The ties that bind

By all rights, Steve Earle should probably be dead. Six divorces, three car wrecks, an $800 dollar a day drug habit, a stint in prison, a tussle with a cop and more bar fights than you can shake a stick at; something should've gotten him by now. But nothing did.
It's the worst rock 'n' roll cliché, chronicled over and over in "Behind the Music" specials that ask us to applaud people like Nikki Sixx and David Crosby for beating drugs and the law. But what are we cheering them for? Surviving? For climbing back to settle into comfortable mediocrity?
For Steve Earle, simply surviving wasn't enough. Look at his life in the five years since getting clean and it's clear the term survivor doesn't really apply. The string of five albums he's put out, beginning with 1995's harrowing, acoustic Train a Comin' and leading through last year's diverse, rock-and-pop flavored Transcendental Blues is a streak as impressive as any artist's in the '90s. He's produced material for other artists and co-owns his own record label, E-Squared. He also recently taught a seven-week course on folk music at the Chicago Folk Center and has a book of short stories due later this year.
Then there's his political activism. David Corn, Washington editor for the political journal The Nation, wrote of Earle, "Welfare rights, opposing the death penalty ... hell, he's done more on-the-ground activism than most legislators." After battling his demons, Steve Earle emerged on the other side a different man and a different artist — many would say a better man and a better artist — certainly a more mature one. That's not surviving, that's transcending.
If Stacey Earle's sick of answering questions about her older brother, you wouldn't know it. "I'm proud of him and I'm proud to be his sister," she says. Of course she's probably gotten used to such queries in the two-and-a-half years since she threw herself to the journalistic wolves by releasing her own recording debut, Simple Gearle. But somehow, the wolves didn't ravage her the way they do most siblings of the famous and infamous. In fact, her wistful folk-pop debut and engaging stage presence charmed even the most sharp-toothed and cynical.
Growing up outside of San Antonio, Texas, music was a constant in the Earle household, but it was Steve who seemed the most driven by it from an early age. He left home at 16, first heading to Austin, where he'd become a regular on the coffeehouse circuit, and later moving on to Nashville with dreams of country music stardom two-stepping in his head. Stacey, too, left home at 16, but her dreams weren't musical.
"I remember loving music, but I was a mother by 16," she explains. By 17, she was married and another child quickly followed. "So my dreams became different. My dreams were food in the cabinet and stuff like that." The marriage lasted almost 10 years, but by 1987, Stacey found herself divorced and with two children in her care.
Meanwhile in Nashville, after years of struggling, Steve had finally hit pay dirt. His 1986 album Guitar Town had gone gold behind glowing reviews comparing him favorably to Bruce Springsteen. It was a visionary melding of country, folk and rock that briefly injected life into the dying, glittery beast of mainstream country music. Two subsequent albums, 1987's Exit 0 and 1988's Copperhead Road, helped gild his growing status as a musical savior, but success came at a price. Steve's daily diet had come to include copious amounts of coke and heroin and he was doing little to hide it.
In 1988, he invited Stacey to come live with him in Nashville. On the surface, he needed someone to look after his kids when he went on the Copperhead Road tour, and she was struggling to support her children as a waitress. But it was clear they both needed more.
"At that point I was sinking fast financially," she recalls. "There was only so much I could do — I had an eighth grade education at the time. So Steve asked me to come to Nashville, maybe for a break. Just to figure out what direction I needed to go and have a rest."
Steve, too, probably needed a rest, but he wouldn't think of taking one. He was arrested a few times over the next few years and, by 1990, his life was a mess. He was also working on his next record and decided to ask Stacey, who'd tinkered with music but never too seriously, to sing on one track.
"I think he thought I needed something special to happen," she says. "He was great like that, cheering me up. So he asked me to sing on The Hard Way record, a duet, 'Promise You Anything.'"
That led Steve to ask her to join his band as a guitarist and back-up singer for the tour that followed. "It just sort of seemed like a natural thing to do," Steve explains with a gruff nonchalance from his office at E-Squared in Nashville. "My brother had been production assistant on my records and production manager when I toured for several years by that time and it just seemed natural. We're a pretty close family."
Upon returning from the tour, Stacey had found the direction she was missing. "I didn't know what hit me," she remembers. "All I knew when I got home was, 'This is what I want to be when I grow up. This is what I want to do.'"
For Steve, though, things continued to get worse. He would release one more album, 1991's forgettable live-and-loud disc, Shut Up and Die Like an Aviator, before literally disappearing into a nearly five-year haze of drugs and alcohol.
