The Chris Moeller Archives

Steve Earle and the Ghost of Townes Van Zandt - The A Train Concert Series - by Aaron Moeller

My concert series has long been made possible by Chris' blog (and your generous donations) but never during my extensive travels have I been able to simply walk across the street to attend a concert. On Tuesday night, however, the great Steve Earle performed at the Hoyt Sherman Theatre in Des Moines, which is literally across the street from the blog's home offices. (In this economy, Chris was thrilled to avoid paying for another multi-state road trip.) With apologies to any local blog readers who may not have been included in the plans to attend the show, there is still the opportunity to upgrade to the CM Blog Platinum Club status. With just a few clicks of the mouse (and a credit card number), you can join our monthly mailing list. (Sorry again, Anonymous.)

Back in the mid-90's when Bruce Springsteen was in mid-career semi-retirement, I was convinced Steve Earle was doing Bruce Springsteen better than Bruce was. A great songwriter and an icon of roots rock music armed with dramatic and cinematic songs - not to mention, a thrilling live performer with a loud band - Steve Earle has never approached Springsteen's success, but he's made a unique name for himself and has since gone way past the Bossman in his outspoken political messages. Joe Pug, Earle's Tuesday night opening act, said he'd learned three things on this solo acoustic tour with Steve: one can walk the whole stage with just his guitar, don't shave your beard until the tour is over, and if you don't piss off some Republicans, you're doing something wrong.

This tour is in support of Earle's new album, Townes, a tribute to his late mentor, Townes Van Zandt, a fellow singer/songwriter from Texas. "Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world and I'll stand on Bob Dylan's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that," Earle once said of his hero. A half generation older than Earle, Van Zandt died in Nashville on New Year's Day, 1997, when the Moeller boys and their dad happened to be passing through Austin, Texas, Townes' frequent base of operations.

"Townes was a great hero, but a horrible role model," Earle has also said of Van Zandt. Van Zandt was born into a wealthy family but spent large parts of his life homeless, sleeping on friends' floors. A manic depressive who went through months of electro-shock therapy in the '60's, he was an alcoholic and heroin addict for most of his adult life. Earle, who was barely 20 years old when he started following Van Zandt around in the mid-70's, was similarly a heroin junkie for years and missed 2 years of performing and recording in the 90s when he wound up spending a few months in the gray-bar hotel. Known as the "Hardcore Troubadour", Earle's been married seven times. He's also a published short story author who's close to releasing a novel. He has written a play about female death row inmate Karla Fay Tucker and he even portrayed Walon, Bubble's rehab sponsor on HBO's The Wire, the greatest show ever on TV.

And keep in mind, Earle was enough of a mainstream country star in the '80's and early '90's that his shows still invite country fans who may not be completely aware of his outspoken politics. I spotted two NASCAR hats and no shortage of southern rock t-shirts, ala the Allman Brothers, etc. There's a pretty fine line between red and blue in all American music, regardless of where the musicians themselves come down.

I didn't know the first song Steve played on this night, but I knew the rest that followed. Having recorded a tribute album, it was cool having had an intimate relationship with even the songs from the new release. "Colorado Girl" is an age-old Townes tune of lost love (a familiar theme for the brooding Van Zandt).

"If I had a nickel I'd find a game/ If I won a dollar I'd make it rain/ If it rained an ocean I'd drink it dry, then lay me down/ Dissatisfied", Van Zandt wrote in Rex's Blues, perhaps his greatest composition, which segued into "Fort Worth Blues", the song Earle wrote on tour in Europe twelve years ago when he learned of his friend's passing back in the States: "They'd shut down all the honky tonks tonight/ They'd say a prayer too/ If they only knew". I'll always remember a Townes Van Zandt tribute episode of Austin City Limits shortly after his death and the image of singer/songwriter Nanci Griffith with tears running down her cheeks as Steve sang his eulogy. A double shot to buckle the knees at this show- two of the most mournful songs ever written.

"Pancho and Lefty" was by far the most popular song Van Zandt ever wrote. It was a country charts #1 hit when recorded as a duet in the '80's by Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard, though it's been said the royalties only served to keep Van Zandt knee-deep in gambling funds and illicit substances when he most needed to start sobering up.

"Tom Ames' Prayer" is one of the first songs Earle wrote when he got out of the big house. It's about a wayward youth who takes to robbing banks. He ultimately finds himself in a Butch-and-Sundance-in-Bolivia-style showdown and wondering if the thoughts he's having are his first chat with the Almighty or just a conversation with the voice in his head.

