Not Entirely Angry or Young, But Surely a Man

Album: Seteve Earle & the Dukes, Exit 0, 1987

Acquired: This album found me. I had never heard anything by or about Steve Earle when I found Exit 0 in the cutout bin of the electronics department at the Little Creek Navy Exchange during the summer of 1987. I liked the title, so I splurged the buck-ninety-nine. It was a great decision.

Best Track: "Nowhere Road" currently, but probably really "It's All Up to You"

Lasting Memory: My freshman year dormmate, Barry, preferred to fall asleep while listening to music. Exit Zero, even though it includes more than a few flat-out honky-tonk rockers and the imagery of almost all the lyrics run from grim to black, was a mutally agreeable choice for the last spin of most evenings.

The whole tone of the album is set with the opening lines of the opening track, "Nowhere Road,"

There's a road, in Oklahoma
Straighter than a preacher
Longer than a memory
And it goes, forever onward
Been a good teacher
For a lot of country boys like me

I push that load from here to someday
I'll push as long as I'm alive, but I don't know how long I'll last
'Cause it's just a road, it ain't no highway
I'm blowin' by the double five
I know I'm going way too fast

I been down this road just searching' for the end
It don't go nowhere, it just brings you back again
Leaves you lonely and cold, standin' on the shoulder
But you've come too far to go back home
So you're walkin' on a nowhere road

What always gets me about "Nowhere Road" is that while it's a pure escape fantasy, it's also a grownup's reconciliation with the fact that, as Too Much Joy sang about five years later, "I'd take a trip/ But everywhere I'd go/ My head would come along with me." But the Steve Earle version of this eternal truth is better because it's a hopeful angry more than just a simmering moral ennui. While Earle's protagonist knows he's beaten before he begins, he's still going to try.

Of course, Earle also recognized that metphorical heads never do breach actual walls, no matter how hard they are banged. He knows, that is, that there ain't no place for an "Angry Young Man" who "Ain't Ever Satisfied." Thirty when he recorded the songs collected on Exit 0, Earle wasn't exactly young and he'd appeared to have at least come to terms with a lot of the anger he was describing. Later in his career, his anger turned to politics (which I disagree with him on) and the death penalty (which I do agree with him on).

Two other themes that emeged fully for Earle on Exit 0 were his amazing skill in creating and delivering Texas Tornados-style rockabilly and his willingness to nearly surrender to the support of a strong family and a patient woman. All three of Earle's themes come together amusingly on "The Week of Living Dangerously," which tells the story of a bored husband and father who took a unauthorized vacation and concludes:

Well I woke up in a county jail 'cross the line in Laredo
With a headache and a deputy staring at me through the door
Well he said "Now how you got across that river alive, I don't know
But your wife just made your bail so now you're really dead for sure"

Now my wife, she called my boss and she lied so I got my job back
And the boys down at the plant, they whisper and stare at me
Yea well my wife can find a lot of little jobs to keep me on the right track
Well, but that's a small price to pay for a week of living dangerously

Yeah-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-wee
That's a small price to pay for a week of living dangerously

The song Earle was probably born to write and record (with an assist from Harry Stinson) however, is "It's All Up to You" because nobody can walk entirely in their own shoes and everybody needs that candle in the window:

No matter which way the wind blows
It's always cold when you're alone
Ain't no candle in the window
You've got to find your own way home
Now the rain ain't gonna hurt you
It's come to wash away your blues
It's all up to you

No body said it would be easy
But it don't have to be this hard
If you're lookin' for a reason
Just stand right where you are
Now there ain't no one out to get you
They've got to walk in their own shoes

It's all up to you
It's all up to you
No one else can get you through
Right or wrong, win or lose
It's all up to you

You can stand out on that highway
Look as far as you can see
But when you get to that horizon
There's always someplace else to be
But don't you stop to look behind you
'Cause you've got some travelin' left to do
It's all up to you

Up Next: Steve Earle, Copperhead Road, 1988

P.S. Just because I think it's one of the greatest album titles of all time, here is a picture of the cover for Earle's first of several hits collections, Shut Up and Die Like an Aviator. Enjoy, and don't take that particular bit of Steve's advice.