Whatever happened to Cotton Mather?

Whatever happened to Cotton Mather? They exploded into the middle of my final year at university, shattering the stranglehold the sixties held on my music collection and helping me shout my way through my last few weeks. Then they reintroduced themselves to me a couple of years later, displaying a sound which had progressed into something pretty dramatic. By the time I finally got to see them perform live in London (after a 9/11-induced fear of flying and consequent gig postponement), I thought this would be a long and positive relationship between the band and this listener. But it was not to be! The band have dropped out of sight, and if any readers from their home town of Austen, Texas, can help me out (where all known websites have failed) and provide me with news, then don’t delay. Meanwhile, what else to do but look back fondly?

Most Cotton Mather band biographies almost immediately name check Oasis. Of course this one is no exception, but I have mentioned the Manchester band merely to dismiss the commonly made comparisons. It’s said that Cotton Mather were following in Oasis’ footsteps. Well, in that they tried to make albums full of catchy and original melodies, combining light-touch pop with heavy guitar music, singing about love without being excessively romantic, I guess they can be compared to Oasis. But to be frank they were only ever really put alongside them because Noel Gallagher decided to promote Cotton Mather as his beneficiaries. The reality is that Cotton Mather line up alongside Oasis not as followers, but as fellow would-be inheritors of the Beatles’ legacy. And they out-do them.

Led by singer and songwriter Robert Harrison, Cotton Mather have made two great old-fashioned albums. By old-fashioned I don’t refer to the noise they produce, but to what they represent: forty-odd minutes, a dozen songs, two guitars a bass and drums, some superb songs, and bags of controlled emotion. This is how albums were supposed to be - the band use the Beatles’ musical concept and sensibilities while avoiding sounding like them. Interestingly, this is not a band with a culture, a history, in their sound. They don’t seem to represent a part of the world, a defined group of people, or even some vague woolly socio-political statement. It is all about the music. Some of it is sublime; some of it is barely listenable. But so long as the former dominates the latter – and it does – you’re going to enjoy these two albums.

Kontiki, released as the 1990s closed, typifies the lo-fi production values which many bands adopted in the wake of the ‘Britpop’ era of the 1990s. The less musical noises, like feedback and distortion, sound natural and organic, and at their best they complement the songs they feature in – Vegetable Row, Private Ruth. But the more straightforward sounding songs work better – not least because Harrison’s lyrics are difficult enough to fathom out without being disturbed by intrusive noise. Try this:

She picked me out of the millions
Thumbing an OED
Dressed me down to civilian
Cracked the code on the Rosetta Stone
Said the word for alone is "alone"
My before and after

The lyrics must be personal, because these are not everyday sentiments which anyone could have dreamed up. When you read them back to yourself, they gradually begin to make sense, but when you put the record on for the first time, all you know is that Harrison uses clever words to excellent effect. Attempts to grasp their meaning will prove futile.

Amidst all this nonsense (and one dreadful song title – Aurora Bori Alice), you will find two completely stunning ballads, Spin My Wheels and Lily Dreams On. These are the type of song which use Robert Harrison’s high and slightly hysterical vocals to best effect – he sounds vulnerable, and yet at the same time sure of every word he says:

In my parallel field, what's imagined is real
For you I conceal, all that I feel
And girl you spin my wheels

When you hear this, you get the feeling that he really means it – and while this might be an illusion, the subtext is that he accepts it – he doesn’t mind – and so why would he lie to us? With this technique of expressing his feelings, Harrison draws you into his songs.

In fact, it is this mode of expression which most links Kontiki with The Big Picture, its successor (leaving aside the interim Hotel Baltimore, a short album of live recordings which is unsatisfactorily short and half-developed). This album takes the lyrical excesses to even greater extremes (“Substance suffers style / Stanley lost the Nile” anyone?). And it is, I have to say, one of those albums during which I skip between favourite songs, ignoring the same few irritating tracks each time. But I think the album qualifies as ‘great’ despite this, as alongside the reverberating jingly-jangly guitars are some ballads that aren’t just beautiful, or stunning, like those on Kontiki. No, these slow numbers are brave. There is no other word for it. Just what is Monterey Honey, for example, seeking to say? He starts by telling us (using, naturally, a great tune) that he lost this particular love because he let her down, that sort of thing. But by the second verse, his lover is asking him “Aren’t you done yet?” and lighting a cigarette. Can he really think he just let her down in the standard selfish double-crossing angst-ridden singer-songwriter manner? Sounds to me like he was trying. The narrator humiliates himself in the interests of the song.

