Steve Earle- Guitar Town
“When a truck driver tells me that he loves Guitar Town,” Steve Earle shares here In the Studio regarding his #1-charting Country debut in March 1986, “he’s relating to our common experience, which is we were both away from home for what we do for a living, and we missed seeing our kids grow up, even though we do completely totally different things for a living. What we have in common is that we travel, so Art and communication are about the similarities between us rather than the differences. And I think we spend too much time in this society lately trying to identify the differences between us and not enough figuring out how our experience is the same, as human beings.”
“When I first started getting played on Country radio, everybody acted like I had sprung full-grown from the brow of ( MCA Records Nashville head ) Jimmy Bowen in 1986, and they always talked about me and Dwight Yoakam and Randy Travis in the same breath. And if anything, I’m a straggler from what was going on in Austin and Nashville in the mid-’70s. I had good teachers, Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, Jerry Jeff Walker, B.W. Stevenson. And it was all about singer-songwriters. And when I first got to Nashville on any given night, you could go to Guy’s house, or John Lomax used to do parties at his house. And he’d have everybody, from the street level where I was to Mickey Newbury and Neil Young, with the guitar going around. So it was a good place to learn. Then, basically cocaine sort of created a caste system and killed that real fast!”