As a latecomer to the game, Stacey would struggle with her songwriting for the better part of the '90s, learning her craft through writers' nights at local clubs and through a stint as a staff writer for a Nashville music publishing company. She found her last name opened doors for her throughout the city, but the man who'd made that last name was largely unavailable to help her any further. In fact, Stacey and the rest of the family spent much of their time and energy trying to keep track of him.
"In any family, when there's a crisis, you tighten up," she explains. "My grandmother called it 'circling the wagons.' That's a department where I think our family is very strong. Definitely, creating problems is not a way to make us go away."
After stays in jail and rehab, Steve got his life back on track. His comeback, 1995's Train a Comin', was received with cautious optimism. The dark-hued follow-up, I Feel Alright, however, provided a resounding confirmation of his return. He used both albums to own up to his ugliest moments and promise himself he wasn't ever going back to them.
"I had a lot of stuff to process when I was making [those] two records," he says. But as dark as his music got then — and still gets now — there was an important change from old days. "It's a little different because I don't believe that you have to be miserable in order to create art. I guess I probably bought into that to a certain extent [before], but it's not true. I think I'm writing the best songs I've ever written now, maybe because I'm older and I've written more songs. I think I write more concisely than ever and my stuff's more melodic. Writing is a lot easier to me now. It's a lot less work just because I don't have to wake up in the morning and buy $500 worth of dope."
El Corazon, in 1997, found Earle reinstating more rock touches into his sound before zagging in a direction no one expected by joining up with the Del McCoury Band for a stellar bluegrass turn on 1999's The Mountain. Most recently, last year's Transcendental Blues returns him to more rock-centric pastures, but he indulges his jones for experimentation by incorporating bits of Beatlesque psychedelia and traditional Irish folk music.
"The main difference between this record and probably any record I've made is there are a lot more chick songs," he says with a laugh. "And that's really good because if I don't write chick songs I find that my audience gets exponentially uglier and hairier."
Meanwhile, well-aware of the looming shadow of her older brother, Stacey tiptoed delicately toward her first album during the years of Steve's comeback. After recording a three-track demo that Steve produced, she nixed a potential deal with Steve's future E-Squared partner Jack Emerson, out of fear she'd never be seen as her own person. "I had a feeling the press might turn around and say, 'He gave it to her on a silver platter and that's why she has it.' I very much wanted to stand on my own," she says.
With the help of her second husband, singer-songwriter Mark Stuart — whom she met at a writers' night in 1991 — Stacey completed her debut, Simple Gearle, in 1998, initially just to sell at shows. She was nearly 38.
To open her second album, last year's Dancin' With Them That Brung Me, a sort of musical thank-you card for all those who helped her along the way, Stacey revisited the tune that gave her life direction a decade earlier: her brother's "Promise You Anything."
"I was afraid of it, because I didn't think it was time yet to do one of his songs," she says. "I thought it was too soon. But I could not put out a Dancin' With Them That Brung Me without including him. What better way can I say thank you?"
Steve would return the sentiment of sorts on Transcendental Blues by asking Stacey to duet with him again, on the bittersweet "When I Fall." With a chorus of "If I soar above the clouds and then/Come crashing back to earth again/You will catch me when I fall," the song plays like Steve's thank you to his sister for sticking through his bleakest days.
"I never asked him, 'Is that what you wrote it about?'" Stacey says, "but from the day I sang it for the first time, that's what I wanted it to be and that's what I take it for. And that's the great thing. That's what I take it home for and that's what it means to me. That's how we communicate, in a lot of ways."
Now, after circuitous routes, Steve and Stacey are touring together for the first time in over a decade. But they're not the only family members on the road. Stacey's band, the Jewels (named after her grandmother), includes her husband and son, while Steve's son Justin is road crew and their brother Patrick is still Steve's production manager.
But will this sort of family affair only further fuel doubters who want to write Stacey off as nothing more than Steve Earle's little sister?
"Anybody who's ever seen her play figures out very quickly she's not just my little sister," Steve contends.
Stacey puts a similar spin on it. "I get a lot of his fans that come to shows. But they always come at the end of the show, 'Y'know, I came here because you're Steve Earle's sister. Next time I come back, I'm coming to see Stacey Earle.' That's all I can ask for."
That, and whatever other fringe benefits come from touring with her brother. "The way I'm putting it is, I'm getting to know someone maybe I didn't know real well, because that wasn't him when he was sick," she says. "This is a new person and I kind of like him."
david.peisner@creativeloafing.com

Steve Earle and the Dukes, and Stacey Earle and the Jewels, play the Variety Playhouse, Sat., Jan. 20, at 8:30 p.m. Tickets are $22.50 in advance, $25 day of show. For information, call 404-521-1786.