From the heart

Steve Earle's El Corazon has blood on the tracks

by Jim Macnie

Like Keith Richards' infamous skull ring, Steve Earle's tattoos tell you a bit about his existential slant. On the left arm there's a heart split in two by a lightning bolt. You can consider it a testament to fractured love or charged passion -- both work, in Earle's case. The right bicep boasts a logo for his band, the Dukes: an ominous skull-and-crossbones icon tagged "Fear No Evil." It's wise that Earle keeps the message within sight, because iniquity and its offshoots have kept his ass in a sling for the last 10 years.

A big chunk of the last decade found the 43-year-old singer buddying up with woe: scag, rancor, divorce, jail, and dissipation all had a hand in busting apart a career that seemed pretty damn solid back in 1986. And it's not as if the then-popular Earle didn't foresee the calamities around the bend. He gave us all a warning when he sang "My Old Friend the Blues," an ode to perpetual bleakness, on his MCA debut Guitar Town. There was an uncanny depth to the performance that's inescapable to this day, like the tone in George Jones' voice as he shows you around his emotionally trashed home in "The Grand Tour." Earle's relationship with gloom seemed pretty acute -- he knew of what he spoke. Though the album had its chipper moments, anxiety was a common ailment of its characters. "There ain't a lot that you can do in this town," he sang on a tune that deftly illustrated the yearning of many backwater denizens, "just drive out to the lake and then turn back around."

Irresistibly catchy, Guitar Town went gold. Its success helped foster a new catholicism for country. For the next several years, Music Row rubber-stamped a blend of twang, folk and pop found in singer-songwriters such as Mary Chapin Carpenter, Nancy Griffith and Lyle Lovett. But the mature demeanor of prosperity proved antithetical to Earle's punkish sass. One disc after his golden arrival, his yearning morphed into a personal nihilism, and the cheers were quickly muffled. Earle called his followup Exit 0, and its songs were populated by got-nuthin' chumps either duped by hollow promises or wounded by personal foibles. Dread pursues us all from time to time, and everyone handles it differently. As Earle described his pals' discontent, he disclosed quite a bit of his own. Sadly, his search for antidotes included handguns and cookin' spoons. Leaping from George Jones to Axl Rose, he not only bit the hand that fed him, he puked in its lap.

But rock loves its renegades, especially those who live to recount the exact dimensions of the hell through which they've trudged. When Earle's downward spiral came to an end a few years back, his expressiveness was shockingly intact. Now he's back on his feet, wholly sober and reasonably successful. Bad choices may have cost him all his teeth and some career momentum, but the singer has sustained a bit of humor about his travails. On last year's The Songs of Jimmie Rogers: A Tribute, he bomped through "In the Jailhouse Now," the Singing Brakeman's tale of a flagrant roustabout. The chuckles were almost audible. The attitude had a kind of damn-the-torpedoes sparkle that strongly suggested Earle had found a psychic cubbyhole in which to tuck his transgressions. That stance was also promoted by the title track of his first major label comeback disc, I Feel Alright (Warner Bros.). It copped to his troubles -- "I bring you precious contraband/of conquerors and concubines and conjurers from darker times" -- without seeming glib or melodramatically repentant. It underscored how much living he'd done, and the kind of lessons he had learned along the way. To a degree, his good ol' boy rambunctiousness has helped his songs get heard. This eloquent iconoclast understands that his nefarious ways have been somewhat mythologized by fans. The middle-aged singer-songwriter is now as well-known for his renegade nature as his formidable songwriting skills. The last two times I caught him live, lyrical allusions to whiskey being guzzled or guns going off were greeted with full-tilt rowdy delight.

