Posts Tagged ‘Steve Earle’
Seeking Joe Pug: A Discursive Interview
I’ve come to be untroubled in my seeking
And I’ve come to say that nothing is for naught
I’ve come to reach out blind, to reach forward and behind
For the more I seek, the more I’m sought
These lyrics, from Joe Pug’s “Hymn 101,” might as well be the tagline for Pug’s current year-long tour, which has taken him from tooling around the local circuit in his hometown, Chicago, to tailing alt.-country legend Steve Earle’s tour bus on a swing down through Texas and back up toward the Great Lakes. From there, he’ll take a brief sojourn to Norway then take up with Josh Ritter for an upper-Midwest tour before heading west for festival season. “I rent a room in Chicago,” he tells me Tuesday after a set in Richmond, “but I’ve probably slept in it about 20 times this year.”
Folk Wisdom: Steve Earle @ The National
The National, in Richmond, is a decorous little theater with a semiformal air. But on Tuesday night, when Steve Earle played a set of mostly Townes Van Zandt covers from his new tribute album, peppered with anecdotes from his 25-year friendship with its eponymous hero, the venue assumed the close familiarity of a living room.
Earle’s speaking voice—deliberate, avuncular, devoid of pretense—sounds as though it was engineered for the specific purpose of perpetuating folk legends. When he says he got the idea for the tribute album when one night from his tour bus he saw Van Zandt’s ghost riding his old horse Amigo through the Colorado fog, you take him at his word. At Tuesday night’s show in Richmond, Earle deployed folk’s discursive oral tradition in the service of contextualizing Townes.
Weekend Music Round-Up
Friday
- X, Steve Soto & the Twisted Hearts. 9:30 club. $25. All ages.
- Alex Rhoads, Midnight Ride. Bangkok Blues. Call for price.
- Dean & Britta, Cheval Sombre. Black Cat. $15. All ages.
- Viva Voce, Cut Off Your Hands. IOTA Club & Cafe. $15. +21.
- The Kennedys. Jammin’ Java. $18.
- Threat Signal w/ The Agonist, Flatline, Thy Will Be Done, Cab Ride Home, Kysmet, Murder the Element. Jaxx. $12–$14. All ages.
- Capital Jazz Fest 2009: Alonzo Bodden, Natalie Cole, Fourplay. Merriweather Post Pavilion. $39.50–$100.
- Rock Solid: The Champions Production Hip-Hop and RNB showcase w/ Crimestoppers, City Limits, and the Ian Walters Project with Angel B. The Red & The Black. $8. +21.
- A Place To Bury Strangers, Caverns, True Womanhood. Rock and Roll Hotel. $12. All ages.
- Like Bells, Kadman, Stella Schindler. Velvet Lounge. $8. +21.
- PJ Harvey and John Parish. Warner Theatre. $45.
- Sunsets with a Soundtrack: The U.S. Army Concert Band. West Steps U.S. Capitol. Free.
- John Prine, Steve Earle. Wolf Trap. $25–$42.
- Liberation Dance Party w/ Natalie Portman’s Shaved Head. DC9. $8. +18.
- Subatomic Sound System, Dubblestandart, Jahdan Blakkamoore, Paul Zasky. Comet Ping Pong. $10. All ages.
Album Review: ‘Townes,’ by Steve Earle
Country musician Steve Earle once famously pronounced Townes Van Zandt “the best songwriter in the whole world, and I’ll stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.” So how come the only people who ever give Townes his propers are his contemporaries and the odd independent filmmaker? Maybe because even when started started writing iconic country-folk standards, he stayed holed up in a tin-roofed shack outside Houston, planting flowers and playing to dive crowds. Maybe because his songs usually only became famous after being covered by other, more entrepreneurial country stars. Or maybe because his ambling melodies have been ground to grains beneath the tire treads of the endless Chevy commercial that is modern country music.
Earle has not forgotten Townes, though; and he’s doing his best to make sure the rest of us don’t either. His latest LP, Townes, is a 15-song memorial to his mentor. The album revisits some of Townes’ most characteristic tunes–including “Mr. Mudd and Mr. Gold,” which was the first Van Zandt song Earle ever played (he did it the night they first officially met, to stop Townes from heckling him), and “To Live is to Fly,” enduring ballad that doubles as the late singer’s epitaph.
