..some new quotes from Steve 'n' Del (and a commentator
familiar 'round these parts)...
Steve Earle, Picking Up on BluegrassWith
'Mountain,' Rocker Scales Skepticism of His Turn to Tradition
By Bill Friskics-WarrenSpecial to The Washington PostSunday, March 14, 1999; Page G01
NASHVILLESteve 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