"Brand New Companion" is a Van Zandt nod to Lightin' Hopkins-style acoustic blues. Earle explained the concept behind writing a good blues song. "The first line presents the problem to overcome, the second line reiterates the problem, the third line fails miserably to resolve the problem... all set to a 12-bar progression, with a beat."


"Just when every ray of hope was gone
I should have known that you would come along
I can't believe I ever doubted you
My old friend, the blues..."


...are some great lines written by Steve Earle, who shares his late pal's penchant for sad, resigned lyrics.

"Taneytown" is a song about a black kid who gets caught on the wrong side of the tracks late at night and barely escapes with his life. It's a rocking song on Steve Earle's El Corazon album, but it was a gripping cautionary tale in this solo setting. Earle also wrote an extended prose version of the song for his short story collection, "Doghouse Roses".

"Someday" is one of Earle's Springsteen-ish songs of escaping small town drudgery and dreaming of a larger world. "Now She's Gone" is his similar take on a small town maiden who manages to find her escape but leaves broken hearts in her wake. "Mr. Mudd and Mr. Gold" is late edition Townes Van Zandt and is filled with some of his most dazzling wordplay, a textbook example of efficient and concise songwriting.

"Goodbye" is a song of Earle's included on Emmylou Harris' greatest album, Wrecking Ball. Earle wrote the tune shortly after his rehab stint. He introduced it in terms of the Program, "it's the 9th Step... in the key of C":


"But I recall all of those nights down in Mexico
That's one place I'll never go in my life again
Was I off somewhere or just too high
But I can't remember if we said goodbye"


"Marie" is a Townes song and maybe the darkest song anybody's ever written. It's about a homeless man and his girlfriend, drifting, finding no work, starving, freezing, dreaming only of settling down somewhere in a burned out van. At one point, Marie suspects she's pregnant. "In my heart I know it's a little boy/ Hope he don't end up like me", sings the narrator. Then finally, as always, tragedy:


"Marie she didn't wake up this morning
She didn't even try
She just rolled over and went to Heaven
My little boy safe inside
I laid them in the sun where somebody'd find 'em
Caught a Chesapeak on the fly
Marie will know I'm headed south
So's to meet me by and by"


A shot of whiskey would have gone down good at that point.

Steve switched to a mandolin for his Irish-flavored "Dixieland". Then brought out his favored thoughts on politics, ones that stayed quite consistent with this blog. Admitting he's somewhere to the left of the Democratic party, he expressed hope for Obama, but said we need to keep his feet to the fire, particularly on getting troops out of Iraq, as promised. He also showed little faith in our endeavors in Afghanistan, a battlefield that "brought down Russia and the British Empire at their peak". If he didn't have hope, he said, however, he wouldn't sing the following song, "Jerusalem", which dreams that "all the children of Abraham will lay down their swords forever". Simple, but obvious.

Earle lives in Manhatten now, with his wife, singer Allison Moorer, and dedicated the song "City of Immigrants" (again on mandolin) to Mr. Kim, the Korean grocer on his corner, who speaks Korean and English and recently had to learn a third language (Spanish) to communicate with his employees. Earle lamented that we are the only country that tries to make it illegal to learn a foreign language. "An embarrassment, believe me, to the rest of the world", he said. I pointed out to my concert companions after the show as we walked outside, that Earle is definitely a New Yorker now - a Seinfeld episode was airing on a flat screen through the window of his tour bus.

Before singing "The Mountain", the title track to his 1999 bluegrass album, Earle pointed out there's no such thing as "clean" coal mining and that we have big decisions to make about energy. Nudging the hometown crowd a little, he also wondered if corn is the best way to make sugar. Earle apologized for not coming to Iowa more often. He missed a mid-90's Farm Aid in Ames when he was in prison. His manager also told him not to visit Iowa City in the summer since the town was empty without all the students. Earle corrected him that college students don't attend his shows, their teachers do.

"If this song doesn't scare you to death, you're overmedicated," he said, before singing Townes' "Lungs", a near hopeless song of apocalyptic doom. Then he rescued the main set with "To Live is to Fly", one of Townes' most hopeful, though bittersweet songs.

There was a two song encore. First, "Guitar Town", the title track to Steve's first major-label album, a #1 country album in '86. After a good ten years of trying to get a record deal and learning at the knee of one of the masters, Steve Earle finally hit the big time. Then he performed "Copperhead Road", the title track to the album that declared Earle wasn't just a folk or country singer, but an ass-kickin' storyteller and one of the rockin'-est sons-of-bitches on the scene. We gave him a standing ovation and then retired across the street, as Des Moines music lovers passed our door en route to their cars. Steve Earle's bus headed down the road to another town where he'll continue to spread the word about his gone, but not forgotten, buddy and sage.

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