The last great American hero isn't Junior Johnson. It's Steve Earle.
Like the stock-car racer immortalized by Tom Wolfe in print and Jeff Bridges on screen, Earle is a genuine Southern Classic: Part poet, part hound dog, contrary as a cat, idealistic as a kid and as ornery an individualist as you'll find this side of heaven, now that Robert Mitchum has gone over to the other side.
He made all of that obvious by launching his concert last night at the Congress Centre not with a hard rocker, but with Christmas In Washington, a melancholy folk song that invokes the ghosts of every great modern American idealist, from Emma Goldman to Malcolm X, and from F.D.R. to Martin Luther King, and calls back to a time when compassion and decency were considered virtues . Quietly, with the goose-bump raising refrain "Come back Woody Guthrie/ Come back to us now/ Turn your eyes from Paradise/ And rise again somehow", he put the perfect coda to the previous night's immaculately contrived State of the Union speech from that other Southern bad boy.
Then there was time for one more bit of topicality:
"Anybody here from the Valley."
(Big cheer.)
"'Cause we heard tell you had a severe shortage of electricity.
"Well, we got all you can handle."
It was Steve, the good ol' boy Southern storyteller at his best -- pull up a chair, y'all, and listen to this-here -- a guy who knows how to create a community.
And what followed was like a Force 8 Gulf Coast gale, not always pretty, and often out of control. But what power!
His back up band -- which he introduced as the "New Dukes" -- played with a reckless finesse and stripped-down horsepower reminiscent of Crazy Horse's at its best.
With Buddy Miller on guitar, Brady Blade on drums (both from Emmylou Harris' band) and bassist Kelly Looney driving him on, Earle blasted his way through a two-hour set (not counting encores) that included a retrospective of some of his best work -- Copperhead Road, Someday, Train A Comin, My Old Friend The Blues, I Feel Alright, The Devil's Right Hand, Hard Core Troubadour ...
But he saved his best efforts for the new material, from El Corazon, the wildly diverse disc he released last fall, performing pretty well all of the album. And it was from El Corazon that the show-stoppers came: The grinding, menacing Telephone Road (his Darkness On The Edge Of Town) and Taneytown; the magnificent, soulful Hank Williams-esque The Other Side Of Town; the playful history of everything, You Know The Rest; and the weird and funky N.Y.C., stark and wonky even deprived of its electronic gimmickry.
Perhaps the strongest statement about Earle's confidence, though -- and his generosity -- is that he was willing to risk being upstaged by his opening act.
Guitarist Miller and his wife Julie, each a recording artist in his/her own right, teamed up for an opening set that surely won them more than a few fans in the audience.
Leading off with a cover of the Bob Dylan obscurity Wallflower, the couple waltzed elegantly through a half dozen country folk songs before inviting Blade and Looney out on stage to help them rip through Julie's Kiss On The Lips, a powerful country rocker that stood up to anything played all night.
An opening act that delivered a mini-concert that would have been worth the price of admission alone, and Steve Earle ... That, friends, is what you call value added.
JAM! Rating: 4 out of 5
