Singer-songwriter Steve Earle has always had plenty to say, whether we were ready to hear it or not. Before his Tuesday night show at Stable Hall, the Current was invited to sit down with the Americana icon backstage for an interview.
The San Antonio native was playing in the hometown of his childhood on his extensive North American Fifty One Years of Songs and Stories summer tour. He also recently released a single with Los Lobos and collaborated on a music video for the song “City of Immigrants” with character actor Steve Buscemi.
The Current wasn’t just there for the return of San Antonio’s prodigal son. Ahead of the concert, Earle received the city of San Antonio’s highest arts honor. Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones presented the performer with the Emissary of the Muses award — a highfalutin’ commendation handed off in the Green Room.
Earle was originally supposed to receive the Emissary of the Muses in front of the crowd during his show, but no matter. Deflating the pomp and circumstance was appropriate for an artist of the people like Earle, who’s always rejected the status quo in favor of a more equitable future.
In a fast but fiery interview, Earle shared his memories of growing up in the Alamo City, attending school (hell, he even named teachers) and playing his first gigs at coffee shops when he wasn’t old enough to perform at bars. Eventually, he went on a spirit quest in search of his idol Texas troubadour Townes Van Zandt. He found him in Houston and quickly became enveloped in his world, as captured in the lauded documentary Heartworn Highways.
Since then, Earle has recorded 21 studio albums and earned three Grammys. He’s also carved out a niche as one of the fiercest voices in Americana, roots, rockabilly and folk music. Earle has never shied away from sharing his pro-choice, pro-immigrant views. His staunch anti-war stance is inextricably linked to growing up in Military City, USA, where he played gigs for medics at Fort Sam Houston during the Vietnam War.
Over the years, Earle has also spoken out against the death penalty and penned songs about poverty and homelessness. Along the way, he also collaborated with the Pogues — fellow outspoken folkies of the Irish punk variety.
After Earle’s conversation with the Current, he performed to a seated crowd in front of his personal logo — a hammer and sickle behind a pirate’s skull. This is who he is all the time.
With Earle, questions are almost irrelevant. You just let him talk.
How does it feel to be an Emissary of the Muses?
Well, I don’t know what that means. I just heard about this yesterday. So, look, this is where I’m from, and it’s a pretty powerful environment to grow up in musically. I mean, it always was. It’s weird, because it had a reputation for being not a great place to be a singer-songwriter trying to play original material. It never was. You found out really quickly there were other places in Texas where you could go and play your own songs easier than you could here. And I was writing songs pretty young.
So I went to Houston first, and Austin was never as much of a thing for me. I spent some time there, but I never lived there. It was like weather’s too good, girls too pretty, dope’s too cheap. I won’t ever get anything done here. So I went to Houston first and then Nashville. I met Townes when I was 17, so that had a lot to do with it. I knew where he was. I followed him over there.
I played the Gate House, which was downtown on Fourth Street, which was the only coffee house around. And I couldn’t play bars. I was too young. I was 14, 15 when I started doing that. And I did the Service Club two in Fort Sam Houston, which is the middle of MTC, the medical training unit there. And it’s the Vietnam War going on. And a lot of the guys that were there in that program were COs. They were Conscientious Objectors. And they was told, “OK, you don’t want to kill anybody. You can go patch people up.” Which was a little mean, because in a guerrilla war, putting a cross on somebody, it’s like putting a target on their back simply because you’re not going to outnumber your enemies. So you have to fight the infrastructure. So you aim at officers and medical staff, and that kind of stuff is a really effective way to fight a guerrilla war.
But there were some people that were really talented and they — with some help from some people outside — put together a coffee house. … And they gave me two gigs that I could get into because they didn’t serve alcohol. And then later it became known as a metal town. And that’s just because Ozzy pissed on the Alamo.
So, Los Lobos and I have got this single out right now. Our connection is really San Antonio more than there’s anything else, because the very first record they recorded just in an anthem that Flaco [Jimenez]’s father had written. I knew Doug [Sahm] and I knew Auggie [Meyers] long before I made records. And when Doug first came back from California, we lived all over the place. We rented. So we lived in Schertz, Kirby, lived on the South Side. I went to Rogers Junior High — that’s Highland District.
And then by high school, I went to Holmes, and I was only there part of two years, so I didn’t finish either year. But George Chambers was my science teacher in high school. He had the best local country band around. The only teacher in my high school that drove a Mercedes convertible, because he did really good on the weekends. And he played over there, he played in Houston.
