With 'Mountain,' Rocker Scales Skepticism of His Turn to Tradition
By Bill Friskics-Warren
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, March 14, 1999; Page G01
NASHVILLE—Steve Earle has been a lot of things since he started making music: hard-knocked troubadour, rockabilly punk, tattooed arena-rocker, real-life outlaw. It's tempting to write off these phases as caprice or artifice, but each has been an expression of his innate rebelliousness.
His new album, "The Mountain" (E-Squared), a collaboration with the Del McCoury Band, which joins him for shows at the Birchmere on Wednesday and Thursday, finds Earle remade yet again. On the album cover, he sports banker's pinstripes instead of his usual biker black. And he plays bluegrass, a musical genre so traditional that for many of its fans, drums and amplifiers are anathema.
It's a confounding move, but there's nothing ironic or false about it. As his heartfelt liner notes attest, Earle loves bluegrass, so much so that he slogged his way through weekly picking sessions, what he calls "bluegrass boot camp," to hone his skills as a guitarist.
"Bluegrass is the original alternative country music," says Earle, sitting at his desk at E-Squared Records, the independent Nashville label that he runs with former Jason & the Scorchers manager Jack Emerson. "It was the very first music that the industry here targeted and marginalized intentionally. It was a conscious decision."
Country radio's prejudice against traditional music is actually a bit of a tradition itself. By the early '60s, even the father of bluegrass, Bill Monroe, couldn't get his songs played on country stations. Prior to that, country deejays wouldn't think twice about spinning the latest Monroe or Flatt and Scruggs records alongside hits by honky-tonkers Hank Williams and Kitty Wells.
"God bless Chet Atkins's heart and Owen Bradley's heart," says Earle, referring to the architects of the uptown Nashville Sound of the '50s and '60s. "But they wanted a larger, more urban audience, and the banjo was the first thing that went. It sounds like a conspiracy theory, but believe me, it's true."
Earle, 44, is no recent convert to bluegrass. When he was 7, he saw Monroe play at the Grand Ole Opry. And he gravitated toward grassers when he moved to Nashville in 1974 as the bass player in Guy Clark's band. "I was part of a little circle of Texas songwriters, and we hung out with bluegrass players because they were the other bohemians," Earle recalls. "They were the other outsiders."
Earle lost touch with the bluegrass community--and everyone else for that matter--around 1990, when he bottomed out on drugs for several years. Toward the end of 1994, he served 60 days for possession of heroin in Nashville's Criminal Justice Center--and since then, he says, he's been clean.
Earle's 1995 all-acoustic "Train a Comin,' " though, found him turning to the bluegrass fold. The album featured several pickers well known to fans of mountain music. One of them, Peter Rowan--who like Del McCoury is an alum of Monroe's Blue Grass Boys--became Earle's mentor; another, the late Roy Huskey Jr., became one of his closest friends. Earle dedicates "The Mountain" to Huskey, while a cast of all-stars pays tribute to him on the album's closing track, "Pilgrim," a song Earle wrote the morning of the upright bass player's funeral.
Earle first hooked up with the Del McCoury Band in 1997, when he invited the band to play on "I Still Follow You Around," a bluegrass song that appears on his otherwise rock album "El Corazon." Before that, the McCourys had recorded a version of one of Earle's tunes, "If You Need a Fool"; Earle had also used Ronnie McCoury, the premier bluegrass mandolin player of the '90s, on his own recording sessions as well as those of acts he has produced.
In the fall of '97, Earle and the McCourys then played a gig together at Nashville's Station Inn. (Earlier this month, they sold out four shows there in less than a half-hour.) "That was when I decided that this record was going to be a bluegrass record," says Earle. "Playing with Del and the boys that night was just the most fun I've ever had."
That night the two acts huddled around a single microphone. Del's high, lonesome wail and Earle's nicotine rasp made for unlikely but affecting harmonies. Even more striking was the way the bodies of the six pickers would weave in and out as they took their solos in front of the mike.
Earle and the McCourys recorded "The Mountain," an album that conveys the immediacy of their live shows, in much the same way. "Steve was on one side of the room, and we were all lined up across from him," explains Ronnie McCoury, 34. "That's how we recorded. There were no overdubs, really."