Ramon Finds Waterfalls is another brazen number, but this time the courage is shown not by the song’s internal narrator, but by Harrison himself. The sheer effrontery of giving us a deliberately bland lighter-waving anthem, with these lyrics

Inside Ramon finds waterfalls
And water falls
From the Tropic of Cancer to the writing on the chiffon walls
From Victoria Cascades to the…

Well…you get the idea. Harrison takes a risk in making this song the album’s emotional centrepiece, with the triumphant melody, the three-part harmonies only hinted at prior to this point, and the mountain-top strutting guitar solo. But it pays off. Such risk is a rare commodity in modern music, and it is worth hanging on to.

Of course another word for all this lyrical and musical grandstanding is ‘pretentious’, and to an extent, that is a fair comment on The Big Picture. Leaving aside the ballads, Kontiki is dominated by shorter and sharper guitar riffs built around no-frills melodies. The Big Picture, on the other hand, while retaining the Cotton Mather tradition of short songs, definitely has bigger intentions for those same riffs. The mood of Kontiki is that of a small world, with characters who fail to look beyond themselves and their small groups – typified by the subject of Homefront Cameo, who pursues futile activities at the expense of taking a more outward view of the world:

She’s made the bed three times today
Each a masterpiece in its own way

By the time of The Big Picture, lead guitarist Whit Williams’ riffs have to sound grander, because the themes they highlight are much more worldly – the album’s first two title characters are The Last of the Mohicans and Marathon Man, and it continues, for the most part, in this vein.

But is this pretentiousness a cause for criticism? Harrison clearly had ambitious goals when he made The Big Picture, but that is what is so fascinating about the album. He had a successful formula ready to use, but chose not to risk boring us by reiterating the same world view. And the decision to match the lyrics with an equally expansive sound must be the right one.
Of course, you will clearly make your own judgement on which side of the brave/pretentious fence Cotton Mather’s music falls. Either way, these albums are challenging and imaginative. With each clever rhyme, with each frenzied vocal climax, and with each Beatley throwback, Cotton Mather’s music takes me back to the time I first heard it, and forward to whatever dream I fancy. Now, where did they get to?

Steve Earle: From Country Music to Revolution

(This piece has been substantially revised since I first posted it.)

What happens when worlds collide? When things you never thought would mix well, meet each other head-on and question each other to the very core, challenging each other to join the party without giving up their own independent essence?

One answer to that question is a Steve Earle album. Any Steve Earle album. Because those are the records, the kinds of musical locations, where you will find poetry, tragedy, politics, philosophy, country music and blues, sitting comfortably together as if the loss of any individual component would mean the descent into irrelevance of the whole. To name all of those parts is to denigrate, in a sense, the overall achievement. Better, perhaps, just to call it the marriage of creativity and emotion. But it is worth noting all of the elements Steve Earle loads into his songs. Because after his unique blend was formulated, the lesser lights (remembering that everything is relative) of alternative country were inevitable – the template had been set. It was Steve Earle, with the assistance of that great American interpreter Emmylou Harris, who brought history with him into the nineties.

The country music character

The characters Steve Earle creates, and the stories he tells, are nothing less than romantic realities. Romantic, because most listeners are forced – compelled – to take them at face value. However far and wide you travel across the North American continent (and I have tried it), you will struggle to find these people and their lives in a concrete and really existing sense. But such is the force of Steve Earle’s music that you know they must be real, because Steve Earle has encountered the tragedies, mysteries and triumphs of which he sings. In some cases he has lived them himself. This boldness, the confidence to tell the stories he knows, is a clear source of inspiration for other modern American songwriters. The model for the frank description of the tragic American figure, more mystical than concrete, more travelling than static, and more full of world-weary experience than most could imagine, is created and re-created in so many Steve Earle songs. This is the country music character from which so many of Earle’s successors drew.

But Earle is no mere chronicler of human suffering. He is also a healer. Some people say that music heals, and in a limited sense, knowing what we know about the emotional power of the music we love, this is true. But this is no pre-ordained, deterministic fact created on the eighth day. If music is to heal, indeed if music is to perform any particular task, it needs exponents of the craft to use the tool that music provides. And so it is with Steve Earle, who has never accepted human suffering as a given. Having told his stories, stated the facts, and explained why things are as they are, through his songs he offers a range of solutions. Rebellion through a life of crime. Money. Love. Music itself. And ultimately, closing a circle and making the vicious virtuous, rebellion through revolution. With this desire to ease the pain of that country music character, to help her or him out, it was Steve Earle who first added that sense of ‘alternative’ to country music.

