15. Resurrection
“His shoulders were like
huge rounded humps of self-defense.”
With
a mane of wavy brown hair swept back on his head and hanging below his collar,
wire rim glasses, and a thick goatee, Norman Blake looks like either a
distinguished professor of English literature or a character who just stepped
out of a nineteenth-century daguerreotype. He with his beloved wife Nancy and
too many stringed instruments to count (“but it’s more than one,” he says in
his deadpan fashion) in the northwesternmost corner of Georgia, directly below
the Tennessee state line and right beside Alabama, where
the three states abut.
“It’s sort of mountainous here,” he says in his dry Georgia accent, “the end of
the southern mountain chain. They go about 50, 60 miles further south.”1
The town is Rising Fawn, Georgia, and the Blake place is about three miles from
where Norman was raised. “I’ve been here all of my life, basically, with the
exception of seven years that I lived in Nashville and two years that I spent
in the army. But Nancy and I have lived on this place for 28, 29 years. We
built the house, we’re responsible for it, yes. It’s a
three-story large frame house, old Southern style, with porches all around. Sort of just a big farmhouse, really.”
Norman, who enunciates precisely, chooses his words carefully, and is often
given to understatement, is one of the world’s greatest stringed instrument
players. He plays country music for a living “because it’s what I’ve done all
my life and it’s what I do best. And it’s certainly what I love the most and it
has the highest element of truth I think of most any music. I think most
genuine country music has a high truth element in it; it covers most any
situation that people get into. It’s real-life stuff.”
One of Norman Blake’s best friends is another string master of great repute,
Peter Rowan, who, like Norman, has made a stand for traditional roots music,
especially bluegrass. Rowan is a former Bill Monroe Bluegrass Boy, and no more
solid credential could be had for a roots music advocate.
In the fall of ’94, Rowan took a trip to visit Blake in Rising Fawn, and the
two men shared a memorable evening together over music on old 78 rpm records
that Norman was playing for Peter in an upstairs room.
“Norman played me 78 after 78,” Peter recalls of that night, “saying ‘Pete,
you’ll like this one here,’ and he’d play me that one. A lot of those tunes
ended up on a record that I did with Jerry Douglas called Yonder. So what was happening with Norman is
that we were listening to this old stuff, like ‘Lullaby of the Leaves,’ just
fantastic old 78s that Norman has been collecting. And thinking, Wouldn’t it be great if we could make music that was just
original acoustic music, something we could be part of? Too bad this isn’t
what’s going on these days, because this is what we play.”2
A couple of months later, Peter got a call from a man who identified himself as
Bill Alsobrook from Nashville. “How would you like to do a record with Steve
Earle?” Alsobrook asked. Another string virtuoso, Sam Bush, had been booked to
play with Steve, but a wrist injury had forced him to bow out.
Rowan was amenable to the idea, even though he knew Steve was or had been in
jail, and that “all of Steve Earle’s great guitars were in pawnshops all over
town, to be had for a song.
“I think Bill Alsobrook had convinced him to go ahead and make a record of
acoustic music of him at his most raw. Because rock ’n’ roll
had just about killed him.”
Rowan, who had begun his career in Nashville in the ’60s, then had moved away,
returned to town in 1984. Around that time, he met Steve Earle for the first
time through the auspices of attorney-turned-manager Ken Levitan.
“I
met this kid in black slacks and a white sport coat, and it was Steve Earle.
But in Nashville everyone’s on their own trajectory. I was writing songs with
Pam Tillis when suddenly she got a phone call, or made a phone call as we were
going from lunch to the songwriting room. She said, ‘I gotta go.’ Next thing I
know she’s a country music star and I didn’t see her for another year.
“With
Steve it was much more like a karmic thing. I’d see him around town. Of course,
Steve is definitely wrapped up in his own circle of rock ’n’ roll destiny. I
bought the first record; I thought it was really cool. But I didn’t understand
him as a person. But every contact I had with him had something to do with
something deep. The next time I saw him was at a gas station on West End. And
he told me, ‘Did you now that Flaco Jiminez’s father had died?’”
“I said, ‘No!’
“He said, ‘Yeah, I went down to San Antonio to the funeral and I bought flowers
and I put your name on ’em.’
“I said, ‘My God, man.’ That’s evidence of a deeper connection. Our paths are
always crossing in a meaningful way.
