The Star-Ledger
http://www.nj.com/
Tuesday, April 26, 2011, 7:32 AM
It’s the early 1960s. John F. Kennedy is president, and the Beatles are still strictly a European phenomenon.
Morphine-addicted Doc Ebersole has lost his license to practice medicine, but ekes out a living offering illegal abortions and other medical services in a San Antonio boardinghouse. Hanging around with him, for some mysterious reason, is the ghost of his old friend Hank Williams, who had died a decade earlier.
That’s the premise of “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive” (Houghton Mifflin, 243 pp., $26), the first novel by singer-songwriter Steve Earle, due to be released on May 12. The title is borrowed from one of country legend Williams’ hits — his last single, in fact, released shortly before he died of a drug- and alcohol-induced heart attack, at 29.
Earle, who has overcome his own struggles with addiction, vividly captures the dead-end reality of an addict’s life — “Doc only just made it down the hall before the next spasm racked him like a toothpaste tube squeezed in the middle, the contents issuing simultaneously from both ends” — and his surprising path toward something better.
“I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive” is also the title of Earle’s new album, released today on the New West label with a cover that looks much like the book cover. And it’s no exaggeration to say that the ghost of Hank Williams looms over it, too.
It’s Earle’s most country-flavored album in years, with lots of fiddle and pedal-steel guitar, and the arrangements tend to be simple. He recorded it with producer T Bone Burnett — a specialist in no-nonsense, roots-oriented projects — and recorded in just six days.
The songs are starkly plainspoken, in the Williams tradition, though they are not about the characters in the book. But the two projects were completed during the same time in Earle’s life — a period when he was dealing with the death of his father — and are linked, in his mind.
“What the book’s about, and where it comes from inside of me … it’s about mortality, and so’s this record,” Earle says in the 18-minute making-of documentary that is included in the deluxe CD/DVD edition of the album.
The album opens with the breezy “Waitin’ on the Sky,” a sigh of relief where Earle looks back on his life (“didn’t know that I was gonna live this long”) and pronounces himself ecstatic to be where he is. There’s an even more rousing tune later (“The Gulf of Mexico”), and some thought-provoking philosophizing in “God is God” (“Something sacred burning in every bush and tree … I believe in God, and God ain’t me”).
But there are also too many drab ballads, sung in a off-puttingly stoic style (“Lonely Are the Free,” “I Am a Wanderer,” “Molly-O”). “Little Emperor” is a several-years-too-late stab at President George W. Bush, while the sentimental love song “Every Part of Me” seems to be borrowed from another album.
This is not, ultimately, one of Earle’s best or most cohesive CDs, though its best moments — including the album-ending New Orleans tribute “This City,” with a subtly majestic horn arrangement by Allen Toussaint — make it worth the effort.
Earle, 56, will perform at a benefit concert at the Beacon Theatre in New York on May 27 and start a full-blown concert tour in June. Over the next few weeks, he will juggle solo-acoustic performances at record stores, to promote “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive” (the CD), with book signings to promote “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive” (the book).
What about “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive” (the song), though?
Earle recorded the Williams gem but, oddly, didn’t put it on the CD, though he did release it as a vinyl single (on Record Store Day, April 16) and is making it available as a bonus track on digital downloads of the album.
He duplicates Williams’ arrangement almost exactly, adding drums but nothing else. As he sings, you can imagine Doc Ebersole humming the song to himself as he faces another dreary day, or the hard-bitten narrators of Earle’s own songs adopting it as an anthem of their own: “You’re looking at a man that’s getting kind of mad/I’ve had a lot of luck but it’s all been bad/No matter how I struggle or strive/I’ll never get out of this world alive.”
Jay Lustig: (973) 392-5850 or jlustig@starledger.com
STEVE EARLE
Where: Wavy Gravy’s 75th-birthday celebration, with Ani DiFranco, Bruce Hornsby, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Dr. John, Jackson Browne, Allison Moorer, Steve Kimock, others, at Beacon Theatre, Broadway and 74th Street, New York
When: May 27 at 8 p.m.
How much: $68.25 to $227.90, benefiting the Seva Foundation. Call (212) 465-6500 or visit beacontheatre.com or ticketmaster.com.
It's the spring of Steve Earle's contentment
By Jerry Shriver, USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/
April 24, 2011
NEW YORK — Steve Earle has delivered plenty of potent messages during his turbulent career, but he has never pricked the public's conscience in as many different ways as he will this spring.
The renegade troubadour-turned-renaissance man is employing a new record, his first novel, a dramatic TV role, a full-blown band tour and behind-the-scenes advocacy work to challenge audiences to think about mortality, redemption, addiction, artistic commitment and other soul-searing questions.
"I grew up counterculture. I'm essentially a hippie, and I'm essentially a folkie," he says of his restless path.
Since his major label debut a quarter-century ago, that route has led him to reinvigorate the outlaw country movement, spend time in jail on drug and weapons charges, kick a longtime drug habit, walk down the aisle seven times, write plays and publish short stories, champion a death-penalty ban — and win three Grammys (amid 14 nominations).
Central to Earle's latest ventures is the song "I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive", the prophetic last single released by tragic country icon Hank Williams before his New Year's Day death in 1953, at age 29. Earle adopts that title for his new T Bone Burnett-produced album, out Tuesday, and for his novel, out May 12 from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Though the projects evolved independently, they embrace similar themes. The novel imagines the tormented life of the doctor who may have given Williams a fatal dose of morphine and who is haunted by Hank's ghost. Some of the album's songs were inspired by the deaths of Earle's father three years ago and a musician friend a year later.
