
Steve Earle: Yeah. They can do anything. Literally.
Rick: They were pretty amazing. That’s pretty much what I got for our time here. I want thank you and Paige (publicist) and must say you’ve got a really good support group, as well as a great band, you’re a blessed man.
Steve Earle: Okay, cool. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thanks a lot.