“Then he went to the dark side. Became obsessed with the whole process—the
thing is, Steve is such a strong guy. He was almost throwing himself against a
brick wall just to see how strong he was. I mean, the wall was never going to
break.”
So in January 1995, “in the middle of a freezing winter,” Peter Rowan found
himself at Magic Tracks Recording Studio with Steve Earle. On one side of him
was Norman Blake, who had also been recruited for the session, on the other was
the most highly regarded standup bass player around, Roy Huskey, Jr. Peter had
known Roy for years from session work and from playing around Nashville,
notably and most memorably at Peter’s regular bluegrass night at the Station
Inn with a group called Crucial Country, whose lineup shifted according to
which hot picker was in town on gig nights but boiled down to “basically
bluegrass players ripping it up with everything from Bob Marley tunes to Bill
Monroe tunes and my tunes,”
Peter
looked at Norman and smiled. “How did this happen?” he asked. “We’re making
that record I was talking about.”
When
Peter first laid eyes on Steve that night, though, he was shocked. It was a
Steve Earle he had never seen before. “Physically, he was almost like deformed.
His body had bulked up hugely; his shoulders were like huge rounded humps of
self-defense. He was having dental problems. He was missing teeth. He’d been
beat up; he’d been in jail; he’d been on heroin.
“But personality-wise he was hot as a pistol.”
For his part, Norman was seeing the only Steve Earle he had ever known—it was
their first meeting. In a typical Norman Blake construct, he says simply, “I
don’t believe I had ever met Steve before this. We were just called in to do
the record.”
Steve may have been away from the studio for a while, but he hadn’t forgotten
the lessons he’d learned along the way. When it came time to record, he did
exactly what he had done in Memphis for The Hard Way—set it up and go.
Preproduction amounted to Rowan, Blake, and Huskey listening to Steve run
through a tune, playing it afterwards, and then recording it.
“He
sang ’em through, we played ’em through, we recorded ’em” is Rowan’s memory of
the five days at Magic Tracks.
Blake
was looking for one thing: getting the right sound on the instruments. Then it
would all fall together; it was only matter of “really listening and getting a
real intimate thing going to where everybody can hear each other; just really
listening to what’s going down and getting it to where you’ve got a real good
recording to start with before you get to the point of we can fix it in the mix
or EQ it. You know, really getting the instruments miked right and that kind of
thing. And not being afraid to have a little leakage and things like that on a
record like this. Not being so sterilized.”
“We
met in front of microphones,” Rowan says. “We were all around different
microphones, and Steve was in the room. We were all in the room playing with
each other. But that’s what I’d been talking about with Norman, that immediacy.
Which of course has translated well through the years, even through O Brother, Where
Art Thou? That sense of rawness. The acoustic
music tradition has a sense of the moment and the rough edges are still there,
which is one of the great things about it. I mean they don’t sound like rough
edges but they’re all there; they’re not all squeezed out. There’s no attempt
to overly smooth out things on Train a Comin’. Which is great,
because it has bite. But Steve’s passion—he was so
wanting to live and yet he could sing funny songs about ‘my hometown,’ great lyrics, ‘Ben McCullough,’ then the
great Townes Van Zandt song, ‘Tecumseh Valley,’ oh, my God!”
The
pattern was to record and play back the performance for everyone to critique on
the spot. Every warm-up, every performance was taped, “just as a reference
point,” according to Rowan. Typically Norman would point everyone in the right
direction after a playback: if they had come close to nailing the song, he’d
announce, “Well, it’s not quite believable yet.” If he judged the performance
to be unacceptable, the pronouncement from on high was “That’s a little
unbelievable.”
What
Blake was waiting to hear was “everybody just kinda looking for something,
freedom in their own structure, so to speak. In other words, you know basically
what you’re supposed to do, but you’re looking for your own artistic freedom
inside that framework—people like Peter and I, who have certainly played our
own music, you’re looking to express yourself in a way that is you, but you’re
still doing it to contribute to something like what Steve’s doing. But you’re
expressing yourself in your own way too.”