Steve Earle as an alt country trailblazer

Since I first heard Copperhead Road, Steve Earle has always held a compelling and fascinating presence in my mind, one which cannot be accounted for by any single explanation. It is partly his attitude, the feeling that he will let nothing stand in the way of his quest for meaningful music; partly the songs, which are sometimes catchy, always well written, and frequently facilitate the most unbelievable emotional release; and partly the way he combines all of the musical styles I care for most – rock, blues and country. They are all there, helping to shape the sound which, while not exactly unique as a genre in itself, gives a foundation for the expression of one American’s best singer-songwriters and one of its most thoughtful commentators. Given all this, it is no surprise that Earle was, for me, a key founding influence on the alternative country movement.

This take on Steve Earle is, perhaps by necessity, highly subjective. This is unavoidable – music is an art form and any attempt to define its meaning in an objective sense, unless you remain in very shallow waters, will end in failure. My selection of Earle as the most important formative influence on alt-country is in itself a subjective choice. Sure, he began as a country artist in the same way that many others (Ryan Adams, Jim White) did. And yes, most of the artists in this book have either worked with or at least reference Steve Earle in their own productions. But that is true for many other older country musicians, and many of the artists featured here sound far more like many other country and non-country artists than they sound like Steve Earle. The sound of Ryan Adams, for example, appears to owe much more to both Gram Parsons and the Rolling Stones than it does to Steve Earle. So why him?

Well. However imperfect the comparison between Steve Earle and the alt-country developers of the nineties, and however much more there is to his talent and achievements than such a label can encompass, we will see from the musical evidence that there is a sense in which he has been a sort of godfather to that movement, both musically and emotionally. And his security in that position is strengthened by the fact that however brilliant the records of the likes of Ryan Adams, Uncle Tupelo and Alejandro Escovedo, they will always struggle to reach the heights and breadth of Earle’s own work. The reason for this is simple – Steve Earle has always taken everything he did, and everything he made music about, to the very limit. When Earle wants to growl, he doesn’t add an element of menace to his voice – he really growls. When he wants to sound romantic, he transforms his voice into a tender and vulnerable drawl, liable to break apart at any moment . When he wants to sound like a rebel, he doesn’t just sing about getting drunk and punching some guy – he sings about real, serious crime. And when he wants to get political, he doesn’t fudge it – he says ‘fuck the war’ and ‘the revolution start now’. Steve Earle never holds back. Because of this, Earle’s work is clearly of huge importance, as it tells us a lot about the heart of the country from which he comes, leaving out none of the uncomfortable truths. And when he says what we should do about it, he is equally unequivocal.

Starting out

Steve Earle’s first album, Guitar Town, actually had Earle pigeon-holed as a follower, rather than a founder. Specifically, it caused the description of Earle as a countrified version of Bruce Springsteen - and to a certain extent that label was justified. While Springsteen had made his name lamenting his life in the towns and cities of New Jersey and rock-operatically proclaiming his restlessness, his desire to break free, Steve Earle began by using a more straightforward genre – country-rock – to say similar things about the Southern country from which he emerged:

Nothin' ever happened 'round my hometown
And I ain't the kind to just hang around
But I heard someone callin' my name one day
And I followed that voice down the lost highway
Everybody told me you can't get far
On thirty-seven dollars and a Jap guitar
Now I'm smokin' into Texas with the hammer down
And a rockin’ little combo from the Guitar Town

In Guitar Town, Steve Earle announced himself as a promising songwriter with a real freshness in his sound and his attitude. The songs say intelligent and yet still heartfelt things about love, sadness and restlessness. And there is something quintessentially American about the sound. The broad country-rock sound leaves plenty of room in the music for you to imagine the scenes he describes and the highways by which he is going to escape. And there is an early realisation on his part that, wherever his troubles emanate from, the solution must come primarily from him as an individual. He is on his own out there, and if ever anyone comes with him, they will most likely be followers. So actually, from an early stage, Steve Earle did set trends, which others interested in the business of modernising the country sound would eventually follow.

