May 06, 2011, 07:22AM

Steve Earle, Man Of Mystery

I’ll Never Get Out of this World Alive is, like pretty much everything Earle has ever done, just okay.

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Beavis: [watching a Tom Petty video] Hey Butt-head, how come Tom Petty is famous?
Butt-Head: Because he's on TV, dumbass.
Beavis: Yeah, but like... but how did he get on TV?
Butt-Head: Uh... because he's famous.
Beavis: Yeah, but, I mean, like, how did he get famous?
Butt-Head: He got famous because he's on TV.
Butt-Head: Because he's famous, Beavis! Now shut up before smack the bejesus out of you!

I feel about Steve Earle the way Beavis and Butt-head feel about Tom Petty. It’s not that I hate him or anything. He’s fine, whatever. I just don’t get him.

His most recent album, I’ll Never Get Out of this World Alive is a neat illustration of his mystifying blahness. As Earle albums go, it’s not so bad; no Copperhead Road but better than that dud of a Del McCoury team-up. There are moderately catchy tunes in that anthemic, working-class-hero, shake-your-fist-in-the-air, semi-slogging, not-quite-up-to-Bruce-Springsteen-standards vein that Earle has made his own. He sings like Dylan crossed with a mildly stunned ungulate. Sometimes this verges on charming, as in his duet with Allison Moorer, where her harmonizing distracts just enough that he sounds rough and earthy rather than incompetent. Sometimes, though, as on “The Gulf of Mexico,” his vocals are borderline intolerable. If you’ve ever wondered what the Pogues would be like if Shane McGowan had his humor and energy surgically removed… well, now you know.

“The Gulf of Mexico” is also, incidentally, blessed with a timely maudlin narrative about the oil spill. Earle lugubriously plods through generations of fisherman, Texaco worker, and roughneck, warbling out the chorus “We were rolling/we were rolling/through the blood red waters we were rolling.” If you’re looking for more profundity, there’s “God Is God,” where Earle declares “I believe in prophecy/some folks see things not everybody can see,” over a supposedly uplifting shuffle. And of course there’s “This City,” made semi-famous by Treme, in which Earle proves that he can write blandly anthemic arrangements for horns as well as for more traditional country instruments. “This city won’t wash away/This city won’t ever drown.” Get out the lighters kids. Then prepare to accidentally singe yourself at the sound of Earle soullessly breaking out the New Orleans slang.

I don’t even bear Earle any particular ill will. “The Devil’s Right Hand” is great. His performance on The Wire was charming. Even this album isn’t terrible; it’s nowhere near as bad as the Flatlanders recent output, for example. But his singing is lousy; his lyrics are generally pedestrian (“I am a wanderer/feet on the ground/heart on my sleeve/and my head in the clouds,”) and his songwriting is uninspired and repetitive.

Why is he famous?

  • Cause he put out three really great albums in the mid-90s, after his stint in jail? What are you even talking about here, Noah? You admit that, "Yeah, Earle's pretty good," and then ascribe some wholly unjustified level of fame to him so that you can take a few pot shots, before backing off into "But, you know, he's alright, I don't hate him or anything."

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  • He's never made a great album, much less a really great album. // I'd understand it more if I actually hated him, I think. I get why people like High on Fire. That's a band that is doing something definitive aesthetically. It's definitively bad, but I can see why people would like it one way or the other.// Earle though just seems bland; neither good nor bad enough to inspire much interest. Like Tom Petty. Thus my confusion at the enthusiasm he inspires in folks such as yourself.

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  • Train A Comin', I Feel Alright and El Corazon are great albums: what you get is a man now sober, out of jail, and ready do what he loves again. If you don't hear that, well whatever, I'm not gonna argue with you about it. But you're hanging your article on a bizarre argument: that you don't really care about Earle one way or the other, that you're basically "Meh" about the whole Earle thing (except of course for the songs you DO like), but then you're baffled by how famous he is -- except he's not really all that famous. I know a whole ton of people who only know him as that guy on The Wire -- if they know him at all.

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  • Expanding on that: This would be an interesting argument to have about Petty, because Petty is legitimately famous. But to what extent do you find Earle's fame disproportionate? He's achieved some modest amount of success, helped in part by David Simon, which would seem to go right along with your argument that he makes pretty okay albums with occasionally "great" songs on them.

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  • Yeah...none of those albums are anywhere near great.//Earle isn't as big a name as Petty, but lots of people think he's a genius. He's pretty famous. Many people say he's made great albums. For reasons which escape me.

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