By
all accounts, Steve began to feel his oats as the sessions went on, taking
charge and dispensing with the tentativeness both Blake and Rowan saw in him at
the outset. There was good reason for Steve to be cautious. These weren’t the
Dukes, his old pals in debauchery. In the four years he’d been away, he’d endured the fear of being unable to write songs
in a sober state. Finally, he felt he was back at square one in his career,
with one last chance to make it right. He was suffering, physically and
metaphysically. Both Blake and Rowan saw that suffering, and both saw him
overcome it in a show of strength that’s burned in their memories.
“I
thought that he definitely was not well,” Blake remembers. “He was having
trouble with his teeth at that point, and in some pain. And there was a small
lack of confidence in what he was going to do or needed to do. I think he was
just there to do it and didn’t know really which direction it was going to go
in.
“As
it went on, he gained confidence rapidly and became much stronger in what he
was doing. It started off a little on the shaky side, just from the fact that
he was medicated and not feeling very good. But very rapidly as we went into
it, I think his confidence came fast and he was able to rise to the occasion
and go on and do a great job.”
“So there we are in the studio with the core,” Rowan says. “It was like finally
I really got to meet Steve. All these years he had been part of my life, and
this was the meeting with Steve. He’d been up hard against it, and we had a
great exchange. I learned a tremendous amount from him, and I think he learned
from me too. As we made the record it was all live takes. It’s really a sense
of confidence, and Steve hadn’t lost his confidence. He’d lost his teeth and
he’d lost his instruments, but his sense of confidence was outrageous. It was
great performances, live performances, maybe a line or two overdubbed where he
got off-mike or something, but they’re all live performances. I didn’t have
enough confidence in myself, and Steve was very much like, ‘You
asshole. What are you equivocating about?’ That planted a seed in me to not
sell myself short. Nashville will make you sell yourself short if you don’t
have that overriding confidence, you know.”
“It
was not the standard studio thing where you just hire some musicians to come
in,” Blake points out. “He knew everybody was on his side and was trying to do
what needed to be done. It worked, in the long run. He recovered real fast.”
Once
the album was done, Steve took the band right out on the road, where at each
stop he was greeted by thunderous ovations and crowds
eager to share the experience with him again. In Los Angeles, at the
Troubadour, the fans surged towards the stage, so close they could reach out
and touch Steve. Norman kept scooting his chair back about six inches after
every song, saying to anyone who would listen, in a typical Norman Blake
construct, “I don’t believe I’m gonna be too close to the front of this stage.”
According
to Rowan, Norman was the only hard sell in the group. Steve—of whom Norman once
said, “he’s a lot of fun, but he’s kind of opinionated,” leading Rowan to burst
forth with a hearty laugh and note, “The joke is that Norman is so opinionated
in a classic kind of way”—approached him with the offer to go on tour,
explaining, “There’s $50,000 in it for you and you just have to be out for
three months and be on a bus with . . . ” Norman, in a typical construct,
replied: “No, you know I don’t believe I’ll be going on that tour.”
Clearly, something or someone persuaded him to change his mind.
To
Rowan, the first tour with Steve, and a second leg, was about more than making
music. That was a big part of it, of course, but it was the offstage
camaraderie that has stayed with him all these years later. The long rides,
picking in the back of the bus, Norman playing “for about 12 hours without
stopping,” introducing Steve to Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights
bookstore in San Francisco, where “Steve walked out with a couple hundred
dollars’ worth of books,” whiling away hours in the bus reading Kerouac and
Ginsberg to each other, “and the years fall away with every mile,” as Steve
sang in “The Other Kind.”
“It
was a moment frozen in time,” Rowan says. “We were like kids. Steve looks at
all things with equal light of possibility. He’s not discouraged by things that
might make me turn a little sour. Which is great. Which is just to say that there was a brief moment in time when we
were both taking a breath of the same air and it was a wonderful time.”
* * *
Pam
Lewis came back into Steve’s life briefly at this juncture. In the years since
she had worked on Guitar Town, both she and Steve had seen the
heights and depths of their profession. Pam had gone on to become partners with
Bob Doyle in a management company, and one of their early successes was in
launching the career of their client Trisha Yearwood, who, steered largely by
producer Garth Fundis, became one of contemporary country’s premier interpretive
singers. Another of their early clients was a complete unknown no one in the
business cared to listen to: Garth Brooks. Eventually, everyone listened to
Garth, to the tune of making him one of the best-selling artists of all
time—not just in country but in all of popular music. Garth’s success was such
that he begat an entire new genre of male country artists, the “hat” acts, so
called because they all wore the same broad-brimmed cowboy hats Garth favored.
