Steve Earle & The Dukes – Guy
New West – 29 March 2019
Ten years ago, Earle released Townes, a tribute album to Townes Van Zandt, one of his two primary songwriting influences. This does the same for the other. Guy, of course, is Guy Clark, the Texas-born outlaw country singer-songwriter who helped pioneer the Americana genre, releasing his acclaimed and hugely influential debut album, Old No. 1, in 1975, featuring such instant classics as L.A. Freeway and Desperadoes Waiting For A Train, and going on to record a further twelve before dying of lymphoma in 2016, though, sadly writing only three in the last fifteen years of his life.
Earle first met him in 1974 and the pair hung out and played together, taking over from Rodney Crowell in Clark’s band, but, although, when he got sick, Clark asked if they could write a song together, it never happened. This album is a kind of apology for a missed opportunity and a lingering regret, but also a heartfelt tribute to one of the greats.
Working with the latest incarnation of his backing band, the Dukes, featuring bassist Kelley Looney, Chris Masterson on guitar, drummer Brad Pemberton, pedal steel player Ricky Jay Jackson and Eleanor Whitmore on fiddle and mandolin, it spans Clark’s recording career with 16 songs, albeit the guitar ringing Out In The Parkin’ Lot, from 2006’s Workbench Songs being the only one after 1999.
Opening with Dublin Blues, the songs are Clark’s but the sound is unmistakably classic Earle with those driving drums, big guitar chords and gravelly vocals, the covers being affectionate but not slaves to the memory. That said, streaked by steel, the likes of L.A. Freeway, Desperadoes and The Last Gunfighter Ballad (the latter the version that appeared on the multi-artist tribute This One’s For Him) do hew closely to the original while still informed by Earle’s musical identity.
Old No.1 accounts for six numbers, the other four being the drawled Texas, 1947, building the musical tension before the wheels start really rolling midway, good-time stomp Rita Ballou, a wistful strum That Old Time Feeling that ditches the original’s harmonica and reworks the fiddle arrangement, and a sparser She Ain’t Going Nowhere that loses the piano but heightens the pedal steel.
Along with Gunfighter, Texas Cookin’ provides Anyhow I Love You, again without piano, with Whitmore on harmonies and, amping up the fiddle and mandolin, the easy catfish creek sway-along swing of The Ballad of Laverne and Captain Flint. Skipping over 1978’s eponymous album, they pay a visit to the South Coast of Texas for the fiddle flying hoedown of New Cut Road, Shawn Camp on acoustic guitar (who also puts in another appearance on Sis Draper, the fiddle blazing stomper he co-wrote for Cold Dog Soup), along with Heartbroke (not, to be honest, one of Clark’s best), though, if you’re being picky, the album did also feature a new version of Rita Ballou. Although it first appeared on Better Days, the reading of the spoken narrative Randall Knife here follows the circling acoustic picking style of the Dublin Blues rerecording rather than the original Cash-like chugging rhythm.
The final number and the album’s bow out is the semi-spoken title track from 1988’s Old Friends and, keening pedal steel and brushed snare laying the foundations, appropriately features just that with instrumental contributions from former Clark cohorts Camp, Verlon Thompson, harmonica legend Mickey Raphael, dobro player Jim McGuire and Garry Nicholson and, sharing vocals, a stellar line up of Terry Allen (who provides the back cover art), Jerry Jeff Walker, Jo Harvey Allen, Rodney Crowell and Emmylou Harris who do indeed “shine like diamonds”.
Although the choice of covers does tend to reflect how Clark’s writing tailed off in the latter years in terms of memorable songs, this stands as both a terrific tip of the hat to a seminal Americana figure and a damn fine Earle album in its own right.
Photo Credit: Tom Bejgrowicz