Steve Earle: making the personal political

By Charles Hughes, ArtsEtc. Writer

“He’s just singing that same old song that he always sang before / He’s the last of the hardcore troubadors.” -Steve Earle

For the past twenty years, Steve Earle has made some of the best and most interesting music of anybody currently working, constantly shifting directions and styles while still maintaining a solid grounding in the roots from which he sprung.

Singing from a deep and oft-troubled soul, Earle represents the latest continuation of both the hard-travelin’, politically minded spirit of Woody Guthrie and the country wail of Hank Williams.

Of course, he does these things while simultaneously rocking as hard and loud as any of the younger pretenders to his throne. The hardcore troubador returns to Madison Friday night.

Throughout his career, Earle has forged his own path. His big break came in 1986, when his masterful Guitar Town record immediately won him the brief title of “The Savior of Country Music.” Hard-edged traditional country, the songs on Guitar Town tread a fine and glorious line between the rocking of the roadhouse and the stories of the coffeehouse.

Nashville is a fickle mistress, however, and Earle has always been characterized by his dogged refusal to play by seemingly any rules — either in his music or in his life. Releasing three albums of increasingly loud and heavy rock ‘n’ roll while simultaneously spiraling downward into a deep set of drug addictions that he almost didn’t get out of, Earle lost that title, a title that repeatedly proves superfluous anyway.

He gained some hard rock fans, mainly through “Copperhead Road,” a powerhouse, mandolin-driven ballad of a desperate, drug-running outlaw. Even in his current sobriety, “Copperhead Road” is the one song Earle is guaranteed to play at every show; luckily for the fans who have heard it repeatedly, he now precedes the song with an extended, lilting mandolin solo that is merely one indication of his ever-fruitful connection with the traditional Irish music of his ancestors.

Not long after the failure of 1990’s The Hard Way, arguably the closest thing to heavy metal the Nashville establishment ever dared release, the bottom dropped out on Steve Earle, and his life was likely only spared by his imprisonment for drug possession.

Post-jail, Steve Earle has not missed. Upon his release in 1995, he released Train A-Comin’, an album of acoustic material recorded with a true all-star line-up of country music’s best. As stellar as Train A-Comin’ is, though, it consists of covers and songs Earle had written before entering jail; the question of whether he could still write as he had before nagged at everyone, perhaps most of all at Earle himself.

I Feel Alright answered every doubt and concern. A blast of triumphantly unrepentant creative energy, I Feel Alright explodes out of speakers with the force of a former prisoner now finally free of his own demons.

Earle followed up in 1997 with El Corazon, perhaps his greatest masterpiece thus far, a journey through emotions and styles that ranged from crunching, Neil Young-style rock ‘n’ roll to a stunning bluegrass collaboration with The Del McCoury Band, one of the genre’s greatest practitioners.

That brief collaboration came to fruition with The Mountain, an album-length set of songs that speak with both the high, lonesome spirit of the best bluegrass and the wise, roving balladry of Earle’s previous work. (Earle has reworked one of the album’s best songs — “Harlan Man,” the driving story of a militant miner — into a fully electric rocker in his recent tours.)

Although the beautiful partnership of Earle and the McCoury Band came to an end too quickly, for reasons neither clear nor pretty, Earle came firing back in 2000 with Transcendental Blues, yet another example of his wide-ranging and passionate genius.

Over the past few years, political activism has become an increasingly essential element of anything Earle does. Earle, who has described himself as being “to the Left of Chairman Mao,” has been intensely involved in both anti-death penalty and anti-poverty movements, offering his time, his support and — most importantly — his songs.

On Jerusalem, his latest effort, the political becomes central, as Earle delivers a blistering group of dispatches from a world on the brink. The fastest and loudest set of songs he has produced since his near-metal days (or maybe in his entire career), Jerusalem finds Earle as a blazing ideological arsonist, telling the stories and preaching the realities of injustice and struggle in a way that manages to be both clear-headed and unambiguous.

He takes no prisoners, and utilizes perhaps the most diverse group of sounds he’s ever used — from hip-hop-style tape loops to Hammond organ — to hammer the walls down.

Although the album’s tone is unflinching (and therefore unflinchingly bleak at times), Earle ends on a note of hope with the beautiful title track, a slice of political gospel that would make the style’s best exemplars — from Curtis Mayfield to Bruce Springsteen — proud.

In concert, Earle and his band the Dukes rage through his vast catalog with fire and fury, alternating between screaming electric rampages and subtler, semi-acoustic forays. He also throws in the occasional expert cover, often of unlikely material. (During his last Madison performance, he nearly blew the roof off the Orpheum with a thunderous version of Nirvana’s “Breed,” a version that began with Earle and the band extracting a wall of feedback from their amplifiers.)

It is a concert experience that stays with any who have witnessed it, and, with fiery new material now added to his arsenal, Friday’s Orpheum Theatre appearance should be no exception. Don’t miss it.

Steve Earle and the Dukes play with Garrison Starr at the Orpheum Theatre, 216 State St., Friday Feb. 7 at 8 p.m. Tickets are $25 and are available at the Orpheum Theatre box office and all Ticketmaster outlets.