LAUREN ST JOHN : HARDCORE TROUBADOUR - THE LIFE AND NEAR DEATH OF STEVE EARLE

If Steve Earle weren't a living, breathing person he'd be a character in a blues song, a raucous ballad that would tell the tale of a gifted rebel who drank too much, lost his career and almost all of his women in a blizzard of heroin and crack-cocaine addiction, and lived wildly and extravagantly on the wrong side of the law. Along the way, Earle has welded rock to country, the Beatles to Springsteen, Celtic to Americana, punk to bluegrass and has produced multiple Grammy-nominated albums and one enduring classic: Guitar Town. Like Hank Williams and Robert Johnson he has wandered across the American South; like Janis Joplin he has a huge capacity for self-destruction that matches an appetite for life in all its extremes. Like Stephen Foster, he is a storyteller and songwriter of rare skill and force whose sincerity echoes through all his work. A heroin addict since the age of fourteen, six times married to five different women, a man who took a four-year 'vacation in the ghetto', Steve Earle none the less survived. And he came back with an artistic and personal vision intact, determined to change society for the better even as he seemed set to live his life for the worse. Lauren St John has been allowed unrestricted access and cooperation by Steve, his family and friends. In exchange, she has written a hauntingly clear-eyed, unvarnished and uncompromising life of one of American music's talismanic sons.

A biography of a legendary singer and song-writer, written with his exclusive and unfettered cooperation, this is the life behind the award-winning and bestselling albums of Steve Earle, rebel, rocker, Nashville legend. Steve Earle is the musicians’ idol – ‘my hero’ to Emmylou Harris – who has said of his life that ‘If I’d known I was going to live this long I’d have taken better care of myself.’ He was taking heroin at thirteen, and by the age of forty was mired in a seemingly permanent ‘vacation in the ghetto’ as he described his life then. In and out of jail for a variety of offences, Earle seemed determined to make good on his boast that when the end of the world came (and it seemed pretty close at times) only he, Keith Richards and the cockroaches would be left standing. Not yet fifty, he has been married six times, twice to the same woman, and amazingly forgiven by almost all of the ex-wives. In moments of consciousness he has, through sheer musical ability, shared a stage with, among others, Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, Sheryl Crow, the Pogues and Bob Dylan. He’s a legend, and one of the most gifted songwriters of his generation. He has poured a lot of living into those songs. Nashville just wouldn’t be the same without him.

Review (Publishers Weekly) : This biography of country rocker Earle begins with him skipping a 1992 meeting with record execs to sign a potentially career-reviving, multimillion-dollar record contract. Instead, he sold his airplane ticket for $100 and went to score crack in the slums of Nashville, beginning what Earle calls his four-year "vacation in the ghetto." It's a brilliant opening hook, and St. John (Walkin' After Midnight) never lets the reader go, breezily guiding through Earle's wild childhood (he dropped out of school after the eighth grade and was living on his own by 16), his five tumultuous marriages, his many run-ins with the law, his restless wanderings through the American South and Mexico—and a quarter-century of addiction to booze, cocaine and heroin that finally ended after some jail time in the mid-1990s. By talking to many of Earle's closest friends, family and former wives, St. John manages to demythologize a man whose life often threatens to overshadow his music (unfortunately, however, she herself doesn't spend much time on Earle's actual recordings). She interprets Earle's death wish simply as an attempt to break away from his middle-class upbringing. Like his literary heroes Hemingway and Kerouac, he courts disaster to fuel his writing. As St. John writes, "It was no accident that his life was a series of belief-beggaring dramas; quite often he was the cause of them. Consciously or unconsciously, he cultivated his own legend." Springsteen may have been the "consummate chronicler of welfare-line blues," she writes, "but Steve had lived the life."

Title : Hardcore Troubadour - The Life and Near Death Of Steve Earle

Auteur : Lauren St John

Language : Engels

Publisher : Fourth Estate

Publishing Date : February 1, 2003

Pages : 416