The biggest adjustment, says Del McCoury, 60, has been working with just one microphone live, something that Earle and the McCourys will do throughout their current tour. "It adds another element to what we do," the elder McCoury says. "It kind of changes things for everybody. You see, we have a little thing that we go through--how we move onstage. Having one more person up there makes things a little trickier."
For his part, Earle has had to adjust to playing more up-tempo. "A lot of people don't know it," he says, "but bluegrass is really hard music to play. It's really demanding for me."
Earle may have a lot of respect for bluegrass, but some of the genre's purists don't have much respect for him. They disapprove of the McCourys' working with him, in part because Earle didn't grow up playing the music.
"There was a bluegrass convention here in town," says Ronnie McCoury, "and this guy came up to me and said, 'We heard y'all is goin' out with a rock group.' And I said, 'Well, we're going out on the road with a fellow by the name of Steve Earle. He's kind of a country rocker. He had a couple songs on country radio back in the '80s, and he's made rock-and-roll records. He's a great songwriter.' The guy just looked at me and said, 'Yeah, that's what we heard. You was goin' out with a rock group.' "
Hard-core bluegrass fans have responded to "The Mountain" in one of two ways, says Jon Weisberger, a banjo player and disc jockey from Kenton County, Ky. "There are people who don't like it, wish it hadn't been made, think it's not bluegrass, think Steve Earle is a terrible singer, and don't understand why Del McCoury would be wasting his time with something like this," he says.
Earle's vocals seem to be the main sticking point with this batch of detractors. "Most lead singers in bluegrass have clear-sounding voices," Weisberger explains. "Earle's got a real rough and gritty voice. When heard in a bluegrass musical context, it can be kind of jarring. And his phrasing doesn't go very well with the kind of harmony singing that's typical in bluegrass, which is why there are no trios on the album.
"The other reaction that I've heard from a significant number of people," continues Weisberger, "is 'I don't like it, but it's good for bluegrass.' "
Indeed, whereas sales of 30,000 make a bluegrass CD a hit, Earle's albums regularly move 100,000 or more units, numbers that only the two biggest stars in bluegrass, Ricky Skaggs and Alison Krauss, can match. Touring with Earle will also introduce the Del McCoury Band to a wider audience, doubtless boosting sales of their superb new disc, "The Family" (Ceili). And as for their brand-new album with Earle, "The Mountain" sold 10,000 copies in its first week, while debuting at No. 133 on the Billboard album chart--no mean feat for a bluegrass CD.
Earle knows that the circle-the-wagons mentality that characterizes some bluegrass fans has kept the genre alive since the country music industry abandoned it three decades ago. On bgrass-l, a general purpose computer "listserve" for the discussion of bluegrass music and related topics, subscribers have even suggested that Earle is riding the McCourys' coattails.
"I don't think intolerance is healthy," says Earle of those he refers to as "bluegrass police."
"I'm probably more against that than I am [against] anything. But I do understand it," he says.
Still, Earle is convinced that he has something to offer bluegrass. "What I can contribute to that community is songs," he says. "Bluegrass needs new songs."
Del McCoury, a fine writer in his own right, agrees. "Bluegrass needs Steve and the material he brings to it," he says. "The songs make the music. You have to have new stuff all the time."
"Bluegrass bands have, for so many years, rehashed the old material," adds Ronnie McCoury, citing Krauss as an exception. "That's probably what's held this music back for such a long time. You don't grow if you just redo Bill Monroe songs, or if you just redo Stanley Brothers or Flatt and Scruggs songs."
But a chunk of bluegrass's core audience is what Weisberger calls "really self-referential."
"The nearest equivalent would be if 90 percent of rock-and-roll records that came out had a Beatles song on it or a Rolling Stones song on it," Weisberger explains. "That just doesn't happen. It does in bluegrass. Not only that, a lot of what gets written, the newer stuff, just isn't very good. We're on the doorstep of the 21st century. When you write a song about a little old log cabin home, it's hard to do it with meaning and sincerity."
Earle says that he wants "to write just one song that would be performed by at least one band at every bluegrass festival in the world."
Even if he can't achieve that, his foray into bluegrass appears to be more than just a fling.
"My next record's gonna be a rock record--I know that simply because I've written half of it," Earle says. "But I'll be playing bluegrass for the rest of my life. There's probably not a genre of music I don't listen to, but there's probably not one that speaks to me the way that bluegrass does at its best."
