NRO Weekend, July 22-23, 2000
Evolution of a Hillbilly
Steve Earle's masterpiece.

By Charles F. Williams

teve Earle was a hillbilly crack addict with five ex-wives and more talent than he knew what to do with. But despite a four-year recording drought, he still had a solid reputation in alternative-country-music circles when he entered jail in 1994 for possession.

Jail didn't hurt him and drug treatment helped; saved his life, not to put too fine a point on it. The short story is this: Earle entered stir a country rocker lost on crack and heroin; he came out a genre-bending artist on a mission to do as much as he could as well as he could in the time left him on this earth. The results have been jaw-dropping: five stellar CDs in five years, each — including his new release, Transcendental Blues — better than the last.

If you like the Beatles circa Rubber Soul/Revolver, if you like Dylan's still-exuberant harmonica and unexpected rhymes and phrasings, if you like Neil Young playing grunge, loud, in an empty barn, late at night, if you like Woody Guthrie storytelling and Irish folk music … well, you won't get exactly that with Earle's latest, but you will get a completely unique sound infused with the best of all those feelings — along with a killer bluegrass number that Earle stuck in the middle of the record for no particular reason other than it's really good.

The good news for those who haven't given him a listen yet is that Transcendental Blues is Steve Earle at the peak of his powers. That means you can start by buying his newest CD and then working your way back — all the way back, to his first record, Guitar Town, released in 1986. You should own them all.

That's what I did. I came upon Earle pathetically late — just about a year ago to the day, in fact — on a hot July night at the Minnesota Zoo south of the Twin Cities.

The Minnesota Zoo hosts a summer concert series in a tiny, intimate amphitheater just in front of the tiger enclosure, and my wife and some friends decided to go. I didn't own any of Earle's albums, but his name had stuck with me along with snatches from some long ago half-heard songs. I remembered the booming riff on Guitar Town. And I remembered another song having something to do with a Vietnam vet taking up where his moonshining daddy had left off. I didn't know where I'd heard it and had no idea what it was called, but I knew it was something I'd once liked well enough to ask somebody who the singer was.

Not a lot to go on, but it was enough, given the dirt-cheap ticket prices and our shared need to hear some kind of live music, and right away. So we went to the zoo, getting there ten minutes late. And then, walking down the path past Monkey Island or some such surrealism, I heard what I hoped was a worker's radio. Because it was bluegrass music, one of the few sounds I had absolutely no interest in hearing. I remember reaching into my pocket to double-check the ticket stub. Steve Earle, it said, and then, sure enough, "and the Bluegrass Dukes."

Well, what the hell.

This might be like watching Spinal Tap's "new phase," but we were there, and if the zoo animals could deal with it, I could too.

Ten minutes later, I was transfixed. I can say that the first third of the show was indeed bluegrass, now that I know what bluegrass really is. Earle and his band played around a lone 1950s-era standup mike, the whole lot of them taking turns wheeling up for solos. It turned out that the songs came from The Mountain, Earle's stunning 1999 bluegrass album, named, aptly enough, after Charles Frazier's great novel, Cold Mountain. The second third was Earle solo, doing a kind of rocking, folking, country blues that I do not believe has ever existed before or since — and I've gone out of my way to listen to a lot of that kind of stuff in my 45 years. Turns out that those songs came from just about everywhere in Earle's oeuvre. The last third of the show was Earle and the band again.

Now, I've been all around the rock shows, boys. Been there in the '70s, been there in the '80s, and been there again in the '90s. But I had never, ever, been part of anything like this. Because this was not only fine music-as-literature (the better read you are, the better you'll appreciate Steve Earle), this was an avalanche of unpretentiously searing … and funny … and haunting songs, as great as folk/rock/country/blues can get. And did I mention that there were a whole lot of these songs coming at us over that incredible 3-hour concert?

As I say, I left wanting to catch them all. And you will too, if you start with Transcendental Blues. And say, isn't that a great title for an album? (Hint: The answer is yes.)