Anybody going Monday? We're opting for Damien Jurado/Rosie Thomas, given we will have guests, the price being cheaper, and having seen Steve too many times to count.
If anybody goes, I'd love to hear a report. Apparently there are a few other acts playing with him on this tour.
Spoken Words Don't Fail Earle
By Geoffrey Himes
Special to The Washington Post
Friday, November 21, 2003; Page WE08
IN THE WRONG hands, spoken song introductions can be the worst part of a concert -- a time-wasting delay for the audience and an "um . . . well"-filled chore for the performer. But in the right hands, those introductions can be the best part, every bit as entertaining and as moving as the songs themselves. Who can ever forget Arlo Guthrie's hilarious monologue before "Alice's Restaurant Massacree," for example, or Solomon Burke's over-the-top sermon within "It's Just a Matter of Time"?
The most interesting parts of the new documentary movie about Steve Earle, "Just an American Boy," and the two-CD live album of the same name, are the spoken bits from his live shows. Whether he's joking about getting beat up by junior-high bullies in his home town of Schertz, Tex., or speaking passionately about the death penalty, these short monologues are crafted with the same pithy detail and delivered with the same well-honed timing as the songs.
"If you're going to make a live album," Earle declares, "you have to do something that separates it from the studio versions of the songs. So we built this album around the monologues. Some of them were related to the political vibe of the record, and some were just stories I've been telling for years. I've been telling that story about Schertz for 10 years."
That story is a comic tale about hitchhiking around Texas in the '60s. It mentions the time he showed up at his parents' house only to find that they had moved without telling him. It describes a return visit to the town where the aforementioned bullies had once harassed him. When he arrived, however, none of the ex-bullies remembered him. Only the cops did, and they gave him a warm place to stay overnight.
The story sets up the song written in jail that night, "Hometown Blues," a bouncy country-swing tune that reminds us, "Won't nothing bring you down like your home town." The song gives the monologue a satisfying payoff, and the monologue gives the song a personal context it otherwise lacks. The combination of the two creates something new.
That story, like the others, is slightly different on the album than it is in the film. That's because the CD set is taken from shows this past April, while the movie was shot earlier between October and February. It reminds us that Earle, like most performers, tells the same stories almost every night on tour, just as he sings the same songs. But he alters them a bit at each show, according to the mood and inspiration of the moment.
"I think you'll find that's true of everyone," he says. "A monologue starts out as something spontaneous, and if people laugh or get all quiet or start cheering, you keep it. If they respond to something, you use that bit again and again. You keep refining it more and more till just the good stuff is left. It's a lot like songwriting.
"I had never written them down or recorded them before. So it was interesting to go back and listen to all the monologues from this last tour and pick out the best ones. We didn't necessarily pick the ones that went with the song that followed; we picked the best monologue performance and then the best song performance. You're looking for timing; you're looking for one that tells the whole story clearly."
Earle comes from a tradition of Texas singer-songwriters who were known for telling stories between songs. His two primary mentors, Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark, were famous for telling deliciously terrible jokes and autobiographical anecdotes between songs. But back in 1985, when Earle was still working on his landmark debut album, "Guitar Town," which was released the following year, he discovered another storytelling role model.
"Bruce Springsteen's 'Born in the U.S.A.' tour was going on while I was making that record," he recalls. "I knew I'd have to play some big places when the record came out, and I was trying to figure out how to go from a coffeehouse to a basketball arena. I went to see Springsteen in Murfreesboro, [Tenn.,] and he turned an arena into a coffeehouse.
"And he did it by telling those stories, whether it was that over-the-top shaggy dog tale about finding the pink Cadillac in the Garden of Eden, or the one about his father, or the one about how Woody Guthrie wrote 'This Land Is Your Land' because he hated 'God Bless America.' He could grab your attention by whispering. As far as putting on a performance, he was the guy at the time."
Like Springsteen, Earle mixes his comic monologues with more pointed political commentary. He will be emphasizing the latter when he plays the 9:30 club Monday as part of the "Tell Us the Truth Tour" with England's punk-socialist troubadour Billy Bragg, former Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello (performing as the Nightwatchman), Lester Chambers of the Chambers Brothers, singer-songwriter Jill Sobule and comedian-actress Janeane Garofalo.
"The purpose of this tour," Earle explains, "is to raise awareness about media consolidation and how that affects the quality of information we get through the news media and the quality of art we get from the cultural media. We really are living in times when dissent seems socially unacceptable, and I find that really scary. And I don't blame it all on the Right; they're who they are and they'll always be that way. I blame it on us in the Left; we went to sleep.
"So we'll be talking about that. But mostly we'll be playing music. I get to sing 'Time Has Come Today' every night with Lester Chambers. How cool is that?"
As part of the show, Earle will most likely sing one of his best political songs, "Christmas in Washington." On the new live CD, Earle begins the song by himself, patiently picking out the hypnotic acoustic guitar figure. Before he starts singing, however, he explains that the song really isn't about Christmas, or even Washington. It's about his heroes, and he wishes it could have been a longer song so he could have fit in more of them.
"Joan Baez could have been in this song," he drawls on the track. "She's my hero, because she sang 'Joe Hill' at Woodstock for her husband, who couldn't be there that day because he was locked up for no other reason than they couldn't shut him up and they couldn't make him kill anybody. So she gave him a voice in front of 400,000 people. Abbie Hoffman could have been in this song. He's my hero, because he said, and I quote, 'What we did back during the '60s is unprecedented in history because for the first time a people rose up against their own army and said, "We don't want it," and the army stopped.' "
Earle goes on to cite George Ryan, the Illinois governor who commuted the sentences of everyone on the state's death row, and Patrick Leahy, the Vermont senator who defended the patriotism of antiwar dissenters. He declares that in times of trouble we need heroes who can show us the way with their courage and integrity. By the time he gets around to singing the song's evocation of Woody Guthrie, Emma Goldman and Joe Hill, he has given that tradition a contemporary context.
"The Vietnam War ended not when I opposed it," Earle argues, "because I always opposed it. It ended when my father opposed it. We disagreed about a lot of things, but when we went to see the 'Woodstock' movie together, he was struck by Joan Baez singing 'Amazing Grace.' He had thought she was the Phony Joanie in the Al Capp cartoon, but he saw how sincere and talented she was, he changed his mind about her. He realized he wasn't getting the real deal from the media and maybe he should change his mind about some other things, too.
"Music can and does make a difference. Seeing 400,000 who mostly opposed the war in one cow pasture made people on my side think that maybe we could change things, and made people on the other side realize that they couldn't ram it down our throats."