Willie [Nelson] used [Chambers’] band when he was in town before he moved back to Texas. And the other guy was a guy named Vernon Carroll, who taught drama. And those are the only two classes I didn’t get kicked out of. And Vernon, actually to this day — he’s retired now, but he started a theater company in Laredo that basically existed to teach kids that were learning to speak English by learning and performing theater.
You recently worked with Steve Buscemi on “City of Immigrants,” and I know that’s a love letter to New York City but it’s also resonant here.
It was when it was written 21 years ago, but then me and Steve Buscemi, we made a video just to get it heard again. And that’s where I live. But the new single with Los Lobos is about a different [kind of] view of immigration that I grew up with here in San Antonio. The only thing I ever did besides whine on the guitar was frame houses. And I did that here for minimum wage, which was $1.60 an hour. And I figured out that working with other guys that worked like me, I’d never make over $80 a week because they wouldn’t work past 3:30 in the afternoon. And on the crews that were owned and operated by Chicanos, they would work until it got dark. And so I saw $100 in one place for the first time in my life doing that. And you also got better lunch. You didn’t get a cold bologna sandwich.
The blessing and the curse of San Antonio is the food.
My boss’s wife would show up with two thermoses full of carne guisada and a stack of tortillas. And I would look at that bologna sandwich, and they’re making tacos. And finally Cruz said, “You don’t have to eat that shit.”
I heard tell that you were a barefoot hippie during those days.
Oh, I was — absolutely. Well, not barefoot all the time, because I was a hippie who wore cowboy boots as often as not. It was just one of the reasons I got my ass kicked. Everybody wanted to kick my ass. Yeah, my hair was pretty long, but I lived out on the northwest side by that age and I lived probably 15 minutes from Floore’s Country Store. And when Willie came back and started playing there all the time, I wasn’t really supposed to be in there, but you could get in there. And I knew George Chambers. That was a lot of it, because they had practically the house band there in those days.
It was funny, because in high school, kids were sort of, you either wore cowboy clothes or you had long hair and the music was segregated to some degree, but Willie Nelson kind of changed all that. When he came back in ’71, it was like I was standing in a cow pasture with guys that used to kick my ass listening to the same bands in a very short period of time. And I don’t think anybody could have imagined Texas being the way people perceive it today when I was growing up. I thought it was set for being in Southern California or something, because nobody could imagine a Republican governor when I was growing up. And Anne Richards wasn’t that long ago.
Right?
Texas is terminal. It’s incurable. And I’ve never come back, and Guy Clark never came back. We left, and we left because we had something we wanted to do. But there’s no cure for it. There’s nothing you can really do about it.
See, this is exactly what I wanted to talk to you about. Political observers say Texas is in play. If you look at all the polls, Talarico is ahead of Paxton. Vickki Goodwin is ahead of Dan Patrick for Lieutenant Governor. Gina Hinojosa is neck-and-neck with Abbott. So what if Texas does turn blue? Would you finally come home?
Oh no, because I’m a New Yorker. I live there on purpose. I’ve been there 21 years. I was in Nashville for 33 years before that, but it’s because I want to do music for theater, and that’s where you go to do that. I also have a 16-year-old with autism, and there’s a special needs school there. It don’t exist anywhere else in this country. So, we’re in New York until he ages out of that school anyway, which I’ll probably be on the planet just long enough to get him through that school until he ages out.
You’re about to meet our mayor and she’s an out lesbian and a Filipino woman. I’ve read your interview with TPR where you said, “I want to walk out my front door and see a same-sex, mixed-race couple holding hands and not being afraid.” And we had our first trans councilman this past year, if only on a temporary basis. We have several queer council members currently. How does the San Antonio of today compare with the San Antonio of your memories?
[The only thing] I remember anybody saying about anybody being gay in San Antonio back then was, “Let’s go to Travis Park and roll queers.” I heard that suggested to me by people when I was growing up. And I think some of them probably would’ve gotten down there and gotten their asses kicked and never tried to do that again, because it became pretty militant down there because of people having to protect themselves. But things do change. And like I said, Texas as a whole was headed in a whole different direction. Then there was this about-face and it was about money. Unfortunately, we’re not a nation of revolutionaries. It was a revolution not of workers, but a revolution of rich farmers that didn’t want to pay their taxes. And it’s kind of still in our DNA.
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