Old Habits Die Hard
The Sunday Age
Sunday March 28, 2004
Steve Earle used to be young, angry and a junkie. These days he's just angry. He spoke with Toby Manning.
Back in the '80s, country-rocker Steve Earle sang ``there ain't no peace for an angry young man". Now, aged 49 and newly trim with greying hair and spectacles, Earle looks more like a youth worker than an angry young man. But if anything, he's more fired-up than ever.
Moments after walking into the London hotel where we're meeting, he's firing off expletive-filled broadsides about smoke-detectors (they're quickly disabled by nervous members of his entourage), about the chain that runs the hotel, and, his bugbear of the moment, ``that f---er George Bush". This former alcoholic and junkie may be getting on, but age has mellowed neither him nor his music, which is the most vital of his career.
Steve Earle was born on January 17, 1955, in Schertz, near San Antonio, Texas, into a working-class household that encouraged his artistic side. Winning high-school guitar contests was one thing, but dabbling in heroin at 14 was another. ``I should have known I was in trouble when I didn't throw up," Earle says in his deep Texas twang. ``It kind of really agreed with me."
By the time he was 19, he'd already left behind careers in carpentry and oil-rigging - not to mention his first wife - when he moved to Nashville in pursuit of a singing career. But with success slow to come and the counter-culture in full swing, Earle threw himself into politics (``the Vietnam War was totally the beginning of my radicalism"), booze and drugs.
``Like everybody else who came out of the '60s, our drug use was experimental. We thought we were explorers," he says. ``And I still have a hard time trusting anyone that's never taken LSD."
Earle also threw himself into women. Wife number two was a cocaine dealer. ``She could match me hit for hit and drink for drink. I was 21-years-old - how the hell was I supposed to know it wasn't love?"
Wife number three (Carol Hunter) lasted until 1984, presenting him with his first child, Justin Townes. Shortly afterwards, in 1986, Earle's music career finally took off.
He was 31 years old. The album Guitar Town revealed a country Springsteen, story songs about gas attendants and good ol' boys played with hard-rockin' swagger, balanced by the occasional haunting, ballad - ``chick songs", as he calls them. The record was both a country and a rock hit.
By 1988's Copperhead Road, Earle had even made the rock chart's top 10, with the title track. The year was rounded off with him being voted one of Playgirl magazine's sexiest country singers.
But even as he was peaking, it was all starting to go wrong. In 1990 Earle was arrested for assaulting a security guard at a gig and placed on probation; his first wife sued for alimony; and another woman slapped a paternity suit on him. Undeterred, he married, divorced and married yet again. But he was showing signs of being confused by his heroin habit: he actually married the same woman twice (Lou Ann Gill is ex-wife number four and six). By 1992, however, Earle had a more pressing relationship: with heroin. His addiction cost him another wife (Tracey Ensenat, wife number five, left him over his drug use), his guitars and his house. He'd moved to Nashville's seedy south side, ``to be closer to the dope".
He slept rough, trawling Lewis Street for Dilaudid, crack or heroin. He was a gaunt, dreadlocked, dirty figure, passing old friends without being recognised.
``I felt like I was standing outside my own life," he says. ``It was really f---ing lonely. I didn't think I was coming back."
Now clean, Earle accepts that addiction is a disease, but rejects the idea he was trying to destroy himself out of some deep-rooted sense of pain. ``I thought my pain was greater than yours, but the truth was I was just a junkie," he says, ``so I couldn't deal with the usual shit everybody else has to deal with."
In fact, Earle nurtured a kind of superman syndrome. ``I really believed I was different, that I was unique. All through that time I took a lot of people to treatment, paid for some of them to go, drove them there and then stole their dope that they stashed on the ground. I believed the whole Keith Richards thing. I thought I was handling it."
But he wasn't. He was, in fact, living on a knife edge. ``I came as close as you can come to death," he says matter of factly. ``Several overdoses when I was by myself. Shot at a couple of times. Robbed several times. Three really bad automobile accidents, due to falling asleep at the wheel after being awake for days and days and days. As close as you can come."
Inevitably, Earle was arrested for heroin possession in 1994, and sent to Tennessee's Cold Creek Correctional Facility, followed by a stint in rehab. It was the making of him.
Restored to the world, Earle relaunched his career in 1995 with the acoustic album Train A Comin', then abruptly gave the finger to purists with the rockier follow up, I Feel Alright, a year later.
By now Earle wasn't just back on track, he was better than he'd ever been. In the past few years, Earle's knack for narrative and character songs has taken an increasingly political turn. He is a committed campaigner against the death penalty and his last album, 2002's Jerusalem, almost exclusively addressed post-September 11 political issues in uncompromising, sometimes apocalyptic terms. One song from it - John Walker's Blues, sung from the point of view of American Taliban fighter John Walker Lindh - brought Earle more press attention than he'd had in his entire career.
``Relative to how many records we sell, the reaction was stronger than to the Dixie Chicks," says Earle with some pride. (In fact, the album was his biggest seller since Copperhead Road.)
Undeterred by the flak, Earle says he isn't about to shut up about politics any time soon. ``Soon as we get this f----- (Bush) out of office, then I'll start writing chick songs again."
Steve Earle plays the Prince, St Kilda, on April 1 and 2.
© 2004 The Sunday Age