Without question, Earle's time has come: the currently thriving alt.country alliance of rock and hillbilly has designated the singer and his similarly bedeviled forebear Gram Parsons as its patron saints. Every time Son Volt's Jay Farrar sighs or Wilco's Jeff Tweedy growls "awlllrahhht," Earle's influence resounds once more. The paradigm is nothing new. The naturally anthemic songs on Guitar Town and Exit 0 baldly milked sources such as Springsteen and Mellencamp to create a canon of boisterous poignancy. And Earle's howl sure was convincing on nightly spins through the Stones' "Dead Flowers." He wasn't born in a vacuum.

The gnarly side of the Americana vibe still tickles Earle's fancy: he currently heads a label dedicated to the style's growls and purrs. How does a guy go from junkie to entrepreneur? Good question. A fair amount of will power and profound esthetic beliefs have to be in cahoots, that's for sure. Earle's E2 imprint is dedicated to gleefully raunchy y'alternative, just as you'd expect. The roster includes Just Add Ice by the V-roys (the Knoxville band that helped their mentor ignite the flame on "In the Jailhouse Now"), Six String Drag's High Hat, and Cheri Knight's The Northwest Kingdom. Under the name twangtrust (take that, Glimmer Twins!), Earle and Ray Kennedy produced each of the albums. The singer's a shaggy dog and tortured artist, sure, but he's no longer a neer-do-well. Stroll the streets of Nashville and you'll likely catch a glimpse of him barreling by with a lilt to his step, on his way to a mixing session or an artist powwow. Walking on the wild side now means returning a few phone calls.

One of the best parts of Earle's comeback is the fact that he's still his testy old self. Sidestepping the piousness that often accompanies clean-up, he begins his newish El Corazon by pissing on the circus masters in D.C. and the apathy of citizens who let dog-and-pony shows like the Lewinsky affair shroud issues like hunger and civil rights. With a hurdy-gurdy droning behind his fingerpicked acoustic, he waxes nostalgic for message-wielding populists like Woody Guthrie and full-tilt instigators like Malcolm X. The tune doesn't let anyone off the hook, striking a blow for the eradication of indifference. That's you and me watching Seinfeld reruns while they pull the wool over our eyes again, bub.

On that song, "Christmas in Washington," Earle barely breaks a whisper. And though his uptempo choruses almost invariably have their dazzle, I've come to prefer Earle the folkie/balladeer to Earle the anthem-rasping rocker. My fave moment since he began passing urine tests is "Ellis Unit 1," the portrayal of a $23K-a-year prison guard who digs regimenting the cons until he's assigned death row duty and has to start thinking about the issues in front of him. Written for the soundtrack of Tim Robbins' Dead Man Walking, it sizzles with prickly particulars that only open eyes and a hyped imagination could concoct. Like John Prine's best stuff, not a word sits wrong.

What El Corazon also proves is that Earle's a hedonist who likes the growl of rock 'n' roll because it lets a bit of anger out and lot of pleasure in. He has called his '80s work "heavy metal bluegrass" because it bashed as much as it twanged. On El Corazon, the rumble continues. "Taney Town," "Telephone Road" and "NYC" are more Live Rust than The Ballad of Tom Joad, and by the time you get to the frivolous "You Know the Rest," he and the Dukes have done a solid by Bringing It All Back Home-era Dylan. That tune is just wordplay for the hell of it, and it comes as a bit of relief. Often sorting out the details of some social ordeal, or counting the beads of sweat on someone's brow or the number of tears falling on the umpteenth post-squabble drive home, Earle's stuff can be wearying. El Corazon has its share of high drama -- there's no Steve Earle without it -- but between the chipper remarks, the good-humored exclamation, the banjo-rolling bluegrass, and the faux-vintage Hankitude, it feels like Earle's getting out of his own head a bit. It's not necessarily his heart he's talking about in the title, it's the pump that motored the blood through everyone he's ever come across in his crazed life.

Listen to him gab when he gets up on stage at Lupo's. His gregariousness is bigger than those West Texas skies. He's a talker. And a picker. And one of the most rowdy-assed folkies you're ever going to come across.

Steve Earle and the Dukes and Buddy and Julie Miller will perform at Lupo's on Saturday at 7 p.m.