STEVE EARLE: WORKING-CLASS SONGS FROM THE TEXAS SOIL

Steve Earle doesn’t know whether he should be excited or nervous about all the glowing reviews he’s received for his debut album, “Guitar Town.”

Put yourself in his place: Here’s a country- and rock-influenced singer-songwriter who scrambled for almost half his 31 years trying to get an opening in the music business--and suddenly he’s being compared to people like Bruce Springsteen, John Fogerty and Tom Petty.

Aware of the dangerously high expectation levels being raised by all the praise, Earle almost seems to take comfort in the one negative review that he has seen.

“This guy in Boston thinks I am the Archie Bunker of rock or something,” Earle said during an interview on the rooftop lounge of a bargain-priced hotel here. “He said I represented the new conservatism in rock. . . . He didn’t even see it as a country album.”

The critic’s suspicion apparently revolves around the imagery in some of Earle’s blue-collar themes.

In the autobiographical title track, Earle describes the restless ambition of someone in a small town trying to beat the odds against making it big in the music business:

Nothin’ ever happened ‘round my hometown

And I ain’t the kind to just hang around ... Everybody told me you can’t get far

On thirty-seven dollars and a Jap guitar.

In “Good Ol’ Boy,” he deals with working-class resentment in a small Texas town where good jobs and sweet dreams are equally distant.

I got a job and it ain’t nearly enough

A twenty thousand dollar pickup truck

Belongs to me and the bank and some funny talkin’

Man from Iran.

About his choice of touchy words, Earle said, “The politics in a song when you are writing in the first person is the politics of the character, not necessarily the politics of the writer. I’m trying to write about the things I see happening around me and how people react to them, not just the things that happen to me.

“But sometimes they do coincide. . . . Like I never thought ‘Jap guitar’ was an issue. I never meant it to be derogatory. It was just part of the color of the story.”

Still, Earle agreed to change the phrase to “cheap guitar” on the “Guitar Town” single to ease record company concerns that radio stations might not play the record in its original form.

However, he balked at changing the line about the banker in “Good Ol’ Boy.”

“That was meant to be derogatory because it was supposed to represent the feelings of the character in the song,” said Earle. “The guy is angry because he’s falling behind economically. That’s the whole theme of the song.”

(Sample lyrics from “Good Ol’ Boy”:

Gettin’ tough

Just my luck

I was born in the land of plenty

Now there’s not enough. )

Earle--a refreshingly unaffected Texan who speaks and sings with a down-home drawl--took a drag from a cigarette, then continued.

“Reagan being in office has given many people in this country a false idea of what is happening. Springsteen said it in this show on his last tour. He was making this pitch for food banks and he said, ‘There are a lot of folks out there that the trickle-down (economic) philosophy hasn’t trickled down to yet.’

“I identify with a lot of that (frustration). I have got an eighth-grade education, so when I have needed to do some (regular) work when I couldn’t make it just with my music, I have a hard time finding something. I never made more than $7,000 a year in my life until about three or four years ago.”

Earle’s music can be described with equal accuracy as “country-influenced rock” or “rock-influenced country.” In today’s tight radio formats, that can cause problems. Program directors can deal with artists who are mostly country or mostly rock, but they have a hard time when their allegiance isn’t quite clear.

After years of being unable to get either country or rock radio to accept fellow Texan Joe Ely, MCA Records is nervous about running into the same roadblock with Earle. Indeed, there has been disagreement within the company on whether to present him as a country act or a rock act.

MCA’s pop-oriented Los Angeles headquarters recommended that Earle make his L.A. debut at Club Lingerie, the trendy rock showcase in Hollywood, while the label’s Nashville office suggested the Palomino, the country stronghold in North Hollywood. Instead, Earle has opted for the more neutral Roxy, where he’s due Wednesday. (He’ll be at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano next Sunday.

How does Earle classify his music?

“I am a country act and I am not ashamed of it,” he said, lighting another cigarette. “That’s why I signed with the Nashville division of MCA. But I would like to think I can appeal to some of the people who like Bruce’s records or John Fogerty’s records because I certainly love those records.

“To me, Creedence songs like ‘Cross-tie Walker’ are great country records as well as great rock records. Springsteen’s ‘Nebraska’ is a hell of a hillbilly record. We even do ‘State Trooper’ (from that album) in our show. Country radio stations ought to be playing records like that. It doesn’t matter that they weren’t recorded in Nashville.”

Earle is a convincing singer and his band, the Dukes, is flexible enough to handle country and rock. But the real strength of “Guitar Town” is the songs--rich in detail, character and purpose.

Though not a true concept album, the LP is a contemporary portrait of working-class aspirations and frustrations. Rather than operate as a traditionalist like newcomer Dwight Yoakam, Earle edges into new territory--much like a younger, more liberal Merle Haggard. He’s nowhere near the classic country singer that Haggard is, but Earle exhibits the same ability to express the working-class milieu.

“Little Rock ‘n’ Roller” is an uncommonly moving lullaby about a musician on the road talking by phone to his young son, while “My Old Friend the Blues” has the lonesome isolation of the best Mickey Newbury songs.

But it is songs like “Someday” that best define Earle’s art. It’s a marvelous summation of the small-town frustration of anyone who is tired of having outsiders look past him. Sample lyric:

Pumping gasoline and countin’ out-of-state plates

They ask me how far into Memphis, son, and where’s the nearest beer.

They don’t even know that there’s a town around here.

Earle has spent a lot of time in small towns--both as a youngster in Texas (just outside San Antonio) and as a traveling musician.

“Interstate highways are like tunnels that go through the country,” he said. “You don’t even know what state you are in when you stop for gas sometimes. But you see these people in small towns, especially the kids, who want to get out of there so bad. I only lived 20 miles outside of San Antonio for a long time, and San Antonio was like Oz to me at one time.”

Though born in Virginia, where his father was stationed in the Army, Earle considers himself a fifth-generation Texan. In fact, his grandfather was so outraged that Earle wasn’t born in the Lone Star State that he mailed a tin can filled with Texas soil so the first dirt the baby’s feet touched would be from Texas.

Earle laughs when he tells the story--but he kept the tradition alive. When Earle’s own son was born in Tennessee, he did the same thing, using another can of dirt mailed from Texas.

As a teen-ager, Earle ran away from home several times, playing guitar in coffee shops and bars on a long trail that stretched through three marriages, a songwriting job in Nashville and a series of odd jobs, including carpentry, building tennis courts and hanging paper on billboards.

He had some success as a writer (his “When You Fall in Love” was a country hit for Johnny Lee in 1982), but he didn’t get signed as a singer until 1983. He had three rockabilly-oriented singles on Epic Records, but none sold well. He was signed by MCA last year.

Critical response for the album has been more encouraging than sales (the LP was No. 39 on Billboard magazine’s country sales charts last week), but Earle is already thinking about the follow-up. “I think the next album will lean more toward social observation and commentary than this one,” he said.

“In the end, you either cheer people up (with your songs) or help them exorcise some problems they have--and people need a bit of both right now. The mood of the country as a whole is that things aren’t as they are being advertised. Lots of people are going hungry. Even more have had to downscale their expectations. They are confused. They remember everything they heard about this country in school and they wonder what happened to it.”