Return of the hardcore troubadour

Forget almost having his song ‘Mustang Wine’ recorded by Elvis, forget hanging out with Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark, forget winning Grammies, kicking drugs, writing journalism, plays and books, appearing in The Wire or acting as an anti death penalty activist and landmine abolition campaigner. Steve’s Earle’s proudest moment came when he played a solo acoustic show at Millstreet a few years ago.

“My claim to fame, if I fuckin’ die tomorrow, the thing I’m proudest of, beats anything that happened to me in jail and all that shit, is one year at Millstreet when it fuckin’ poured rain, the kind of rain you don’t see in Ireland, thunder and lightning scaring the fuck out of everybody, far from the proverbial soft day, Christy Moore showed up, took one look at the stage and said, ‘No fucking way’ and they moved the whole show inside. And to rearrange everyone’s schedules I had to follow Christy in West Cork, him solo, selling out six nights at the fucking Point in those days. I followed him and lived to tell the tale.”
Compared to that, Steve’s solo appearance at the Midlands Festival should be a cakewalk. When hotpress catches up with him, it’s noon in Nashville, and he’s considering the forthcoming release of his twelfth album Washington Square Serenade.
“This trip doesn’t have that much to do with the new record yet,” he says, “I may play a song or two from it, but these shows were booked a long time ago, they’re about commerce and playing a festival and seeing a lot of friends. The record will be out in September and the tour’s gonna start in Europe at the Celtic Connections festival in Glasgow the third week in January. I’ll do the whole tour solo. I may fuck around with some beats, that’s kind of what the record’s about.”
Yes, you heard him right. Beats. Washington Square Serenade was produced by Dust Brother John King, and is a mongrel hybrid of string driven instruments (banjo, acoustic guitar, mandolin and bouzouki), loops and beatbox rhythms.
“It’s a very folky record arrived at by a hip-hop road,” Earle explains. “It’s based on the idea that hip-hop at its best is folk music too. There’s not much difference between a college kid picking up a banjo or a pair of turntables. That was the idea of John and I working together, because that’s kind of what the Beck records John made were about, and Paul’s Boutique is my favourite Beasties record. All of the beats are mine except for ‘Way Down In The Hole’, the Tom Waits song, that’s John’s, and that was done from scratch.
“The reason I covered that song is I’m in a television show over here called The Wire on HBO, we’re filming the last season right now. That song’s always been the theme. The first year they used a version by the Blind Boys Of Alabama, the second year the original Waits version, the third year was the Nevilles, the fourth year was this DJ from Baltimore and a children’s choir, and this year I’m doing it.”
Those who’ve been following the series (which features Irish actor Aidan Gillen and is widely regarded as the finest TV show this side of The Sopranos or Deadwood) on TG4 will already be aware that Earle plays a redneck recovering drug addict named Waylon.
“In other words I’m not acting!” he laughs. “There’s a character in it who’s actually based on a real person, called Bubbles, who was a pretty notorious snitch in West Baltimore who eventually got clean and became kind of an inspiration to other recovering addicts around town, and then he ended up dying of AIDS. But I play Bubbles’s sponsor. Whenever Bubbles decided to try to get clean over the arc of the show, they’d write me in.
“It was written by Ed Burns and David Simon, an ex Baltimore cop and an ex Baltimore crime writer who grew up there and love the city, and they believe the war on drugs is killing their city on both sides, whether it’s the police or the gangs fighting it. It’s interesting that it’s playing in Ireland, because Ireland might be the only place in Europe… there are definitely people in parts of Dublin that’ll relate to it. But it’s a really breakneck-paced shooting. All my scenes are with Andre Royo, who plays Bubbles, so I’m grafting behind a really fine actor, and I get to say those words, and it’s really great writing.”
Speaking of writing, Earle is also close to completing I’ll Never Get Out Of This World Alive, his first full length novel for Houghton Mifflin.
“I was hoping to finish it before I recorded this record,” he says, “but this is my day job and there was some pressure on me from people who have a direct effect on my finances to go ahead and turn a record in, so I stopped, but I’m very, very close. I should finish it by the end of the year. It’s not going to be a huge book, somewhere between 200 and 300 pages. Editors don’t want short fiction. I actually have a collection of short fiction that’s still in print in this country (2001’s Doghouse Roses) you can always find one in a chain book store, and I do realise that for a collection of short fiction to stay in print for six years pisses a lot of writers off, that I’m able to do that because of my other job, but… fuck em!”
So who are his masters in the book-writing racket?
“Well, Michael Ondaatje wrote my favourite book, which is Coming Through Slaughter. I think he’s written really, really good books since, but he created a form of literature that didn’t exist before that book, and it sold what it sold and there was probably zero incentive to try to repeat it. But it is this fucking amazing thing that I don’t think ever existed before, it’s almost like On The Road in that sense. Kerouac is really vastly overrated when it comes to the body of work, and only for one reason, he was just a really dysfunctional alcoholic who fell apart at a relatively early age. His poetry was stunning, but the prose, there’s really only one book, and it is an amazing thing, and he was never able to duplicate it.
“But my editor at Houghton was trying to give me an incentive to write a full length novel, which I was resisting, because it doesn’t really fit into my lifestyle, it’s a long time for me to turn my attention away from music and the other things that I do. I can write a play in a month at most and I can write a short story in a day or two, but a novel, I’ve been working on this thing for fucking five years really, closer to six, and it’s been stop-and-start. But he basically suggested that I do something to do with music. So my book is totally inspired by Coming Through Slaughter.”
Any chance of a quick synopsis?
“It’s basically about a defrocked doctor who’s a heroin addict and supports his habit by performing abortions and patching up gunshot wounds in the middle of the night in San Antonio, Texas in 1963. Ten years earlier he was travelling with Hank Williams when he died, and when he’s really fucked up Hank’s ghost shows up. He’s another junkie – hopefully I’ll be able to quit writing about junkies after this! But he’s me and he’s a lot of other people that I’ve known. There was a real guy named Toby Marshall, who may very well have been travelling with Hank when he died, but he wasn’t really a doctor, he was a quack who believed he could treat alcoholics by large doses of chlorohydrate, which is basically a barbiturate, and there was a huge amount of it in Hank’s system when he died. And he wasn’t there by the time the police got there, he sort of evaporated, but several witnesses placed him in the car when it left Knoxville the night before. I started out on that story, but I’d already got it stuck in my head that he really was a doctor before I found out he wasn’t, and I finally decided the way I was going was more interesting. The only reason to put yourself through the torture of fiction is the fact that you can just make shit up.”
Steve Earle plays the Midlands Festival on July 28.