Hardcore Troubadour

Worshipful, overlong biography of the singer-songwriter who first shook up Nashville with Guitar Town in 1986 and has been ruffling mainstream feathers ever since. Steve Earle is almost as famous for his reckless lifestyle and political activism as for biting songs like Hillbilly Highway and John Walker. (Of this last, about the American indicted for fighting with the Taliban, Earle remarked with relish, this will be the song that gets me kicked out of the country. ) British journalist St. John (Shark: The Biography of Greg Norman, not reviewed, etc.), who met him in 1999 while he was campaigning against capital punishment, was clearly dazzled by the legendary Earle charisma. Though she chronicles in stupefying detail his years of drug addiction and dutifully quotes at length from injured siblings, several ex-wives, and various embittered former business associates, all of the musician's extremely bad behavior is tinged with a patina of glamour: the artist sinking into the lower depths to fuel his art. Friend and foe alike describe Earle as a brilliant, nonstop talker, but you'd never know it from the self-serving remarks St. John chooses to print. Few admirers of the lyrics to Copperhead Road and Devil's Right Hand will want to know that their author is capable of banalities like When you've been married six times, you figure out that it's at least partly your fault. The author adequately captures the exciting ferment of 1980s Nashville, when such idiosyncratic artists as Lucinda Williams, Lyle Lovett, John Hiatt, Roseanne Cash, Emmylou Harris, and Townes Van Zandt shook country music to its core. But St. John has little to say about their music, and her rhapsodies about Earle are embarrassing. His thrilling, drug-free resurrection after a mid-'90s jail term to create some of the best recordings of his career does not require hyperbole like In the history of incarceration, few men have returned to the outside world with such an overwhelming determination to embrace redemption, or with quite so much to offer the world, both personally and artistically. The ferociously intelligent and talented Earle deserves better than this fawning portrait. (Kirkus Reviews)