Happy 30th Anniversary to Steve Earle’s fourth studio album The Hard Way, originally released July 1, 1990.
It’s difficult now to listen to The Hard Way, Steve Earle’s fourth full-length, and his last studio album for MCA, without feeling a sense of loss. Co-producer Joe Hardy, bassist Kelly Looney, pedal steel wizard Bucky Baxter—they’ve all since left us, and their absence just adds to the darkness already creeping in around the edges of the album while it was being recorded and upon its release in the summer of 1990. The deepest darkness surrounding the album just happened to come from Earle himself.
After hitching to Nashville to follow his heroes Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark in 1974, and sitting in on bass and backing vocals on Clark’s debut album Old No. 1 (1975), Earle started shopping songs around, almost scoring an Elvis Presley recording of his song “Mustang Wine,” but the King didn’t make the session. Earle was featured in the acclaimed documentary Heartworn Highways not long after, however, a ball of rock & roll energy shown swapping tunes at Guy and Susanna Clark’s kitchen table with a virtual who’s who of progressive country singer-songwriters including Steve Young and Rodney Crowell.
Earle signed to Epic in the early 1980s and put out an EP (called Pink & Black) of raw, slapback echo-heavy rockabilly-tinged rave-ups that went nowhere but paved the way for his MCA deal in 1986 and the release of his full-length debut, the critically-acclaimed and commercially successful Guitar Town. (Epic would cynically re-release the EP in 1987 with a handful of other tracks recorded during those same sessions to capitalize on the success of Guitar Town and labeled the collection Early Tracks. Get it? “Earle-y?”)
Guitar Town was a huge step forward. Nestled somewhere between John Cougar Mellencamp and Bruce Springsteen (ok, closer to the Boss’s side), but delivered with a southern accent, Earle delivered first-person accounts of hard times for good ol’ boys like him, life on the road (both as a troubadour and as a new dad), the big dreams that can seem unattainable when trapped in a small town, and the usual tales of heartbreak but told with a sharp wit and an eye for detail.
His debut arrived just in time to fit into what has been called “The Great Credibility Scare” of the mid-to-late ‘80s, when Dwight Yoakam’s Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc, Etc and Randy Travis’ Storms of Life were waking country radio up from its Urban Cowboy stupor. Soon newcomers like Foster and Lloyd would join with veterans Rosanne Cash and Rodney Crowell to all become part of the “new traditionalists” —because you have to have a brand.
Steve Earle never quite fit the mold, however. He wasn’t a traditionalist in the way Randy Travis was viewed/marketed, nor was he hip west-coast-country-chic like Dwight Yoakam. Earle’s nervous swagger came off as authentic, natural, not contrived. The downside of that authenticity is that his troubles and addictions played out in the public eye.
His follow-up to Guitar Town, Exit 0 (1987), was the first album co-credited to the Dukes and contained more expansive character studies (the former football player who peaked in high school, angry young men who can’t be satisfied, a farmer afraid of losing his land, a regular joe who decides to let loose for a week) and a little harder edge to the music. His third, Copperhead Road (1988), expanded that harder edge to full-tilt rock (to the point where MCA decided to release it on their UNI imprint) and got him an all-out album rock radio hit with the title track.
Copperhead Road, like Exit 0, has its share of character studies, only deeper and more varied: the pot-growing Vietnam vet of the title cut, a snake oil salesman, a guy who gets perspective, wisdom, and a warning from a homeless man, to another Vietnam vet coming home to a much different world than his WWII veteran grandfather did. His lyrics are getting more political, in the Woody Guthrie sense as he champions the downtrodden and forgotten. That sense of justice shows up on The Hard Way most explicitly in the album’s centerpiece: the devastating, harrowing death row dirge, “Billy Austin.”
With sparse accompaniment, only acoustic guitar, a subtle, droning synth, and distant percussion that sounds like a prison cell door punctuating the tale, Earle tells the story of the song’s namesake who, in the tradition of Johnny Cash and Nebraska-era Bruce Springsteen, has shot a man but has no remorse. As he is strapped to his chair, he asks a final question just before the juice hits: “Could you pull that switch yourself, sir, with a sure and steady hand? And then, could you still tell yourself, sir, that you’re better than I am?” The question hangs in the air long after the cell door slams the song shut.
The Hard Way is Steve Earle at his angriest, most rebellious, darkest. It’s also his loudest, heaviest album—it sounds as if he’s almost daring MCA to drop him (which they did after the live mess that was Shut Up and Die Like an Aviator that followed in 1991). He hits the road right at the top, taking “comfort in aluminum and steel” on “The Other Kind.” He’s getting the hell outta dodge. Goodbye, Guitar Town, we’re turning “this beast into the wind. There are those that break and bend,” but he’s the other kind.
Joe Hardy, who had engineered Copperhead Road, was just coming off helming the Georgia Satellites’ majestic final statement of their classic lineup with the sprawling In the Land of Salvation and Sin (1989). Thankfully, he brought over the sound he captured with that masterpiece to The Hard Way, most noticeably one of the best snare sounds of the era. The crisp, tight, pop of the snare throughout The Hard Way stands in stark contrast to the cavernous muffled boom that dominated the drums on Copperhead Road. In fact, The Hard Way’s production holds up today when many of its contemporaries now sound dreadfully dated.
The plodding “Esmeralda’s Hollywood” and the breakneck “This Highway’s Mine (Roadmaster)” pummel the senses with bluesy, metallic power, as does “Justice In Ontario,” a variation of the telling of the Irish Black Donnellys who migrated to Ontario and were slaughtered by a lynch mob.
The Hard Way is not all headbanging through the darkness, however. Earle also adds to one of his most underrated arsenals, his ability to craft top-notch power-pop (think “Goodbye’s All We’ve Got Left,” “Even When I’m Blue”), as he does here with both “Promise You Anything” and “Hopeless Romantics,” while “Regular Guy” chugs along with oblivious glee as it turns a poor man’s lament on its head with the couplet, “never got rich but I never did try,” and “Country Girl” sounds like a long lost Faces outtake.
Meanwhile, “When The People Find Out” sounds more timely now than ever, considering the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and certain members of Congress who justify or outright ignore his words and, most dangerously, his actions (or lack thereof). The Christ Missionary Baptist Church Choir’s backing adds weight to the unmasking of the transparent hypocrisy of the narrator’s target. The anger continues through “West Nashville Boogie,” where the bright lights of Music City might as well be on another planet as a poor high school kid may or may not be planning something horrible. John Lee Hooker’s “Boogie Chillen” riff never sounded so ominous.
The Hard Way was released during Earle’s self-described “vacation in the ghetto”—a time when his artistic ambition took a backseat to an increasing fascination with, and dependence on, heroin and cocaine, ultimately leading to him being arrested and sentenced to a year in prison. (He served sixty days and completed an outpatient drug treatment program.)
Earle’s post-prison career has been remarkable to witness. From the all-acoustic Train A-Comin’ (1995) and the glorious I Feel Alright (1996) to this year’s Ghosts of West Virginia, Earle’s music has been consistently high in quality and he shows no sign of slowing down.
Although it was released in the darkest of times, The Hard Way still contains some of the most powerful music of its era and of Steve Earle’s long career. It’s a messy, dark, difficult album, but so is life in general. And if nothing else, The Hard Way proves that we can all survive the darkest of times and come out stronger because of it. Doing it the hard way is sometimes the only way to learn.
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