Yet Earle, 56, insists the works are "not about mortality in any negative sense at all. They're about mortality in the sense that, this is the one thing we all have to do. You know what they say about death and taxes. But you have the option to not pay taxes. I have done that. And paid the penalty and interest and survived. You have no choice about death whatsoever."
The album ends on an uplifting note with "This City", a song about the resilience of New Orleans that Earle wrote for last year's first-season finale of the David Simon series Treme on HBO. Earle appeared in three episodes as a street musician named Harley ("me, without a record contract"), and the song was nominated for a Grammy and an Emmy. "It's one of the best songs I've written ... and represents one of a million second chances I've gotten in my life."
Earle reprises that role this season, starting with the third episode May 8. His character mentors Annie, the talented street-musician violinist played by Lucia Micarelli. Like Earle (who appeared in an earlier Simon HBO series, The Wire), Micarelli is a musician who later branched out into acting, and the two clicked immediately.
"As he has been a mentor to Annie, he has become a mentor to me as well," says Micarelli, 27, who wrote a song with Earle that will be featured this season. "He's very obviously a good man, incredibly bright, kindhearted and generous creatively and otherwise. My running joke is, 'C'mon, Uncle Steve, tell us a story!' We all love him."
Earle likely will soak up plenty of love from his longtime fans when he launches an extensive tour beginning June 9 in Seattle. After years of performing solo and acoustic, he'll play with an enhanced version of his old backup band, The Dukes, with whom he last toured in 2005. The "new" outfit is billed as Steve Earle and the Dukes (and Duchesses) featuring Allison Moorer. He and Moorer wed in 2005 and have a 1-year-old son.
What's different about marriage No. 7?
"It's Allison, for one thing," he says. "And I'm sober. I had never been married sober. It's totally different being married when you're sober. Totally different being a new father when you're sober."
So in spite of the sobering themes of his creative output and his work with Amnesty International on the death penalty, Earle proclaims himself "pretty happy. I make an embarrassing amount of money doing something I really love. I live in the greatest city in the world (New York), and I am looking forward when Treme ends to going to New Orleans on my own and feeling like it's my own.
"I've got nothing to complain about."
Lost Highway, Found Writer
Steve Earle conjures Hank Williams in a new album and a coming novel.
By JOHN JURGENSEN
The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/
April 22, 2011
In his past, singer-songwriter Steve Earle has drug addiction, jail and relationships up and down the family tree of American roots music—more than enough material for an autobiography. But that's not Mr. Earle's mode of sharing. "I would never f— myself out of song material by writing a memoir. What a waste," he says in a phone interview from New Orleans, where he was shooting scenes for his recurring role as a street musician in the HBO series "Treme."
Instead, he started with another musician's mythology and used it to write his debut novel, "I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive." In the book, due May 12, the ghost of Hank Williams haunts a doctor who ministered to the addled country star. A new album by Mr. Earle deals with overlapping themes of mortality and spirituality and shares a title, borrowed from a song written by Williams—the last record released before he died on New Year's 1953.
Mr. Earle had long been intrigued by stories of a doctor who treated Williams for alcoholism and chronic back pain up until the singer died in the back seat of his Cadillac en route to a concert. Mr. Earle's editor, after shepherding a collection of Mr. Earle's short stories, "Doghouse Roses," had urged the singer to use his music experience, preferably in the more marketable form of a novel.
By all accounts, Williams's doctor, Toby Marshall, was a quack whose cure for drinking involved lots of chloral hydrate, a sedative. Mr. Earle imagined a different protagonist, a once-privileged physician named Doc Ebersole who bottomed out after Williams's death. On skid row in San Antonio (where Mr. Earle grew up), the doctor shoots dope and gets hectored by Williams's spirit. His slow-motion suicide is interrupted when a young Mexican girl comes to him for an abortion.
Mr. Earle, who stirred controversy in 2002 with a song written from the perspective of "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, says he didn't hesitate to put words in the mouth of the king of country music—or at least a spectral version of him. "I have a connection to Hank Williams that not everyone has," he says, citing their common bond as singer-songwriters who rebelled against the Nashville establishment.
A protégé of the revered (and alcoholic) singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt, Mr. Earle's own substance abuse torched his career in the early 1990s. He served jail time on drug and firearms charges and got sober, leading to a creative rebirth, and has been prolific for the past 16 years.
He drew on his past consumption of "big, big, big doses of heroin and cocaine" to describe Doc's habit. Narcotic highs, during which the character is "balanced precariously on the edge of a tiny flat world," are followed by an almost lethal overdose. Mr. Earle says he personally had "several" such near-death experiences: "I believe I was spared for a reason, I'm also no longer arrogant enough to believe that I'll know what it is."
Writing for the album, due Tuesday, began about three years ago, around the time Mr. Earle's father died and the novel was halfway done. His focus on prose influenced his music process: He delegated much of the instrumentation to the producer, T Bone Burnett, so he could continue refining his lyrics up to the last minute. He says, "I felt like I was hitting on all eight cylinders, as far as the shoving-words-around part of it goes."
That doesn't mean the rest of the novel came easy: "I probably wished I took drugs or drank after a day of working on long-form prose more than any other time in my life."
Write to John Jurgensen at john.jurgensen@wsj.com
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