Steve Earle - Feel Alright

Hell and Back

1. Steve Earle is THAT dude and Feel Alright resonates in my bone morrow. Americans love a redemption story, but more than that we venerate outlaws and renegades with an almost religious-like fervor. If country music is Americana then outlaw country is encoded in our collective DNA. We need it. Feel Alright is indicative of Steve Earle’s man’s dichotomy as it’s both redemptive and it revels in renegade behavior. Steve doesn’t need to prop up his head on Billy the Kid’s tombstone or whistle past John Dillinger’s grave. Oh no, absolutely not. Steve is telling an autobiographical story and that makes it so much fucking cooler. Raw, honest vulnerability has always been cooler than wearing someone else’s boots. He’s knocked himself down. Life didn’t do it. He did it to himself, he knows it, and he wants a reckoning of who stood with and against him.

   I was born my papa's son
   A wanderin' eye and a smokin' gun
   Now some of you would live through me
   Then lock me up and throw away the key
   Or just find a place to hide away
   Hope that I'll just go away, hah

   -Steve Earle, Feel Alright

   Steve Earle - he of cocaine abuse and heroin addiction, of seven marriages - is free from the rehabilitation clinic and you know he was counting days and writing songs in his head. Here he’s acknowledging his mistakes, he’s declaring his determination to perservere, and it’s gonna take a jackhammer to chisel that shit-eating grin off his mug.

2. I fucked up plenty in my 24-year Navy career - nothing that landed me in front of a firing squad or in a court-martial - but I appeared in front of several commanding officers in my dress uniform. I cultivated an image, to be sure, that endeared me to some people, but infuriated others. I can take an ass chewing like few other people I know, and I always managed to come out just barely ahead. I attribute this to being exceptionally talented at my job, which always left me with just enough professional capital to get my ass out of hock. I’d spend three months or so wisely investing, then I’d do something that nearly bankrupted me. It’s really an asinine way to approach a personal or professional undertaking. I thrived on oppositional provocation as a younger man. I needed a nemesis telling me I wasn’t good enough, that I wasn’t capable enough. I didn’t have that mechanism that makes valedictorians or state champion wrestlers. What I had, and still have somewhat, is a burning urge to present authority with two middle fingers and my bare ass to kiss.

   I’m like fuck critics, you can kiss my whole asshole

   -Jay-Z, 99 Problems

   I’m older now, ostensibly a bit wiser. I had to put Peter Pan to bed and be the man and the leader I needed as a junior sailor and as a young man. That said, my guns remain loaded just in case I need to rouse the rabble and disturb the shit. In listening to Feel Alright, I’m struck with this overwhelming sense of empathy for Steve. I flew over the cuckoo’s next and the rehabilition house once upon a time too. What no one knows until they endure it, until they work through the experience, is that they’re going to be even better once they get out of their own way. Far better. Cocaine couldn’t kill Steve. Heroin couldn’t either. Even Steve couldn’t kill himself. He removed the nonsense and climbed back up the mountain. If you thought he was a problem before, just wait until he’s got all his senses about him.

   Yeah, but be careful what you wish for friend
   'Cause I've been to Hell and now I'm back again

   -Steve Earle, Feel Alright

3. Americans love rebels because rebels are not obliged to play by the rules. We imagine ourselves as stylish rogues, fighting to overthrow an unjust system equipped with razor wit and keen fashion sense. Hollywood, man… No one is scripting our lives. No one is penning our dialogues (If they were I’d have called dibs on Sorkin and Tarantino years ago). Our lives are an X-rated improvisation, and that means we’re going to get hurt. We’re going to fuck it all up a few times if we’re doing any real kind of living at all. And then we have make that climb to personal redemption. Steve’s apparently a disciple of the Trial and Error School with tremendous post-graduate work in the field of Fuck Around and Find Out. These are the most dangerous people around. I know a few old renegades, and I treat them with decency and respect. How could I not? Old age isn’t a gift given to everyone, and there are no aging AND bad gunslingers. That’s a binary profession. You don’t get to be old unless you’re great. That’s the fee. This theory doesn’t apply in the realm of American music where outlaw country singers and bluesmen still roam. You can grow old and happy and be completely mediocre because the stakes just aren’t that high. This dynamic is precisely why there are so many half-assed outlaw singers and bluesmen. They’re too afraid to let life or fate or their own terrible decisions strip away all of life’s niceities and rebuild. Steve was never afraid, or maybe he was and did it anyway, which is the hallmark of genuine courage. No, it doesn’t take courage to do a line or shoot up. It takes courage to put it all down.

   In 2003, the magnificent Annie Leibovitz released a photography book called American Music featuring her photographs of American musicians going back decades. Steve’s portrait appears on page 238 and he looks like he was born 38 and divorced. The book also features a series of essays. Patti Smith, Beck, Mos Def, Ryan Adams, Roseanne Cash, and Steve all contributed. Our boy concludes his essay like so:

   “I’m just listening for the ancient tones, and once I’ve learned to listen, I mean really listen, I’ll come down from the mountain and make a record as loud as New York City and as lonesome as the Cumberland Gap. Then I can die. Believe that.”

   I do.