Steve Earle: Early Tracks : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Steve Earle – the good ol' new boy from Nashville who enthralled rock and country fans last year with the genre-crossing breakthrough LP Guitar Town – has joined the ranks of rockers through the ages who've released heralded "debut" albums only to have potentially humiliating predebut albums rise like naive specters from their fresh-faced pasts. In interviews at the time of Guitar Town's release, Earle sheepishly confessed to the existence in a previous record company's can of several "terrible" singles and an album's worth of unreleased tracks, which – in his nightmares – he imagined would inevitably come out under the name of Early Earle.

Close. The not-quite-so-punny Early Tracks has indeed been unvaulted by Epic to reap the benefits of Earle's later and far better work for MCA. But happily, it's not the stuff that singer-songwriters' bad dreams are made of. Recorded back in 1982 and 1983, the stylistically simple and comparatively primitive Early Tracks offers further proof that the child is indeed father to the man, while offering up good, crude country fun on its own minor merits.

The album's two real treasures are polarized romantic bookends of sorts: the hilarious, sidewalk-scraping masochism of "If You Need a Fool" and the proud, subverted misogyny of "My Baby Worships Me." The latter song finds Earle dating a woman who just may check in as the greatest girlfriend of all time; she not only forgives him for sexual transgressions with her friends but also continues to work an assembly line just to support his lazy butt ("We go to dinner, she pay the bill/She make the payment on my Coupe de Ville" – does she have any sisters?). Our boy is on the other side of the self-esteem spectrum, however, in the former number, volunteering to play the buffoon for his baby should more desirable roles be unavailable: "They're just not making fools the way that they used to," he warns in his persuasive sales pitch. "They don't come back for more the way I always do." Earle, obviously, is no fool for having come back to Music City, U.S.A., for more even after the disappointment of this initially shelved first salvo.