I first discovered Steve Earle through his 1988 album Copperhead Road. Its attitude is essentially a hangover from the days of the country rebels and outlaws of the seventies, with whom Earle cut his teeth. It was many years after that that he began his recording career, and although it isn’t clear whether Copperhead Road is a tribute to those days or a final hard-rocking attempt to exorcise them, it is clear that the record owes more to a period ten years gone than anything contemporary. What was current, though, was the subject matter – the economic content of his songs. I got hold of this album at a time when everyone around me was only interested in listening to singers who sang in fake voices, unwilling or afraid to look at their audiences while they performed, and this, for me, cast doubt on the authenticity of their words. Not so with Steve Earle. Copperhead Road kicks off with what can perhaps best be described as some shit-kicking attitude: the story of a hereditary bootlegger who, as a result of the hand the economy has dealt him, knows no other way. The words themselves say he is resigned to his fate, but the anger in the voice and the uncompromising and enveloping sound of the electric guitar and organ (which on its own initiates the song with a menacing mixture of drone and swirl, leaving it far from clear what will follow) make you wonder just how happy this man can be with his life:

Well my name's John Lee Pettimore
Same as my daddy and his daddy before
You hardly ever saw Grandaddy down here
He only came to town about twice a year
He'd buy a hundred pounds of yeast and some copper line
Everybody knew that he made moonshine
Now the revenue man wanted Grandaddy bad
He headed up the holler with everything he had
It's before my time but I've been told
He never came back from Copperhead Road

But there is a subtlety to this song, and it is one which has always attracted me to moments of rock and roll abandonment. The listener has work for that release, as following the organ introduction comes a mandolin rhythm – strident, up in the mix and percussive, but nonetheless just a little mandolin – and plenty of room for you to hear the lyrics. These are things Earle wants you to hear, and understand, before he lets you crank out the air guitar and let it all hang out.

The album’s other key commentary on the state of American society, Johnny Come Lately, is not dissimilar. Less aggressive than the title track, this song is more of an upbeat, Irish bar-room affair – that it was recorded with the Pogues gives a good indication of Steve Earle’s mood. But all the hand-clapping and singing along to that infectious chorus can never disguise the song’s subject matter, not mentioned explicitly until the end of the last verse, but all the more memorable for that, which is the fate of returning Vietnam War veterans. Not an original topic for popular culture, certainly not for those who ever bothered to listen to Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA, but an important one in Steve Earle’s America.

Up to this point in his career, the main tonics for Steve Earle’s dirty world were crime, portrayed as a negative but inevitable remedy, and music itself, which through good-time singalongs and unbridled rock release offered some respite as well. But as Earle’s work grew in scope, and the problems he addressed began to get bigger, his work became increasingly cinematic in their telling. With this move to a big screen portrayal of American life came, perhaps, the realisation that crime, petty rebellion and rock and roll offered only short-term answers to Earle’s diagnoses. This is where love and politics came in.

Cinematic song

The Hard Way (1990) is one of the few studio albums to be credited to Steve Earle and the Dukes. This nod to his long-time backing band (admittedly a revolving cast of characters based around Earle himself) is appropriate, as this is the album on which Earle sounds most like the lead singer in a band, rather than a bard recording with the hired help. The opening track, The Other Kind, perfectly sums up the heroically individual stance Earle adopts so often, and part of this is down to the way the song’s broad sound envelopes the listener so completely. A piano introduces us to the strident strutting which typifies this record, and as Earle begins to tell what seems to be a quite mundane story (“I woke up this mornin’…”), the rest of the band comes in, once more dominated by a percussively bashed mandolin. And before we can draw much breath, the chorus explodes and leaves us in no doubt who the narrator is: no-one else but Earle himself:

I'm back out on that road again
Turn this beast into the wind
There are those that break and bend
I’m the other kind
I’m the other kind

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, of course, but it is difficult not to link this implicit promise of an earthly saviour with Earle’s later political work. On the surface, what he is offering is a strong lover and a protective friend. But there is more in this song than that. There is a conceit present in the song which could grate. But somehow it doesn’t, because as in most of Steve Earle’s songs, you are drawn by the power of the story to believing whatever he says. So when he pledges heroism, you know he is up to the task. But there is a human side to this, perhaps represented by the switch from the hard-rocking chorus to the bridge to the next verse, in which the mandolin – hit like a drum, but again nonetheless just a mandolin – leads the way melodically. It always seems like Earle loves mixing his mandos and banjos with heavy electric stuff, but this isn’t just shock value – there is a genuine split in his personality which is demonstrated by the dichotomy in his message (“I’ll love you and save you that way” / “I’ll save you and everyone else too”), and he knows how to reflect this in his music.

This dual message is perhaps the moment where Steve Earle’s country music character, the restless, emotional American, becomes both a part of and a representation of the American Dream, as Earle sees it. Part of Earle seems to want to accept the American Dream at face value – taking as read the ability to do as you like, make something of yourself if only you would put a bit of hard work in, and live a life of independence and prosperity. Up to this point, little if any blame is attached for the imperfections in the American Dream, like the life of bootlegging the character of Copperhead Road lives, or the lack of anything to do in the Guitar Town. But gradually now, Earle seems to realise that there is something more at play here. These are not surface imperfections – they are the results of severe and fundamental social problems. These are problems which cast doubt on the American Dream’s core, and they are problems which need solving.

