What's the trouble with country? Too much flag waving in the music. Too many soft hearts and not enough hard heads. Too many singers opening theme parks. Too much corn, not enough conscience. Hearts all out of the music and onto the sleeves of stage costumes heavy with fringe and rhinestones. Nashville's a suburb of Vegas, and the sweetheart of the rodeo has moved to that notorious drive in Beverly Hills.
At least one other trouble is worth mentioning: there is only one Steve Earle. He has just made his first album, he hasn't had a Top Ten single, and he plays rock clubs as well as country venues. But his voice has offhand brute force when it has to bear down and unforced gentleness when it comes to business of the heart. He sings about familiar territory -- small towns and horizon-piercing interstates, luckless marriages and faithless love, dumb faith and poor prospects -- and blows all the cobwebs away because his eye is fresh and because he appears to be the very guy he's singing about, a Lone Star Everyman with a "two-pack habit and a motel tan." An old-fashioned engine, maybe, but built for speed and just the thing to get country music back on the track.
There's already a clamor to climb aboard. Waylon Jennings, who can still hang tough and sing true, recorded an Earle tune called The Devil's Right Hand on his new album, Will the Wolf Survive. At a recent date in a tony Chicago club, an upscale crowd got joyously behind the heavy beat and the Duane Eddy- style guitar rumble of Earle's band, even as they paid respectful attention to such back-against-the-wall Earle lyrics as "I hit the beer joints every Friday night/ Spend a little money lookin' for a fight/ It don't matter if I lose or win/ 'Cause Monday I'm back on the losin' end again." That has always been one of the neatest tricks in country, writing about the losing end and coming out a winner, and the fact that Earle can carry it off still seems to surprise him. When he heard his songs going down as smoothly with Chicago slickers as they do with hillbillies, he leaned onto the mike, grinned and said, "This might turn out to be some fun."
Earle's tunes do not have the sentimentality of mainstream country. They have older echoes: the scarred spirit and lonesome heart of Hank Williams, the grittiness of Johnny Cash, the Bull Run rhythmic charge of another Texas boy, Buddy Holly, who came out of a tradition that was as much old country as new rock 'n' roll. Rockabilly was the name for it, but somehow the country strains of Holly always got slighted. Rock claimed him exclusively -- and unfairly. Playing in that same territory, Earle redresses some of the balance.
He says flat out, "I'm a country singer, and I'm comfortable with that. But why does a country singer have to play only on country radio or a rock singer only on a rock station? I still don't understand why it's that big a deal." Earle may be the man to bring about this kind of crossover, but it's a hard job that has frustrated such gifted performers as John Prine and Joe Ely. Still, Earle has strong qualifications. He can sing Springsteen's spooky, poignant State Trooper and make it his own. He looks like the guy one stool over at the truck stop, with a Peterbilt cap and a waistline that has seen a little too much barbecue, but he reads Faulkner, Steinbeck and Hemingway and points out that "you can't write if you don't read."