Still On Track

04/05/2002 4:00 PM, Yahoo! Music
Robert L Doerschuk

Blame it on the phone company, but for some reason our attempts to call Steve Earle at his Nashville office kept leading us to an answering machine for UNICEF. But after we had finally made the connection and explained what happened, the outlaw icon shrugged off the delay. "Hey," he rasped, "maybe I should be doing something as important as those guys."

In fact, Earle has done plenty over 20-plus years of writing and performing--so much that his newest album, Sidetracks (Artemis/E-Squared) is dedicated to picking up some of the pieces that he's left behind. It's a mismatched but vivid bouquet, whose complexity reflects just a few of his many interests. The music ranges from bluegrass to neo-grunge, the lyrics from dewy baseball mythology to hard-eyed political assertion. Sidetracks covers a lot of bases, then sets the stage for Earle to move on toward new horizons. Even UNICEF would be happy with a record this strong.

LAUNCH: Have there many things you've cut over the years that have been cut or erased, that might have gone onto a project like Sidetracks?

EARLE: No, we're pretty good archivists. I think the only tracks that exist on me that haven't been released are a version of a Guy Clark song that I recorded with a bunch of guys as a private take for his birthday. It'll probably never be released--it's really good, but that's not why I recorded it. Maybe Guy will put it up on Napster [laughs].

LAUNCH: Is there any other material you had to leave out for whatever reason?

EARLE: There were a few things that almost didn't end up here because of legal stuff. For instance, "Time Has Come Today" is on this because the version with Abbie [Hoffman] didn't make the soundtrack [for Steal This Movie] because the filmmakers never cleared it with his estate. I edited all that stuff in [i.e., Hoffman speaking at a political rally], but any time you don't have permission, you make an alternate version. Thank God I did, because it came up on a deadline and we still didn't have permission to use it. So when Steal This Movie came out, I had to use the version without Abbie.

LAUNCH: How do Hoffman's values stand up in these times of essentially mandatory patriotism?

EARLE: I've seen this brand of patriotism before; we had flags when I was growing up that said, "America: Love It Or Leave It!" all over them. But that has nothing to do with September 11. This is about going into Iraq, and we are going to go into Iraq, with or without everybody's permission. In Afghanistan a few weeks ago we rolled into the valley that the Russians tried to get the mujahadeen out of for 10 years. They never could, and that broke the Soviet Union. We got our asses kicked, too. We got run the f--k out of there, and we said, "Oh, there were a thousand of them in there. We killed 500 of 'em." Well, they found 14 f--king bodies. Somebody's lying to somebody. Something ain't right. But I don't expect this to go on forever. There's a point at which people will get tired of sending their kids out there, and it'll happen a lot faster than it did in Vietnam.

LAUNCH: You cover Bob Dylan's "My Back Pages" on Sidetracks.

EARLE: I cut "My Back Pages" for Steal This Movie too, in a key that was too high for me because it was actually recorded for Jackson Browne and Joan Osborne to sing on--which they did; the very same track is on Steal This Movie with Jackson and Joan. But I love my scratch vocal, because it is so on the edge, right at the top of my range. Also, teaching at the Old Town School three years ago, "My Back Pages" was one of the songs on my course. That record, Another Side Of Bob Dylan, is where Dylan finds his own voice. That's the record where he stops being Woody Guthrie, once and for all. The lyric is as close to poetry as songwriters get. I don't think that poetry and songwriting are ever the same thing, simply because songwriters have the advantage of the effect on emotion that sheer tonality has, and poets have to do it without that. So you've got to give credit to poetry for being a much more hardcore beast. Being a poet is like being a bluegrass musician, like deciding to do something that almost guarantees that you'll never get rich, and to do that every day of your life.

LAUNCH: Compare that track to another cover on the album, of Nirvana's "Breed."

EARLE: That's probably as off-the-cuff as anything that Nirvana ever recorded. I don't think Kurt Cobain worked a long time on that lyric. At the same time, it's the kind of thrown-off lyric that can only be written by the real deal. Make no mistake: If Kurt Cobain had lived, he'd be doing stuff that would scare the sh-t out of all of us right now. He was writing melodies in rock music when no one else did. That's why Nirvana was as huge as it was: He was doing something that had been forgotten. And lyrically, he was just starting to scratch the surface.

LAUNCH: Your album Guitar Town was reissued not long ago. How does that record stand up for you now?

EARLE: It's still the record that changed my life. It created a career after I'd been banging around Nashville for a lot of years--suddenly I could do exactly what I wanted to do, and make an embarrassing amount of money while doing it.