Unlike so many of his contemporaries in the eighties and early nineties, Earle is not afraid to sing as he speaks. If he sang in any other way, how could we believe such bold statements as those he makes in his songs? There is never a trace of artifice. What you hear is what you get, and his emotions and musical talents are therefore inseparable to the listener. As a result, Earle’s offer of love comes across as a believable solution to some people’s problems, but it is only convincing up to a point. Earle knows he can’t pull the wool over our (or his own) eyes forever, and even in The Other Kind you get the feeling that it isn’t just love he is offering. There must be something more out there. What good is love to someone stuck on death row, about to be killed for killing? That is the story of Billy Austin, one of Steve Earle’s most chilling and moving songs.

Campaigning

It is probably true to say that Earle’s politics and political songs are so credible now partly because he developed his politics organically – beginning from issues in which he had strong beliefs backed up by strong arguments, rather than belatedly jumping on a bandwagon. From an early age, Earle campaigned against the death penalty, and although throughout his career he has written many songs on this issue, none have ever bettered his first. Following the generalisations of his earlier work, implicitly blaming the economics of the time for many of society’s ills without ever quite laying the blame in any particular place (much as Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska had done in 1982), with Billy Austin he picked the issue about which he felt most deeply, and said what was on his mind.

Although equally cinematic in its sound as the heavier songs on The Hard Way, Billy Austin’s drama comes from just two things – the production, which makes his acoustic guitar sound like it comes not just from left and right, but also from front, rear and some other more intangible place in the head as well, and Earle’s voice, which is as hard and embittered as an old blues singer at the same as being as fragile as Gram Parsons. The singer fits the song, which isn’t a story of a miscarriage of justice, or the apology of a repentant man. It is the confession of a criminal who knows he has done wrong, can’t say for sure that society is responsible for his own mistakes, but knows certain facts which speak for themselves:

Now my waitin's over
As the final hour drags by
I ain't about to tell you
That I don't deserve to die
But there's twenty-seven men here
Most are black, brown or poor
Most of 'em are guilty
Who are you to say for sure?

The song then finishes as it begins, with Billy pointing out his essential human qualities – his name, his age and the significant fact of his mixed-race background. The listener is left drawing his own conclusions, but Earle’s message is pretty clear. There can be no excuses for what society’s worst criminals have done. But what do we expect? In Steve Earle’s USA, the poverty and racism he sees all around him make such tragedies as Billy’s crimes unavoidable. Not excusable, but the inevitable consequences of a sick society. But Earle always gives the impression that he is here to help us out in some way. His diagnoses always contain the first steps towards finding a cure.

So Steve Earle the rebel, Steve Earle the dissident rock and roller, Steve Earle the songwriter were all firmly established by the mid-nineties; and Steve Earle the political activist was beginning to become a more dominant force in his songs. If the first of those needed any further boosting in the eyes of the listening public, then his spell in prison (for firearms offences) probably sealed the deal. But the record he put out soon after his release from prison, Train a Comin’, is without much doubt his most incredible achievement – and it is the album which, more than any other, offers real spiritual and artistic guidance to the alt-country movement.

The country music character made real

Irrespective of his incarceration, this is a special set of songs. The alt-country boom was already under way when Train a Comin’ was released in 1995, but it was leaning heavily towards the electric – and sometimes punk – stylings of Uncle Tupelo and the Jayhawks. Nothing wrong with that of course, but looking back, the range of influences wasn’t quite in place just yet. If anything was most obviously missing from the music of the country pretenders, it was acoustic country music – and the confidence to go ahead and play it. Uncle Tupelo’s 16-20 March, 1992 had made full use of political folk music, but the uniquely personal and heartfelt sound of acoustic country music needed Train a Comin’ to give it a new set of wings.

In Train a Comin’, Earle combines old western-style bar songs with both the songwriting genius of genuine country songwriters, like Townes Van Zandt, and the Beatles. He combines songs which tell of travels across Mexico and old America with songs which stretch further afield – both spatially and temporally – to Bablyon. He combines mandolins played more delicately than before with harmonies sweeter than ever and a lovely variety of acoustic guitars. And above all, he brings every one of those influences into the songs on the album that he wrote himself. Chief among those songs is Goodbye – so good, so important, a song that it gets a chapter all to itself.

