Photo credit: Kellen Nordstrom
Thursday night at the Turner Hall Ballroom, Steve Earle admitted to the delusion of seeing the svelte, clean-shaven 20 year-old he once was instead of his current, heftier, bearded 60 year-old self when he looks into mirror. But he need not harbor any misconceptions about the state of his singing.
That voice is fine enough for him to have led the current iteration of his on-and-off-again band, The Dukes, through nearly 30 songs that spanned a career encompassing the blues he has most recently explored, country of mainstream and alt varieties, rock of the same two descriptors, driving Celtic folk and even a taste of metal. Acting as the aesthetic glue to his musical wanderings, Earle's distinctively rough voice flatters his gift for sensing the connections among the genres in which he has immersed himself in a career exceeding three decades.
And though his voice seems to have hardly aged since his mid-’80s national breakthrough, the inflection can be lower key in some cases. The urgency that made "Guitar Town" sound so vital when it became Earle's biggest country radio hit in ’86 has been transformed into something all the more autobiographically matter of fact. "Copperhead Road" may have been an anomalous story song when it cracked rock radio's top 10 a couple years later, but it's now become apiece with the narrative gist of much of his catalog that has since followed. In a move signaling the breadth of his artistic life since those days those two songs figured nigh unceremoniously in the middle of his and The Dukes' set.
Blues is where Earle began and, in a way, ended the evening. Numbers from 2015's Terraplane such as "Baby's Just as Mean as Me" and "King Of The Blues," prefaced as a B.B. King tribute, inspired the bandleader to explain how his Texas upbringing made putting together a blues album a goal with a high bar set by forebears in the music from his state such as Lightnin’ Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb. Those pieces were in rousing, electrified arrangements. More autobiographical numbers about his days of drug addiction—and the exact length of his subsequent sobriety—and recent divorce from his latest wife, Allison Moorer, were rendered in sparser acoustic arrangements, the better to emphasize Earle's emotional range.
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The group assayed a heavier, psychedelic bluesiness toward the end of their set in renditions of ’60s rock chestnuts "Hey Joe" and "Wild Thing," both strongly informed by Jimi Hendrix's iterations of both. The latter, the last song in the second of two encore sets, was made especially Hendrixian as the Earle and his Dukes left the stage with a lengthy squall of reverb before the lights went up.
That kind of move could be interpreted as a jump from the sublime to the amiably ridiculous, as not long before the bludgeoning of "Thing," Earle got went into his political mode, prefacing his anthemic song used in Fahrenheit 9/11, "The Revolution Starts Now," with a none too complimentary shout-out to Scott Walker and a lengthy preface to their recent digital single about Confederate flag controversies, "Mississippi, It's Time."
The Mastersons, featuring two of members of Earle’s band, lead guitarist Chris Masterson and his wife, fiddler/keyboardist/guitarist Eleanor Whitmore, opened the night with folk-pop ranging wide in sentiment and melodic construction, following an introduction from a proud and grateful Earle.