Some of them—Clint Black and Alan Jackson—proved to have real staying power and
for good reason: they could write, play, and sing with authority and
credibility. Too many, though, went for the safe, middle ground, had a
formulaic hit or two and settled into the lower tier of country stardom, having
no lasting impact or influence.
Brooks was the exception in that his outsized ego matched the magnitude of his
record sales. Behind-the-scenes horror stories of his power plays abound in
Nashville, but in public he always put on a humble act, and the public ate it
up. His music was nothing special—he sang in a baritone drawl with a bit of a
Southwestern accent, favored syrupy ballads and hard country drinking and
partying songs, spiked with flourishes from the worst of ’70s and ’80s arena
rock. (In interviews Brooks would often wax rapturous about Styx and Kansas,
and at the peak of his popularity he cut a version of “Hard Luck Woman” for a
Kiss tribute album that was some kind of monstrosity, with Brooks growling the
lyrics in a voice that no one could have recognized as his.) His
arena-rock-influenced live shows were notable for their physicality (he seemed
to enjoy swinging from ropes at one point, for instance) and their fireworks.
It figures that Steve Earle would have little use for an artist as compromised
as Garth Brooks. In Hardcore Troubadour he offered a withering assessment of
the ’90s phenom: “Well, he really can’t sing. He really can’t carry a tune in a
bucket. His records need a lot of work. He really is tone deaf. He’s one of the
worst singers I’ve ever heard in my life. I think Garth Brooks is kind of evil
just because he sucks so much energy and money out of the business. But, you
know, that’s country music, and I don’t have anything to do with what they call
country music. I haven’t since my second record.”3
Pam Lewis and Bob Doyle’s thank-you for steering Brooks from obscurity to the
pinnacle of the entertainment world was to be fired by him. Pam went back to
where she started, rebuilding her independent publicity business and doing a
lot of soul searching. When Steve Roberts and Owsley Manier approached her
about working on several of their Winter Harvest projects, including Train a Comin’,
the personal work she had done served her well, because she found Steve to be
“bratty, adversarial, and difficult. I think he was punishing me. And his
manager [John Dotson] was being difficult, very obstructive. When someone
wanted to interview Steve, it would take days to get an answer. Things like
that. But we got through it.
“I
had gone through my own transitions in life, and I was reading a lot of
metaphysical books, and I was trying to really get my own act together and be
more insightful and patient. By that time we were in our late twenties, early
thirties. Steve’s older than I am. But you get to an age where you do some soul
searching and you get a little wisdom. I wouldn’t go home and be devastated,
because I realized, This is a guy who’s gone through
hell and back.”4
Pam
did succeed in getting Steve to do some press for the new album. One of the
best of the interviews from that time was with Chris Morris in Billboard’s
March 18, 1995, issue. In it Steve described Train a Comin’ as “exactly the record I needed right
now. No major label would let me make this record, coming back after four years
especially. I always wanted to do it. It was a low-pressure record, at a point
in my life when I needed a low-pressure record.”5
He had to tweak Norman Blake a bit, of course, describing the fact of Blake
even leaving his beloved Georgia as “a coup because Norman is, shall we say,
set in his ways. There’s nobody that does what he does better than he does it.
Norman is a flat-picking acoustic guitar player, but he can play anything with
strings on it, and he really became a utility man on this record.”
Later on he would be blunt and forthcoming about his drug addiction, but at
that early stage of his recovery he recoiled from the subject, saying, “it isn’t anybody’s business.” Rather, he offered an eloquent
appraisal of the changes wrought in him during his visit to the Seventh Circle.
“At 40 it becomes clear—especially if you get to be 40 the way I did, defying
gravity—that what’s important is your life and your wife and your kids. There
is an edge in things you do when you’re younger, and you think it’s life or death. But if you survive long enough,
artistically and otherwise, it suddenly dawns on you one day that you didn’t
have to go through maybe all the shit that you went through, but there ain’t
nobody in the world that could have told you that when it was goin’ on. It’s
just that simple.”
About that wife, a little more than a year later Steve filed for divorce from
Lou-Anne, thus ending his sixth marriage.
