Rock survivor Steve Earle has a cracking tale about the first time he met outlaw country musician Johnny Bush. Bush, who appears on Steve Earle & The Dukes’ potent new album So You Wannabe An Outlaw, was a popular drawcard in San Antonio when an inebriated Earle first crossed his path in 1973.
“I met Johnny Bush when I was 18 or 19 and was hanging out with a member of his band, Joe Voorhees, who was sitting in with me playing five string banjo at a restaurant,” Earle recalls. “After the show we got to the state where we were incapacitated and basically it wasn’t safe for us to drive very far, but we were hungry. Joe says to me, ‘Bush is away in Vegas at the moment and I have the keys to his condo. It’s not far from here so we could go and raid his ice box.’ It sounded like a good idea so we went there and I’m eating a big bowl of Rice Krispies and Joe is on the other side of the table. I see him go as white as a sheet and say, “J-J-J-John!” I turned around and there is Johnny Bush in his bath robe with a .357 Magnum pointed at the back of my head. It was one of those deals where I am kind of lucky to be here, but that’s the night I met Johnny Bush. Every time I’ve met him since then has been more pleasant than that. He later wrote an autobiography and he inscribed the copy he gave me with the line ‘To Steve, I sure am glad I didn’t pull the trigger’…”
After escaping death in San Antonio, Earle arrived in Nashville in the mid-‘70s. It was a time when a cocky young bucks with a few song sketches in their pocket could pitch their efforts to towering figures of country music such as late songwriters Tompall Glaser and Guy Clarke or producers Jack Clement and Pete Drake.
“I got there at a time when you could walk into JJ’s Market, which was a little 24 hour Nashville market, and Waylon Jennings and Tompall Glaser would be on the pinball machines banging the hell out of them. There were three or four studios around town that people hung out. We were the nightshift and we didn’t keep regular hours, so it was a great time to be in Nashville and a great time to be songwriting.”
Like his late idols (and one-time collaborators) Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings, Earle is a gifted raconteur who wears his gritty, personal tales of sobriety, love and redemption like badges of honour. So You Wannabe An Outlaw alternates between fiery swagger and engaging candour. Earle’s first album for Warner Brothers in 20 years careens from the menacing howl of "Fixin’ To Die" through to the contemplative beauty of "Goodbye Michelangelo", stopping off at many memorable musical truck-stops along the way. Rich in country totems such as demons, depression and deliverance, Earle says he drew particular inspiration from Jennings’ 1973 album Honky Tonk Heroes.
“This record is heavily based on Honky Tonk Heroes, which was all Billy Joe Shaver songs recorded in 1972, but it took until ’73 for Waylon to convince RCA to actually put the record out. It’s a really important record to me and it’s a record I listen to every five or six years. I have records that are always on rotation - there’s always a Willie record, a Waylon record, a Merle Haggard and a Johnny Cash record I have on rotation. They are the guys I looked up to and considered to be the country artists who didn’t really care about categorisation.”
Given the Devil rears his head on So You Wannabe An Outlaw’s title track, does Earle have a strong Christian faith or is this simply an artist working with a totem long favoured by outlaw musicians?
“The Devil to me is more of a character,” Earle says. “I believe in God – and I kind of always have - but I’m not a Christian. God’s not Santa Claus, so God doesn’t care if I believe or not. There either is or there isn’t, but I choose to believe there is. I don’t know anyone who took real Lysergic Acid Diethylamide 25 who doesn’t believe in God – or at least didn’t for a minute. I am old enough that it is true of me. The Devil is a great character and if I sat down to work it out I would probably be embarrassed how many songs I have written about the Devil.
“The Devil is in a lot of my songs – I could have a compilation of devil songs!” Earle adds with a laugh. “But I don’t think I’m alone in having that guy in a lot of songs – sometimes as the good guy, sometimes as the bad guy!”
More than 20 years have passed since Earle served jail-time for drug possession in the mid ‘90s, but new song "If Mama Coulda Seen Me" lyrically takes the 62-year-old back to prison. Although it’s sung from an inmate’s perspective, Earle suggests his six months locked in a cell rarely plays on his mind. “Not really, but it left an impression. I have the advantage of having been locked up for a very short period of time, but long enough to know that I don’t want to do it again. When I drive I don’t go fast so there’s no reason to be pulled up by the police, but if feels kind of good to not have anything in the car anymore which I’d have to worry about. Jails are a very negative part of the culture in my country. We lock a lot of people up and people make a lot of money doing it, since we have privatised prisons here. It doesn’t seem to me to be a very good idea and we lock people up for things we shouldn’t. It doesn’t do any good to lock addicts up. It worked for me, but it wasn’t jail that cleaned me up as much as the treatment centre they allowed me to go to while I was in. That was what allowed me to change.
“Now I go into jails in another capacity,” Earle says. “I am somebody who still depends on 12 step programs to keep on an even keel, so I occasionally go into jails to speak or take the meetings.”
With So You Wannabe An Outlaw complete and Australian tour dates currently being pencilled in around next March, Earle’s attention has turned to finishing his autobiography, I Can’t Remember If We Said Goodbye. The musician, who penned the 2011 novel I’ll Never Get Out Of This World Alive, says there has been both laughter and tears while writing his memoir.
“It’s not completed but I am going on it pretty good now. You should see it by the end of the year or early next year. I’m just trying to get it finished because I need the money and don’t want to give the advance back! Getting up and writing about you every day is hard. Writing about characters in my music can be fun, but I get sick of writing about myself.”
Given the number of apocryphal stories pertaining to Earle (Is he really a bonsai aficionado? Is it true he was asked to join Lynyrd Skynrd? Did he seriously tell Bob Dylan to fuck off when the future Nobel Laureate complained about Earle’s on-stage cussing during the pair’s 1989 tour dates together?), I Can’t Remember If We Said Goodbye is likely to be a fascinating read. Earle mentions his deceased friend and musical hero Townes Van Zandt when outlining what we can expect in the memoir.
“I hear people tell stories about Townes Van Zandt as if they were there, and I know they weren’t because I was. There’s an episode in my book that’s been written about in several books where Townes played Russian roulette in Tennessee in ’77 or something. People tell that story as if they know what happened, and I’m part of the story when they tell it, but in truth I was the only one there. It was just me and Townes. Townes is gone now and people have to decide who they are going to believe – me or the guys who weren’t there.
“I’m pretty proud of what I have done so far and it’s a book about recovery as much as anything else,” Earle says. “It kind of has to be, otherwise I wouldn’t be here. I’m pretty proud of what I’ve written and can’t wait for people to see it.”
Steve Earle & The Dukes’ So You Wannabe An Outlaw is out now.