As ever, Earle isn’t afraid to sing in either a chirpy or a downhearted voice about what he considers to be the realities of the country which simultaneously enthrals and disgusts him. Both Mercenary Song and Tom Ames’ Prayer focus on the shady side of the law, and how life at the US-Mexico border will always – given the current economic realities – stay on the wrong side of that straight and narrow path. The solution, of course, is somewhat circular but equally predictable: money. Elsewhere, Earle will offer alternative remedies to life’s ills and ails, but he is never one to shy away from the power, admittedly short-term but no less real for that, of money:

And we're bound for the border
We're soldiers of fortune
And we'll fight for no country but we'll die for good pay
Under the flag of the greenback dollar
Or the peso down Mexico way

Other than Goodbye, the song which stands out most on Train a Comin’ is Tecumseh Valley – performed as a heartfelt tribute to both the song’s writer, Townes Van Zandt, and the song itself. Although Tecumseh Valley was written by Earle’s mentor rather than the man himself, it is in many ways the archetypal Steve Earle song, with one important difference – it is the story of a woman. Women feature heavily in Steve Earle’s repertoire, but not usually as the focal points of songs. Nonetheless he makes the song his own. Earle (and his band) perform a guitar break which is as near to perfect as can be imagined, he laces his vocal with a real sense of tragedy, and even his enunciation of the word ‘Tecumseh’ seems appropriate – as he recites this most difficult and heartbreaking of stories, he gets out the Valley’s name quite hesitatingly – it doesn’t role off his tongue like the Copperheads and Hollywoods of days gone by.

The story itself tells of a young woman named Caroline, free and hopeful, who arrives in the Valley wishing to make something of herself, while making enough money for her mining family back home, who have fallen on hard times. But her dreams of going home are shattered by the realisation that when they come, those hard times spread their wings far and wide. But while van Zandt’s lyrics are suggestive without explicitly telling us the path Caroline takes, Earle uses the words from an alternative version van Zandt once recorded, changing some key lyrics and spelling out the tragedies at the heart of the road, at the heart of the American Dream. While van Zandt’s Caroline walks the streets, filled with hate, enticing men to walk beside her, Earle’s Caroline is more tragic and yet more real: she is forced to sell herself.

She took to whoring out in the streets
With all the lust inside her
And it was many a man
Who returned again
Just to lay himself beside her

Although the song is van Zandt’s, the character is just as much Earle’s – his choice of verse about the whoring, lustful Caroline made sure of that. With that verse, the song is dragged from the internalised, personal world of Townes van Zandt and placed squarely in the middle of Steve Earle’s world view.

Ultimately, as the song unfolds before your ears, as the simply picked guitar rhythm and colourful bent notes build a subtle momentum and sense of loss all of their own, you fear that there is only one way it can end, and Caroline’s death is almost a relief when it comes, as Earle’s vocal has made you feel so sad for her – at last she now rests in peace. But for all of the relief in the world, you cannot help but shed a tear inside for the stoical and accepting way in which Caroline kills herself:

Well they found her down beneath the stairs
That led to Gypsy Sally's
In her hand when she died
Was a note that cried
Fare thee well Tecumseh Valley

Don’t be surprised at the strength of Steve Earle’s poignant rendition of Tecumseh Valley. The character of Caroline is a key one, an emblematic figure for Earle. He didn’t write the song, but he takes possession of it with this performance in an unshakeable manner. His performance is so right, with perfect amounts of emotion, impassively factual storytelling and instrumental skill. Moreover, so many other characters in Earle’s own songs are encapsulated by Caroline. She acts as a summary of so many of Steve Earle’s characters, stories and songs. Just as Billy Austin is his extreme male character, a representation from the half of America’s population of all that is wrong in the country, Caroline is the female equivalent. Between them, Billy and Caroline are Earle’s country music character, and his United States. Everything, from the small town restlessness of Guitar Town to the dysfunctional, dangerous world that gave rise to John Walker’s Blues, is either predicted or described by Steve Earle’s Billy Austin and the hero of Townes Van Zandt’s Tecumseh Valley. Because between them you can see at once both the personal-level tragedy made a million times worse by society’s bad laws, and the social, macro-level tragedy, made worse by individuals’ bigotry and prejudice.

Rebellion

Reference has already been made to Steve Earle’s belief in money as a palliative to suffering and hardship. But he is no fool, and he knows that although money offers some relief, it is only a short-term, surface-level solution, and it could never be more than that. Money and its role in society are a real cause of so many of the problems about which he sings, and so it is no surprise that Steve Earle has, more recently, turned his attentions to more fundamental aspects of society – democracy, equality (or the lack of them) – and done so in the spirit of genuine political activism.

