Photo credit: Chad Batka
Steve Earle
These days, singer-songwriter Steve Earle doesn’t have to fret about getting a part-time job to make ends meet. But in the late ’80s, there were at least a few moments of uncertainty. In 1986, he released his debut album, Guitar Town, which became a number one, chart-topping country record. The album’s singles, however, didn’t have much traction in the charts, and his follow-up, Exit 0, released the following year, didn’t have any songs that charted higher than number 30 on the country singles chart.
“It was sort of obvious that country music had decided that I didn’t belong, and I had to find another place to go,” says Earle. “So, I started finding ways to get on rock radio. I needed to get played somewhere else in order to keep having a career. I wanted to do enough that I didn’t have to get a job.” After playing and recording in Nashville, Tenn., for more than a decade (he moved there in 1974) he was suddenly moving west to try his luck in Memphis. It was there that he recorded his third album, Copperhead Road, at the legendary Ardent Studios.
“It’s an important record to me to because I felt like I had to fight to make that record the way that I wanted to make it,” Earle says. “It was fun to go and be in a different environment than the one I was used to in Nashville.” It proved to be a wise decision. Rock radio took notice following the album’s release in 1988 on Uni Records, an imprint of MCA Records. The album’s singles received heavy airplay and turned new listeners onto Earle’s music. In a way, Earle’s fight for survival in making the album is one reason he’s still at it today. “I saw it as an escape from the demise of my career rather than continue to make country records for radio,” he says.
This year, Earle and his longtime band The Dukes will be celebration the album’s 30th anniversary. The album will be performed in its entirety along with songs from the rest of his career, including his latest album, So You Wanna Be An Outlaw. It’s not the first time he’s tried album shows. Two years ago, he celebrated Guitar Town with album-centric shows. “Doing the Guitar Town 30th-anniversary thing was more fun than I thought it would be,” Earle says. “This has been surprising, because some of the songs I haven’t played in a long time. There’s about three songs I’ve played every night, and the rest I haven’t played since 1988. It’s fun to play those songs again.”
The album is a mix of political and love songs. Political songs like “Snakeoil” were written about the Vietnam War but still resonate today “considering our current political situation,” he says. “In the ’80s, people were making art about the whole Vietnam experience,” he says. “I grew up during the Vietnam War. It was my post-Vietnam record.” Earle is flattered that people still enjoy that album, and that it’s influenced generations of musicians. “That’s a degree of success when people take your work and build on that and go on and do their work,” he says.
While he admits he’s a better songwriter now, he’s still proud of the album’s songs.
“I wrote Copperhead Road when I was 33 years old, and I had been in Nashville since I was 19 and learning from really good teachers,” he says. “So, I was a pretty good songwriter then.” The album features The Dukes on many of the tracks, as well as special guests like The Pogues and Telluride (also known as Strength in Numbers). Since Ardent is made of three separate studios, they happened to be recording at the same time R.E.M. was recording their album, Green. R.E.M. even borrowed steel guitar player Bucky Baxter for a couple of songs. Earle says his biggest regret is not having Béla Fleck play banjo on “Nothing but a Child.” Ultimately, though, recording at Ardent is something he’ll always cherish; it’s a moment from his career when he made a defiant turn away from country radio, so he finds it amusing that country radio later came around to it.
“When the line dance craze [in the ’90s] was going on, there was a Copperhead Road line dance,” he recalls. “And I think that’s when country stations embraced it and played it as a recurrent.”
Steve Earle and The Dukes play the Pabst Theater on Friday, March 30, at 8 p.m. with openers The Mastersons.
