When the teen-age Steve Earle left San Antonio, Texas, where he was raised, for Greenwich Village, in 1974, he had an image in his mind: the cover of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” showing Dylan and his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, strolling through the West Village on a snowy day. That was where Earle wanted to be. He made it as far as Nashville. There he became a protégé of Townes Van Zandt, and developed his talents as a songwriter, a country singer, and a hard-strumming guitarist, all of which were on display in his fine first album, “Guitar Town” (1986). By the end of the eighties, Earle seemed on the verge of becoming a troubadour to rank with Dylan and Springsteen. But he had also become an alcoholic and a heroin addict, and in 1994 he was sentenced to a year in prison on drug-related charges. After serving four months, he was released into a twelve-step program, and there, to his surprise, he said, “I had a genuine spiritual experience.” His career recovered, and his most recent album, “The Revolution Starts . . . Now,” won a Grammy in 2004.
But through these triumphs and disasters, six marriages, and assorted tattoos, that image of the Village in the jingle-jangle morning of the folk movement never left Earle’s mind. Finally, in 2005, Earle got his own place in the West Village. He and his wife, the singer-songwriter Allison Moorer, moved into a garden apartment on the same block depicted in the “Freewheelin’ ” photograph.
Earle was in the Village the other day, working on a new album, which will be called “Washington Square Serenade.” He had made it more like a hip-hop record, he said: “The pieces are set to beats. It’s nothing like the way I usually work, when I bring a full band into the studio and we do the orchestrating right there.” He had recorded the demos on a computer in his apartment—“I finally tested positive for Pro Tools,” he said—and now, a few blocks away, at Electric Lady Studio, on West Eighth, he was adding guitars and other instruments (mandolin, bouzouki, harmonium), nearly all of which he plays himself. Electric Lady is the studio that Jimi Hendrix built to record his own music, and used only briefly before he succumbed to the same thing that Earle seemed determined to die of, except that he didn’t.
Earle turns out to be a historian of the early folk scene in the Village. (He and his wife are planning to publish a walking tour.) He has read everything written about the era, and can tell you the address of Izzy Young’s Folklore Center on MacDougal (No. 110; it’s now a nail salon) and the location of Gerdes Folk City (corner of West Fourth and Mercer), where Dylan played his first big gig. “This is where they invented what I do,” he said. “And it happened only because there were these three groups—the folksingers, the musicologists, and the writers—who happened to be living in this several-block radius. If that scene doesn’t happen, then rock and roll never becomes literature. It just stays pop.”
Earle has an opinion about everything. French fries, for example. Noticing some McDonald’s food in the studio, Earle said, “I’ll eat some bad shit, but I had heroin since the last time I had something from McDonald’s. In Germany, I did have a McRib sandwich. They believe in the pig in Germany, so I ate one half of a McRib. But no French fries. Go to Raoul’s, on Prince Street, for the French fries. They put duck fat on them. One thing you don’t want to be in France is waterfowl—they find more ways to fuck you up if you’re a goose or a duck.”
Earle was in the studio’s control room, but he was too large for it. He is tall, with long arms that he flings around as he talks, while his legs propel him as though he were being controlled by a remote. His hair is long on the sides and sparse on top; he has a leonine beard and a clear, direct gaze. He was wearing baggy jeans, a Western shirt, and cowboy boots. In recent years, Earle has lost a lot of weight, through the Atkins diet, and also quit smoking. He’s finishing a novel for Houghton Mifflin, hosting a weekly radio show on Sirius, and playing a recurring character on “The Wire”—a former addict named Waylon, whom the show’s creator, David Simon, based on Earle. He had a train to catch that evening for Baltimore, for the next day’s shoot.
The album’s producer, John King, of the Dust Brothers, was seated before the mixing board, working on an edit of Tom Waits’s “Way Down in the Hole,” performed by Earle, which will be the theme song of “The Wire” this season. Sweeping his hand over the console, Earle said, “This is all about how far you want to shine a flashlight inside your own asshole.”
Earle’s legs carried him out of the control room and into the much larger recording space, which contained about thirty of his guitars. (Although Earle is ambivalent about many forms of private property, he believes wholeheartedly in owning guitars.) On one wall was a large painting, commissioned by Hendrix, depicting beautiful alien chicks surveying a psychedelic landscape from the console of their spaceship.
Sitting on a drum stool, Earle talked about Hendrix and his connections to the Village and Dylan, and other subjects he had on his mind, such as Shakespeare, the reasons he likes John Edwards, and the beauties of New York. “I need to be able to walk out of my door and see a same-sex biracial couple walking down the street holding hands. That makes me feel safe.”
But isn’t Earle forty-five years too late?
“No way,” he said emphatically. “It’s still a neighborhood. And Suze Rotolo’s still here. And she looks so great!” ♦