Alternative country music is clearly well steeped in the rebellious side of country music – the affinity of Ryan Adams, Uncle Tupelo and the rest to Hank Williams and Gram Parsons is partly about the music itself, but there is also something there about the attitude. To see a Ryan Adams show is to observe a man who sees a clear link between that outlaw songwriter image and making good music. Only by following your path, and criticising everything around you that you think is wrong, will you be able to write quality music from a position of artistic integrity. But with commercial pressures as they are, these artists have a tendency to hide behind subtle political references which can be left barely noticed and can often be half-denied (a 2005 interview with Jay Farrar in No Depression magazine, in which he denied the existence of any politics in Son Volt’s 2005 album Okemah and the Melody of Riot, is a case in point – have a listen to the album and tell me that album isn’t political).

There’s nothing new there. But while criticising things is all very well, what about some action? There must be room for some leadership from modern country music in this sense, if any credibility is to be retained for this bunch of rebels. Steve Earle had always been one step ahead of most other left-wing musicians, in that he wrote songs about the issues he cared about – chiefly the death penalty. But by 1997, in the album El Corazon, he had made that extra step, and began to make more all-encompassing political gestures. Best among these, to this very day, is Christmas in Washington.

This song has no amazing chord changes, no new or radical solutions to political problems, but the strength of feeling with which he sings his plea to Woody Guthrie (and various other would-be comrades) to come and help us out from this mess of capitalism, corruption and phoneyism gives the song a touching and intangible sense of originality and timelessness. This comes naturally to Steve Earle because he rejects out of hand the often-stated dichotomy between the personal and the political. For him, the two are intrinsically linked – how you treat your family, your friends, cannot be separated from the politics which exist all around you. Of course, that is the essence of the American Dream: the sheer size, resource base and capacity of the country is what, in theory, gives each instance of the country music character the chance to live that free and individual life. Musically, this gives Earle’s political songwriting a natural ease, as he slips between the plight of his individual characters and the political figures and solutions which he feels are of relevance:

I sat home in Tennessee
Staring at the screen
With an uneasy feeling in my chest
And I’m wonderin’ what it means

So come back Woody Guthrie
Come back to us now
Tear your eyes from paradise
And rise again somehow

Despite the soft nature of the recording, with acoustic guitars and Earle’s best attempt at a gentle vocal backed only by his trademark organ drones, there is a marked confidence about it. It sounds like one of Bob Dylan’s better “finger-pointing songs” from the early sixties, but with the genuine emotional depth in the vocal which Dylan only ever put into his later, more personal songs. Some would say that the confidence overspills into conceit, when he sings to Woody that “You and me and Cisco [Houston] know…”, but is such confidence conceit when it is true? By this point in the song, and by this point in Earle’s career, he surely realised, like so many others, that the mantle of America’s foremost popular protest singer had passed to him, and it is a job he takes seriously.

Musical peak

It is said that throughout the recording of Transcendental Blues, Steve Earle kept a copy of the Beatles’ Revolver by his side. This is probably urban myth in terms of its strict accuracy, but it is clear that he had that record, and its experimental lessons, very firmly in mind when making Transcendental Blues, an album that serves as a full and fantastic example of what can be achieved when the very best country musicians cross-fertilise their music with the styles more usually associated with people a world away from them.

Earle’s respect and admiration for the Beatles are well documented, but it is fascinating that he chose Revolver, the Beatles’ most innovative and sonically adventurous album, rather than, the songwriter’s manna that is Rubber Soul. Above all else, Steve Earle is a songwriter, and never lets music get in the way of the song itself. Yet here he was, using as his guiding light a record which wrote the book on loops, backwards guitar tracks, and ethereal, other-worldly sounds. His confidence must have been sky-high, as he would have realised that what made Revolver work was not the experimental sounds themselves, but the fact that the songs the Beatles were writing in the mid-sixties were so strong that the experiments were able to complement the songs without over-shadowing them. If, as seems likely, that was what Steve Earle was aiming for with Transcendental Blues, he pulled it off.

It would be very unlike Steve Earle to start anything off with a half-measure, and so it is with Transcendental Blues’ opening track, the title song. Fuzzy guitars from every corner, a rumbling bass line, echoey pounding drums and mysterious lyrics sung with a confident up-and-down melody are all brought into the fray in a big bang of country-blues, before he eases his foot off the effects pedals and lets the experiments come through at a more reasonable pace for the rest of the album.

