By Richard Burnett for Curtains Up
@bugsburnett
The last time I saw Steve Earle he thanked Canada for making him a rock’n’roll star. Once hailed as the saviour of country music back in the mid-’80s, Copperhead Road in 1988 morphed Earle into a bona fide rock star.
“From the beginning I realized I wasn’t going to have a career within the confines of traditional country music,” the Virginia-born Earle told me a couple years ago. “We didn’t do well in country venues but we did well in rock clubs. And Canada was one of the reasons we believed in what we did – our songs were played on rock radio [there]. And when Copperhead Road came out, we began playing arenas. It’s always been my biggest audience, Canada.”
Earle returns to Montreal to headline the Corona Theatre on August 9. But Earle has travelled a long and winding road to get here since Copperhead topped the charts 25 years ago. The seven-time married Earle’s life bottomed out in 1993 when his heroin addiction landed him in prison.
Earle recalls his scariest moment in the slammer. “This one guy got his arm broken over hair clippers, and it became immediately racial because there were only three white people in the 50-man dorm I was in,” Earle says. “Most people in jail are working-class and poor people and, in America, people of colour. That’s how it is. [A friend] told me I didn’t jail well. ‘You make the mistake that we’re living here. But we’re just jailin’.’ After that I did better.”
Since his release in late ’94, Earle’s comeback has been nothing short of extraordinary. And Earle – who performs over 200 concerts every year; has won Grammy Awards for Best Contemporary Folk Album in 2005, 2008 and 2010; and is currently cross-promoting his 2013 album The Low Highway – owes it to his disciplined work ethic.
“It just keeps me out of trouble. And I like my job. It’s better than the alternative.”
Earle’s life has been chronicled in Amos Poe’s documentary film Just an American Boy and in NYC music writer David McGee’s acclaimed biography, Steve Earle: Fearless Heart, Outlaw Poet. Earle is also a published writer; has written and directed a play; and appeared as a recovering drug addict in the HBO series The Wire. He’s dueted with everybody from Lucinda Williams to Sheryl Crow; recorded Johnny Come Lately with The Pogues; and his songs have been used in innumerable movie soundtracks and have been covered by everyone from Johnny Cash to Emmylou Harris.
Another American icon – Elvis Presley – was supposed to record Earle’s song Mustang Wine back in 1975. But, Earle tells me, “Elvis was making a record in Nashville for the first time in several years and, I found out years later, Elvis never left his hotel room, [which] had foil on the windows. I was pissed off at him for years – 10 years after he died! He cost me a lot of money.”
Steve Earle w/ The Mastersons, at the Corona Theatre, August 9 at 8 pm. Click here for more info and tickets.
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Photo courtesy evenko