Train a Comin’
Winter Harvest, 1995
Produced
by William Alsobrook and Steve Earle
Executive
producers for Winter Harvest: Owsley Manier and Steve Roberts
Recording
engineer: Wayne Neuendorf
Additional
engineer: Mike Elliot
Recorded
at: Magic Tracks Recording Studio and Masterfonics, Nashville, Tennessee
Mixed
by Wayne Neuendorf at Masterfonics, Nashville, Tennessee
Second
engineers, Masterfonics: David Hall and Keith Boden
Mastering
and editing: Mack Evans at Magnetic Technology—Nashville, Tennessee
Musicians
Steve
Earle: guitar, high-string guitar, harmonica, vocals
Norman
Blake: guitar, dobro, fiddle, mandolin, Hawaiian
guitar
Peter
Rowan: mandolin, mandola, gut string guitar, vocals
Roy
Huskey: acoustic bass
Emmylou
Harris: vocals
Songs
1. “Mystery Train Part II” (2:31) (Steve
Earle)
2. “Hometown Blues” (2:41) (Steve Earle)
3. “Sometimes She Forgets” (3:01) (Steve
Earle)
4. “Mercenary Song” (2:39) (Steve Earle)
5. “Goodbye” (4:57) (Steve Earle)
6. “Tom Ames’ Prayer” (3:02)
7. “Nothin’ without You” (3:02) (Steve
Earle)
8. “Angel Is the Devil” (2:12) (Steve
Earle)
9. “I’m Looking through You”
(2:28) (Lennon-McCartney)
10. “Northern Winds” (1:40) (Norman Blake)
11. “Ben McCulloch” (4:10) (Steve Earle)
12. “Rivers of Babylon” (B. Crowe–J. McNaughton–G. Reyam–F.
Farian)
13. “Tecumseh Valley” (4:28) (Townes Van Zandt)
In
the annals of comeback history, Steve’s return from oblivion, especially when
seen in the context of the work he’s produced post-rehab, seems every bit as
remarkable as Elvis’s 1968 ascension from mediocrity and irrelevance back to
his customary regal standing, when he reclaimed himself and his art. As if
acknowledging at least this much of a connection between Steve and his first
musical hero, Train a Comin’ begins with an obvious Elvis reference
in the title of its opening song. “Mystery Train Part II” begins with a bouncy
mandolin line that’s playing before the recording starts and fades in, then is
joined by the deeper mandola, and is borne ceaselessly to a frantic conclusion.
The lyric seems fairly straightforward, about a train rumbling through the
countryside and the singer’s longing to be on it. Given Steve’s recent history,
though, the lyric, “She ain’t bound for nowhere ... engineer don’t seem to care
... ” hits close to home as a summary of the years of
madness that preceded this session. Rowan joins in on a soaring harmony chorus,
helping kick off Steve’s comeback on a triumphant note.
From
1977, “Hometown Blues” (Steve’s note: “Went home to Texas and no one remembered
me but the cops”) begins with Steve announcing “apologies to Thomas Wolfe and
Doc Watson” before kicking into a lilting, old-timey melody that happens to be
driving a harsh indictment of the old hometown, where his friends are gone and
the changes have unsettled him. In a lively singsong chorus, he notes that “my
heart lies in broken pieces / scattered along the way.” Which
in turn sets up a jolly, angular solo spun out by Norman Blake on Hawaiian
guitar.
A
beautifully crafted portrait of a lonely woman who won’t admit to her longing
for companionship, “Sometimes She Forgets,” from 1979, is a classic country
tearjerker, made doubly poignant by Blake’s earnest, song-length fiddle solo
and Rowan’s rustic, trilling mandolin lines supporting Steve’s drawling vocal.
The punch line is the song’s comic relief—Steve encourages a male suitor to go
for it “’cause sometimes she forgets.”
Clearly,
three songs in, Steve has made a statement that Train a Comin’ is going to be a modest,
back-to-the-basics exercise. The drug-fueled fury of Copperhead Road
and The Hard Way has given way to craft, feeling and
folk-flavored storytelling. This is the sound of an artist marshalling all his
gifts at their most fundamental level—language, structure, style, point of view
in a minimalist environment—and finding his voice again, his mojo.