Elsewhere on the album, what is notable is the way each song’s story seems to have just the right kind of music attached to it – and with just the right amounts of experimentation and originality. In Another Town he seems to be harking back to his Country-Springsteen days, get out of this one horse town, with just the barest hint of ambivalence:

One of these days when I've had enough
Buddy, you ain't gonna see me around
Just as soon as I get my courage up
Gonna take it to another town

The narrator isn’t quite in that mental place which will allow him to flea the boring bleakness, and the recurrence of Earle’s distorted electric guitars reflect that lack of clarity in the thinking of his character.

The album also has some incredibly delicate, tender and terribly lonely ballads – like Over Yonder (Jonathan’s Song) and Lonelier Than This. What becomes obvious listening to these songs in particular is that Steve Earle’s voice had been waiting for the Revolver-esque sound to come along, because the two go really well together. True, country music and rock and roll also sound good when backing his gruff, earthy and rootsy voice, but only because Earle pulls those genres with him, in the directions he knows will work best for his songs. But the Beatles’ inspired fuzz of 1966 is actually Steve Earle’s voice, in instrumental form.

Revolution

As the twentieth century became the twenty-first century, and as most other alt-country artists slowed down their rate of album production, Steve Earle stepped up a gear. He brought the Transcendental Blues sound with him, modifying it just slightly so that the distortion was subtler and the sheer anger and rock and roll aggression were heightened. This is most evident in the opening riff of The Revolution Starts…Now – a frightening guitar-driven combination of intention, menace and volume. But as Earle got his head around a government he hated, and which was doing so many things he opposed so strongly, he stopped bothering with any half-measures for action, like crime, empty rebellion, and even music itself, and focused increasingly on using his songs as vehicles for his activism.

But in terms of the art itself, was it driven purely by Earle’s attitude towards the Bush administration, or was this something of an inevitable next step for him? Both Jerusalem (2002) and The Revolution Starts…Now (2004) are filled with polemical songs – about the war on Iraq, the assault on American people’s liberties, and American society. For the most part, they are up to Earle’s usual standards, combining original melodies and angry (and yet somehow very sensible) lyrics. Take, for instance, Amerika v. 6.0 (The Best We Can Do):

Look at ya
Yeah, take a look in the mirror now tell me what you see
Another satisfied customer in the front of the line for the American dream
I remember when we was both out on the boulevard
Talkin' revolution and singin' the blues
Nowadays it's letters to the editor and cheatin' on our taxes
Is the best that we can do

Through all of the venom of the message, and amidst the insistent stop-and-start drum-dominated sound, Steve Earle’s old yearning and romanticism peep through, and it is this combination that makes the song work. He is asking, is this mess the best we can manage, with all the knowledge, historical experience and resources we have at our disposal? Let’s try to make things better. But when society’s failures lead to the suicide bomber John Walker (the most modern and yet most believable example of the country music character and the American Dream gone wrong) taking such an extreme path, aren’t things rather more futile than even Steve Earle had expected? What good would Woody Guthrie have done if he had come back as Earle had requested? For all his ‘fellow travelling’ with the Communist Party, it is far from clear that Woody favoured revolution. But maybe that is what is needed – Steve Earle seems to think we’ve already begun to go down that path, less by some voluntaristic route than compelled by an invisible, inevitable force, created by the extremes of reaction from government and so many others:

The revolution starts now
When you rise above your fear
And tear the walls around you down
The revolution starts here
Where you work and where you play
Where you lay your money down
What you do and what you say
The revolution starts now
Yeah the revolution starts now

Of course, this is a verse within a song, and we should not expect a fully-formed political theory to be contained within it. But the sentiment is clear.

But back to the original question – would these albums and these sentiments have happened in any case, in some form, or were they inspired, in some dark way, by President Bush’s extremism and the excesses of his administration? The existence of several weak songs on both albums, less easy to listen to and less perfectly-formed from a songwriting perspective, suggest that Earle just had to release both records, for political reasons more than artistic ones. Certainly, a combination of the two records’ strong songs (mainly the political ones, with the duet with Emmylou Harris I Remember You an obvious addition) would have been a much better album. But one thing both these records have in common with just about every other Steve Earle album is the sense of spontaneity. He had something to say, so he said it.

Indeed, all the way from Guitar Town, through Train a Comin’ to Transcendental Blues, Earle has always sounded fresh, alive and like he has created something new. Jerusalem and The Revolution Starts...Now, for their faults, follow in this tradition, and that is something Steve Earle should be fiercely proud of. In fact, inadequate though it may be, “spontaneous” is as good a word as you will find to sum up Steve Earle’s recording career so far. Genuine, emotional, stoical and hard-nosed. Blues, country and alternative. Crime, love and politics. Everything to the extreme, nothing left in reserve, nothing held back. What else could America’s great songwriters do other than follow in Steve Earle’s footsteps?