After an action packed weekend
that featured two parties, ninety minutes of Ultimate and 45 holes of disc
golf, I’ve just awakened from a nap refreshed, and ready to take on the world –
or at least this next music review.
Disc 423 is…Exit 0
Year of Release: 1987
What’s up with the Cover? It’s a road sign, alerting you to the fact that just
ahead is the turn that will take you to Steve Earle and the Dukes’ second album. I’ve always liked this cover, and have lived
in hope to one day see this sign off of some highway and take that off-ramp to
awesome. I guess metaphorically, I took
it already when I bought the record.
How I Came To Know It: My folks own this album,
and although I love it they almost never play it. It was an early purchase once I was out on my
own, unless this is their copy that I’ve merely liberated years ago when I went
away to university.
How It Stacks Up: I have fourteen studio albums of original material by
Steve Earle, and since I’ve already reviewed eight of them, you know
competition is fierce. “Exit 0” is one of
his best, and I’ll put it 2nd or 3rd, in a statistical
tie with “Guitar Town.”
Rating: 5 stars.
Yeah, that just happened.
In 1986, Steve Earle exploded on
the alt-country music scene with “Guitar Town” and in 1988 he crossed over into
mainstream music with the monster-selling “Copperhead Road.” Sandwiched between these two
massive commercial successes was “Exit 0” an understated and oft-forgotten
album likely better than both of those.
How an album as moving, melodic
and emotive as “Exit 0” could be forgotten is a mystery that has always left me
scratching my head. It could be the
production it ended up with on compact disc.
In the late eighties, a lot of albums were still recorded for vinyl, and
then directly transferred to digital without any remastering to better translate
them to that format.
This often leaves albums like “Exit
0”, which are recorded at a very low volume and that need to be turned up
overly loud just to get proper sound separation. (In the early oughts, record companies would
compensate for this earlier error by over-amplifying everything for a few
years). Fortunately, the songwriting on
this record is so strong that it easily overcomes this production deficiency,
and loses none of its emotional impact.
This is Steve Earle at his ‘lonely
highway’ best, painting the portraits of ordinary men living rich and sometimes
tragic internal lives. These are men who
are never satisfied, but like a Dylan Thomas poem, still manage to sing in
their chains.
The opening guitar chords of the
album’s first song “Nowhere Road” are
reminiscent of the previous year’s “Guitar
Town” but apparently minus the latter’s optimism. The opening lyric tells you that for his sophomore
effort, Earle will have more than a few words about the empty spaces between what
we expect of life, and what’s delivered:
“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.”
This lonely road could just as
easily be the album that follows, as Earle paints the stark and the beautiful
together as artfully as a John Ford movie shot in Death Valley.
My favourite song on the record is
“No. 29” a song that showcases the
empty glory of Friday night high school football in America. It captures the tragic core of that
experience better in three and a half minutes than B.G. Bissinger’s novel “Friday
Night Lights” can manage in three hundred and fifty pages. The slow, sad pacing of “No. 29”, tells of a star running back who is injured in a high
school game, and now only has memories to cling to. The football imagery is great, but Earle
doesn’t miss a moment to remind the listener what this song is really about for
most of the town’s residents:
“I was born and raised here, this town’s my town
Everybody knows my name
But ever since the glass plant closed down
Things ‘round here ain’t never been the same.”
Our hero’s focus now lies in taking
the ‘new’ “No. 29” out for a steak
sometimes, and feeling the scar ache in his leg, which reminds him of his past
glory. Springsteen’s “Glory Days” might make you nostalgic for
your youth, but “No. 29” is a
reminder that not everyone gets out of it in one piece.
Other songs show that there are
darker directions down the Nowhere Road, such as in “Angry Young Man” where a man stands before a gas station – gun in
hand – and apology like an unfulfilled promise the song’s refrain reflects in
his mind:
“Mama I hope that you understand
This ain’t no place for an angry young man.”
With such awful depths, it is a
good thing that “Exit 0” manages to show the lighter side of blue collar
frustration, with songs like “The Week of
Living Dangerously,” which recounts a man’s decision to ‘take a left when
he’d usually take a right’ on his way home from work, and ends up a week later
with his wife bailing him out of a Mexican jail.
Even in this song and elsewhere the
‘I’m in love with my car’ moments on “Sweet
Little ‘66” this record have an undercurrent of sadness, with a lot of
wheels spinning in the muddy ditches of back country towns, and not gaining much
traction.
Yet throughout the experience,
Earle imparts a square-jawed determination in his music that tells you that
win, lose or draw, if you stand tall and rail back at whatever life slings at
you, sometimes that’s enough.
This determination is reflected in
the final track, “It’s All Up To You”
which provides the perfect book end to the “Nowhere
Road” the record starts you down. To
a slow country drum beat, and a low, loose and haunting guitar riff, Earle
reminds us:
“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
The rain ain’t gonna hurt you
It’s come to wash away your blues
It’s all up to you.”
This record is quiet, but it
sneaks up on you with this message. You
can feel trapped in your circumstance, but in the end, it is how you react to
your situation that measures your worth in this world. The Nowhere Road may be straight and stark,
but where it goes is all up to you.
Coming from a town where I never felt totally at home, and finding
myself in a city where I totally do, I can relate to the sentiment. If I didn’t appreciate every moment of the
journey to this point, or if I miss any of the points to come then I wasn’t
listening closely enough to what Earle has to tell us on this record.
The album is a masterfully paced
thirty eight minutes, twenty one seconds of music that has a quiet beauty, that
is well worth turning up and paying attention to.
Best tracks: All tracks – there’s nary a week track on this
record.
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