Hardcore Troubadour: The Life and Near Death of Steve Earle - Hardcover

St John, Lauren

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0007149425 ISBN 13: 9780007149421

Publisher: Harper, 2003

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

Lauren St. John is the author of Walkin’ After Midnight: A Journey To The Heart Of Nashville,a biography about Steve Earle, and four other biographies. She writes regularly for The Sunday Times and The Independent. She lives in London, England.

From 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."
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0007149425
• ISBN 13: 9780007149421
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416