In
keeping with the tenor of the project, the atmospheric “Mercenary Song” is a
soldier of fortune’s account of how he and a couple of friends joined up with
Pancho Villa’s army, advising that they “fight for no country, but we’ll die
for good pay.” There are no great revelations—when the fight is over in Mexico,
they’re looking to go to Chile, “heard tell there’s some trouble down there.”
Again, evocative guitar work rules the day, with exotic atmospheres courtesy
the tune’s Spanish flavor, especially in the melody lines fashioned in tandem
by acoustic and gut-stringed guitars played by, respectively, Steve and Norman
Blake. And the high-stepping, Guy Clark–style chorus is a delight, a pure,
jubilant celebration of the mercenary’s ethos.
As
“Mercenary Song” marches out, the first,
tentative, finger-picked acoustic notes of “Goodbye” emerge, haunting and
winsome. Written when he was in the Buffalo Valley rehab center, “Goodbye” is a
heartbreaking farewell, apparently to Teresa Ensenat. Steve sings it gritty and
breathless, sounding at a couple of points as if he’s struggling to find the
words to express regret over losing a great love and at the same time thrashing
himself for the debacle he caused and can’t come to terms with because he
doesn’t even know if he was “just off somewhere, just too high” even to
remember how they parted. Rowan on gut string, Blake on dobro, and Steve on
harmonica surge into the chorus, as if the song might break open to a more
hopeful place, but as quickly as it rises, so does it recede back to the stark,
lonely sound of Steve’s finger-picking and ragged vocal, a forlorn soul on the
lost highway.
“Tom
Ames’ Prayer,” circa 1975, is a classic, strutting story-song about an Old West
bank robber who finally gets caught and sent to jail, but escapes before his
hanging and walks out into the street with his pistols cocked, ready to go out
in a blaze of gunfire rather than at the end of “Parker’s rope.” Midway
through, Blake fashions a fleet-fingered acoustic solo as energizing as it is
exquisitely conceived and impeccably executed. Later on the disc Steve rolls
out another epic story-song in “Ben McCullough,” also from ’75, one of those
songs fondly remembered by the Bishop’s Pub crowd. (Born in 1811 in Tennessee,
raised in Arkansas, the real Ben McCullough is considered a heroic Texas
patriot for his service at the Battle of San Jacinto—he didn’t arrive in time to join his friend Davy Crockett at
the Alamo—and as a member of the Second Congress of the Republic and of Texas’s
First Legislature. A brigadier general in the Confederate Army, he was killed
while leading a division in the Battle of Elkhorn Tavern on March 7, 1862. His
body was returned to Austin, where it is buried in the State Cemetery.6) Set in the Civil War—Steve’s first venture into the lore
of the War Between the States, which he would explore in more depth later—“Ben McCullough” tells the story of brothers who enlist in
Ben McCullough’s infantry and come to hate everything about their plight (one
brother is killed at Wilson’s Creek), especially Ben McCullough for leading
them into misery and horror. Rich in detail and overflowing with venom, “Ben
McCullough” plays out in dark, foreboding tones, Steve perfectly embodying and
expressing the rage his character feels toward his commanding officer’s base
inhumanity, sounding almost gleeful when he spits out the final sentiment of
the chorus—“when you die, you’ll be a foot soldier
just like me / in the devil’s infantry.”
“Ben McCullough” is set up by an expressive, longing guitar solo by Norman
Blake, 1 minute 40 seconds of angular poignance that sounds like thunderclouds
gathering. Blake’s intricate approach to the tune finds him employing
pull-offs, trills, and ominous strings of triplet figures on the bottom strings
in stating, restating, and augmenting the composition’s main theme. Titled
“Northern Winds,” the song was originally an untitled march Blake found in The Northern Fiddler,
a traditional fiddle tune book from Northern Ireland.
“I
just called it ‘Northern Winds’ for identification’s sake,” Blake says. “It was
just a traditional piece that seemed like it fit in that spot.”
Blake
came up with it when Steve asked him if he had something that would be suitable
as a prelude to “Ben McCullough.” It’s in a standard tuning, but Blake doesn’t
play it standard; instead, he approaches it “in a very nontraditional way. I
played it more abstractly and it would not be at all like it was in the book,
as far as mood or tempo or that kind of thing.”
