The Color of Country

By JAY COCKS

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."

There was a time, however, when it seemed that Steve wouldn't get down the academic skills to do either. "Hell" is what he says he put his parents through. Born in Fort Monroe, Va., Earle grew up in Schertz, Texas, just 17 miles northeast of San Antonio. It was the kind of place Earle recalls in Someday: "There ain't a lot you can do in this town/ You drive down to the lake and then you turn back around." As Earle grew up, his own trips out of town got more frequent, the turnarounds longer. "I wasn't a bad kid, I wasn't gettin' in a lot of trouble," he remembers. "I just wanted to get away to walk the streets, mostly listening to all the songs I had in my head."

By the time he was 16, he made it to Houston, where he "slept on anybody's couch until I wore out my welcome." He hooked up with his uncle Nick Fain, who had lived with the family for a while and taught his nephew the rudiments of six-string rock guitar. "He was only five years older than I was," Earle says. "He was my hero." A friendship with Townes Van Zandt started Earle down the folk-music trail, where he eventually landed jobs on the coffeehouse circuit. "There was lots of noise and smoke. I became the world's loudest folk singer."

First married at 19, Earle hitched to Nashville while his wife was away and he thought he could make his mark. He moved there in 1974 and managed to write a few songs while cadging odd jobs. He built swimming pools. He worked house construction. Once, in 1975, a dream almost came true: Elvis was going to record one of Earle's songs, but he never showed up at the studio. After cutting a few singles for Epic and an album for CBS that was shelved, Earle recalls, "I lost all my confidence. I thought I had lost my edge."

There were other bad times and two more failed marriages. One of Earle's sweetest tunes is a lullaby called Little Rock 'n' Roller, sung by a traveling musician to a faraway son. "That song was no fun to write, and it isn't any fun to sing," says Earle, who has a son of his own. "But I really needed to write it. It made me feel better."

Guitar Town has some of the frantic strength of a last good shot, which it was. Earle is 31,"the tour bus is home," and making it in country music needs a young man's grit after all. But MCA has given him a seven-album contract, and some material for the new record is getting an airing in concert. Those new songs nail a listener right to the spot. Steve Earle is already fulfilling his promise even before he has stopped being promising. No time to waste.

With reporting by Don Winbush/Nashville