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A CONVERSATION WITH STEVE EARLE (continued)
PM: What old Blues or Jazz do you like, and is there any ethnic music you're partial to?
SE: My taste in Jazz is pretty basic, and pretty archaic, I guess. I am a fan of hard Bop, I like Bird and Dizzy Gillespie and the original K.C./New York connection. But I also like the West Coast stuff a lot, I dig Zoot Sims and Chet Baker, I don't think that's a lesser form of Jazz. It's just different, and a product of the environment. And that's the only kind of Jazz I really understand. When it starts becoming math, I don't get it.
PM: But you like the late 50s and early 60s quartets and the like, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, like that?
SE: I love Miles Davis, I like Coltrane, sure. Wes Montgomery is lost on me, the only Jazz guitarists that really knocked me out were Django Reinhardt and John McLaughlin. The problem with the Jazz Rock fusion in the 70s was that most of it never rocked. But I loved the Mahavishnu Orchestra, they were the loudest thing I'd ever heard. It had the tonality of Jazz and the energy and volume of Rock. Billy Cobham would come out and play for 10 minutes by himself, and then the rest of the band would walk out. McLaughlin played that Gibson doubleneck in those days through a 100 watt Marshall and two 4x12 cabinets. The thing would be leaning against the amp, and he'd walk over to it and turn the volume control up and the rig would go "ba-wa-ah" [makes a Harley/motorboat combo sound, laughing]. That was the Birds of Fire tour.
PM: And Blues?
SE: I listen to Delta stuff and acoustic stuff more than I do electric stuff. It doesn't mean I don't like electric stuff, just that I'm more interested in Country Blues, because I can play it. But I'm from Texas, and a lot of my contemporaries and friends came out of Freddy King's band. Guys my age and a little older, the Vaughns and even Johnny Winter, and Rocky Hill, who's Dusty Hill's brother. Gary Nicholson and most of Delbert's original band were all Freddy King Band veterans. It's really a Fort Worth thing, more than a Dallas thing. There was a chain of nightclubs called The Cellar After Hours Clubs. The original one was in Fort Worth, but there was one in Dallas and one in Houston, and there was one in San Antonio for a short period of time.
I played San Antonio and Houston. Johnny Carroll managed the Houston Cellar. I was very much into Blues based stuff when I was a teenager, 13-14, and I was in a Blues band. I really loved the Brit stuff that came along that was completely and totally Blues.
PM: Yardbirds, and all that.
SE: That was even earlier, and I definitely loved the Yardbirds. They were one of my favorite bands. But I mean the Jeff Beck Group, Truth and Beck-ola. They were outstanding, and Here Comes Shuggie Otis came out in 1968, that was a very good year. My band basically played everything on East West [the classic Paul Butterfield Blues Band record] and we did shuffles, that kind of stuff. I played piano in that band, and was the singer. And we played in two keys, because of my limitations on the instrument.
PM: C and G.
SE: That's right. It was just where I was. All the kids on the South Side wore cowboy hats and were into Country music, and if you were going to be into anything other than Country music, all this blues based stuff was coming out, and we were into it. As far outside that box we got was Spirit, that's as psychedelic as we got.
[At this point, we realized he had to leave for the studio. He let me snap a photo, and we walked back to where our cars were parked.]
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