From 1980 Steve dusted off a traditional country-styled love song, “Nothin’
without You,” featuring Emmylou Harris adding keening harmony on the choruses,
and Rowan and Blake offering lonesome, heartbreaking solos on mandolin and dobro, respectively. From what Steve refers to as his
“vacation in the ghetto,” circa ’92, came the whimsical ragtime-style “Angel Is
the Devil,” to which Steve gives a robust ambiance with his 12-string guitar,
while Blake weaves a fanciful mandolin solo throughout the arrangement.
The collection is rounded out with three covers, all of them telling:
Lennon-McCartney’s “I’m Looking through You,” from the momentous Rubber Soul
album, is done at a slightly slower tempo than the original’s, but Rowan’s
mandolin and Blake’s dobro enhance the country flavor
that was suggested in the Beatles’ arrangement. (“I had heard that song, but
that’s about all,” Blake says, adding in a typical Norman Blake construct,
“That’s a far cry from where I live.”) With Emmylou Harris sitting in again,
the band cooks up a countrified version of the Melodians’ reggae gem “Rivers of
Babylon,” which Steve sings with gripping intensity, as if the song speaks both
to the spiritual renewal he’s undergoing and to the social conscience that
would soon become a dominant feature of his resurrection. Finally, a delicate
rendering of “Tecumseh Valley,” Townes Van
Zandt’s account of a wayward girl whose broken dreams lead her first to
prostitution then to suicide. Roy Huskey, Jr.’s bass, which has been the pulse
of Train a Comin’, thumps softly throughout, like a
softly beating heart; Steve finger-picks a melody on acoustic, Rowan adds rich
texture with the gut-string guitar, and Blake emits an eerie cry on the dobro.
This is where Steve came in: a beautifully structured tale, characters defined
in a terse, vivid phrases, a landscape described succinctly as the setting for
a story that gathers momentum with each sorrowful verse until the inevitable,
heart-wrenching concluding scene and a subtle but stirring closing line—“Fare thee well Tecumseh Valley”—that heightens the
senselessness of the tragedy.
When
the song fades, Steve is back where he started as an artist, schooled in the
fundamentals of his craft by a demanding mentor; having mastered those
fundamentals, he is ready to set his sights on the world again and, with clear
vision and a fearless heart, to take its measure.
Trust in Twang: Calling Ray
Ray
Kennedy: “When Steve disappeared for a while, a
lot of us were really concerned about him. One of my really close friends,
Alice Randall, is a songwriter who became a screenwriter and then a book
writer; she’s one of Steve’s closest friends too. Alice and I used to go to these
functions together, like when Steve would be doing something at the Country
Music Hall of Fame, signing a guitar, giving a speech about something.
Sometimes Alice would go out on the road with Steve, and she’d tell me what was
going on with him. We’d start seeing some of his guitars showing up in
pawnshops, and some people would actually buy them and put the guitars away
with the idea of giving them back to Steve at some point. At one point I ran
across a six-string bass that was custom made for him by Joe Glaser. I called
Joe and he came and bought it and at a later date returned it to Steve. That’s
kind of cool that Steve had that kind of support.
“When he finally did go to jail and go to treatment and get out of treatment,
the person that was managing him, John Dotson, had been kind of comanaging me
with Dale Morris. John suggested to Steve to call me. Steve didn’t know that I
had this great studio down on Music Row. So he called me and said while he was
in jail he wrote some songs, and wanted to record some demos. Those first couple of demos were the beginning of that
record I Feel Alright, and that’s how that kind of unfolded. Day one of recording
the first demo, which was the song “Feel Alright,” we recorded it and mixed it
and went home with a finished cut for that record. Within a couple of days
A&R people from the different labels were showing up at the studio; people
started coming after him. Which was pretty funny, because
they just kind of sat in the corner and watched us work.”7
End Notes
1. Author interview with Norman Blake, 03-16-05; all
quotes from Norman Blake in this section are from this interview unless
otherwise indicated.
2. Author interview with Peter Rowan, 03-04-05; all
quotes from Peter Rowan in this section are from this interview unless
otherwise indicated.
3. Hardcore Troubadour, 325–326.
4. Author interview with Pam Lewis, 02-02-05.
5. “Rehab Complete, Earle Offers New Album,” by Chris
Morris, Billboard, March 18, 1995; all quotes in
this passage are from this interview.
6. www.lasjunction.com/people/mccullog.htm.
7. Author interview with Ray Kennedy, 03-06-05.