Word: rocks
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...least one other trouble is worth mentioning: there is only one Steve Earle. He has just made his first album, he hasn't had a Top Ten single, and he plays rock clubs as well as country venues. But his voice has offhand brute force when it has to bear down and unforced gentleness when it comes to business of the heart. He sings about familiar territory -- small towns and horizon-piercing interstates, luckless marriages and faithless love, dumb faith and poor prospects -- and blows all the cobwebs away because his eye is fresh and because he appears...
...have the sentimentality of mainstream country. They have older echoes: the scarred spirit and lonesome heart of Hank Williams, the grittiness of Johnny Cash, the Bull Run rhythmic charge of another Texas boy, Buddy Holly, who came out of a tradition that was as much old country as new rock 'n' roll. Rockabilly was the name for it, but somehow the country strains of Holly always got slighted. Rock claimed him exclusively -- and unfairly. Playing in that same territory, Earle redresses some of the balance...
...says flat out, "I'm a country singer, and I'm comfortable with that. But why does a country singer have to play only on country radio or a rock singer only on a rock station? I still don't understand why it's that big a deal." Earle may be the man to bring about this kind of crossover, but it's a hard job that has frustrated such gifted performers as John Prine and Joe Ely. Still, Earle has strong qualifications. He can sing Springsteen's spooky, poignant State Trooper and make it his own. He looks like...
...time he was 16, he made it to Houston, where he "slept on anybody's couch until I wore out my welcome." He hooked up with his uncle Nick Fain, who had lived with the family for a while and taught his nephew the rudiments of six-string rock guitar. "He was only five years older than I was," Earle says. "He was my hero." A friendship with Townes Van Zandt started Earle down the folk-music trail, where he eventually landed jobs on the coffeehouse circuit. "There was lots of noise and smoke. I became the world's loudest...
There were other bad times and two more failed marriages. One of Earle's sweetest tunes is a lullaby called Little Rock 'n' Roller, sung by a traveling musician to a faraway son. "That song was no fun to write, and it isn't any fun to sing," says Earle, who has a son of his own. "But I really needed to write it. It made me feel better...