“I’ve still got a dry cleaning tag in there,” Justin Townes Earle says, reaching into the pocket of his suit jacket to pull out a pack of cigarettes.
It’s mid-afternoon and damn near ninety degrees but Earle’s only concession to the heat is to remove the cowboy hat that’s been lazily perched on top of his sharply-parted dark hair. He extracts a lighter with one tattooed hand and flicks the cleaner’s tag toward the center of the table. The jacket stays on.
The twenty-seven year old musician has burned through cigarettes and suits with equal abandon on this summer’s tour. He’ll swap the afternoon’s cream-colored version for seersucker before he takes the stage later that night, his shows paying tribute to the Grand Ol’ days of Nashville when nattily dressed singers dropped yes ma’ams and yessirs between their songs.
Earle is an interesting blend of swagger and sincerity, combining a reverence for the past with a decidedly modern attitude. In concert, his rhinestone shirts cover his heavily inked arms and on his latest release, Midnight at the Movies, he wedges a Replacements cover between John Henry references and steel guitar twang.
There’s a good chance Earle inherited a chunk of this outlook from his father, legendary Nashville badass Steve Earle, and his namesake Townes Van Zandt, another of country’s hall of fame hellraisers. Van Zandt served as a mentor for the senior Earle and the two were known as much for the music they made in the studio as the trouble they found out of it.
The younger Earle has already crammed a lot of hard livin’ into his relatively short life, a fact he acknowledges on Midnight with lyrics like “I went down the same road as my old man/But I was younger then.” Now on the far side of his twenties, he’s several years clean and well on his way to making a name for himself, rather than being dragged through his father’s dusty footprints.
We recently had the chance to talk with Earle about his influences, his endless tour schedule, and some of those tattoos.
Midnight at the Movies is fantastic, start to finish. What was the inspiration for this particular set of songs?
I wrote most of these songs with kind of an image in my head of a mid-1940s Times Square kind of vibe. That was the picture I was trying to paint. Dirty, dirty movie theaters with seats missing and, you know, weird people
Like the title track. Have you always been influenced by the past?
Yeah, yeah, when I was 18 I was really obsessed with Jack Kerouac and the beat generation and that imagery. It was such a strange period in time for art and it took me a long time to kind of process and figure out what the hell all of it was really about.
It was a really fluid time for art, for literature...for everything, really.
Yeah, so much changed, and it was, you know, the birth of the cool. It was the first time that people just came out like “Fuck you, we’re livin’ this way”. And there’s something really fascinating about that but it took me years to decide whether there was really a cause there or if they were just degenerates.
I think that generally in the beginning there was really a cause there that got left behind, just like all things popular get watered down, diluted, dipped in chocolate, covered in marshmallow and served to the masses.
Do you think your fellow musicians have “lost the cause” as well?
Yeah, all you gotta do is do the fuckin’ research and see where the bodies are actually buried. Dylan wasn’t good because it started with Dylan. Dylan was good because he had a very good understanding of Woody Guthrie and because he understood that Woody Guthrie wasn’t the end of it. Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee come in and Lead Belly comes in and then you keep movin’ through time and then [Dylan] comes into play and then Springsteen comes into play. Those are the guys that really paid attention to the records.
Would you put yourself on that same continuum from Dylan and Springsteen?
You know, all I can say for myself is that I started with Woody Guthrie. Woody Guthrie is the beginning of it all and if you start anywhere else but with Woody Guthrie you’re cutting your chances in half of doing something real.
Is that sense of authenticity the most important thing to you as an artist?
If they’re gonna call you roots music than you’ve gotta show the roots. If you’re covering it up with a bunch of crap, you don’t fall under roots as far as I’m concerned, as far as referencing John Henry, referencing Joe Hill. That’s paying respects to the past. Dylan didn’t write one song in the early days where a line wasn’t taken from an old song. That’s how you do it.
You’ve got a song about John Henry. Was he the inspiration for your tattoo? [Earle has a pair of crossed sledgehammers inked over his thumb, a symbol that has become his logo.]
That symbolism definitely plays into it but it’s just kind of an all around--I just kind of like it. Guy Clark told me when I was fifteen years old that I had a thumb like a sledgehammer so I got a sledgehammer tattooed over the thumb that he was the most fond of.
You mentioned roots music and that you’d classify yourself as roots music. Do you think coming from Nashville you get pigeonholed as a country artist?
I do.
Do you get that conditional praise where people don’t say “you’ve made a good album” but call it a “good country album”?
I actually do better on the indie charts than I do on the country charts. My crowds tend to be younger, tattooed up, not rockabilly and... I don’t know exactly how to classify ‘em but they’ve got a lot of tattoos and they wear jeans and t-shirts.
You cover The Replacements’ “Can’t Hardly Wait” on Midnight. That may be part of it.
Yeah, that’s another one of those bands--another one of the surprising ones that comes out of the early to mid 80s. You can hear Carl Perkins on a Replacements record, you can hear Muddy Waters on a Replacements record, you can hear Buck Owens on a Replacements record. You can hear what they were listening to. And I think that’s really important. I’m genuinely convinced that there’s maybe one in about five million people that’s gonna do something really, genuinely original. But there hasn’t been one in my lifetime. There hasn’t been one in my parents’ lifetime.
Who was the last original then?
Bill Monroe, Charlie Poole. They did something original but that was a long time ago and people have been fucking up what they created ever since.
Most guys who are 27, 28 don’t drop Bill Monroe’s name into conversation. You seem to be a real student of music.
I think it’s the area of the country that I grew up in and the fact that I knew when I was young that I was different from everybody else and that I liked something different than everybody else but I just couldn’t find it. When everybody else was listening to hip hop, I was listening to different hip hop artists and when I was really young, everybody liked Poison but I liked AC/DC.
I think that was a much better choice.
When I discovered the roots of the music that I liked a lot, it lead me forward where I could listen to newer music because I could find those little bits and find where I needed to be. And I just figured out that I’m kind of a pirate, I’m just gonna take bits and pieces and do what I want, when I want, and I’m gonna do it on my terms.
So you grew up in Nashville and with your musical legacy--your pair of namesakes--did you have any choice but to become a musician?
You know I was an OK carpenter, I was an OK bricklayer, and I was a really good painter. I could paint houses like a motherfucker. The problem with that is that I just don’t wanna do that and this is the only other thing I’ve ever been good at. I guess I was a good drug dealer in the sense that I knew that I always knew where to get drugs but I was never any good at hanging on to them or selling what I was supposed to sell. This is the thing I’ve been the most successful at.