Worshipful, overlong biography of the singer-songwriter who first
shook up Nashville with Guitar Town in 1986 and has been ruffling
mainstream feathers ever since. Steve Earle is almost as famous for
his reckless lifestyle and political activism as for biting songs
like "Hillbilly Highway" and "John Walker." (Of this last, about
the American indicted for fighting with the Taliban, Earle remarked
with relish, "this will be the song that gets me kicked out of the
country.") British journalist St. John (Shark: The Biography of
Greg Norman, not reviewed, etc.), who met him in 1999 while he was
campaigning against capital punishment, was clearly dazzled by the
legendary Earle charisma. Though she chronicles in stupefying
detail his years of drug addiction and dutifully quotes at length
from injured siblings, several ex-wives, and various embittered
former business associates, all of the musician's extremely bad
behavior is tinged with a patina of glamour: the artist sinking
into the lower depths to fuel his art. Friend and foe alike
describe Earle as a brilliant, nonstop talker, but you'd never know
it from the self-serving remarks St. John chooses to print. Few
admirers of the lyrics to "Copperhead Road" and "Devil's Right
Hand" will want to know that their author is capable of banalities
like "When you've been married six times, you figure out that it's
at least partly your fault." The author adequately captures the
exciting ferment of 1980s Nashville, when such idiosyncratic
artists as Lucinda Williams, Lyle Lovett, John Hiatt, Roseanne
Cash, Emmylou Harris, and Townes Van Zandt shook country music to
its core. But St. John has little to say about their music, and her
rhapsodies about Earle are embarrassing. His thrilling, drug-free
resurrection after a mid-'90s jail term to create some of the best
recordings of his career does not require hyperbole like "In the
history of incarceration, few men have returned to the outside
world with such an overwhelming determination to embrace
redemption, or with quite so much to offer the world, both
personally and artistically." The ferociously intelligent and
talented Earle deserves better than this fawning portrait. (Kirkus
Reviews)
Steve Earle is the musicians? idol ? ?my hero? to Emmylou Harris ? who has said of his life that ?If I?d known I was going to live this long I?d have taken better care of myself.? He was taking heroin at thirteen, and by the age of forty was mired in a seemingly permanent ?vacation in the ghetto? as he described his life then. In and out of jail for a variety of offences, Earle seemed determined to make good on his boast that when the end of the world came (and it seemed pretty close at times) only he, Keith Richards and the cockroaches would be left standing. Not yet fifty, he has been married six times, twice to the same woman, and amazingly forgiven by almost all of the ex-wives. In moments of consciousness he has, through sheer musical ability, shared a stage with, among others, Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, Sheryl Crow, the Pogues and Bob Dylan. He?s a legend, and one of the most gifted songwriters of his generation. He has poured a lot of living into those songs. Nashville just wouldn?t be the same without him.
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