Marah Jawns / Ep. 3
Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.
-Napoleon Bonaparte
jawn one.
On the deck of a hotel we are set out in the Texas sun listening to Steve Earle moving through his own voice like a fire in the house of mirrors. Hundreds of versions of him emerge at once, each of them burning larger than life… as it ought to be when you meet your heroes, I guess. Earle talks a lot and I’m hung over, sipping orange juice and coffee from the lobby coffeeshop, and much of what he says is missed by me because of the strangeness of it all. As a teenager, I’d been transfixed and lifted and changed by Guitar Town, his 1986 major label debut. Now here we were in the late Austin morning, people noticing him/ him ignoring them but bathing RomanEmporerStyle in their fixed gazes. He talks about our band some and I’m here to admit that I forget everything he said. It was all too much for me. I think, if I’m not authentically autistic, that I have been autistic at times. I don’t say that lightly or insensitively either. My brain isn’t what I’ve always thought it was/ I’m starting to see that all this time later. At some point I do recall that he said we were “like a literate AC/DC'“. I suppose that was enough really. Earle had been to prison. He’d flipped cars and been scalped by the road. He’d written songs that made me, even at a young age, feel a deep resonating voice in my guts. His music was more than music. I never cared about music as much as a lot of musicians, anyway. I cared about something else, something much different than albums or whatever. Steve Earle and me didn’t meet out on the windswept plains of songwriting or whatever. I never came close to him and frankly, no matter who you are, neither did you. Where I touched the same sun-streaked window as a Texas troubadour was somewhere in the amalgam of our respective trips to this particular place at this particular moment in time. No matter what anyone says, and bless their little tricked hearts, but I was a fake musician in most of the ways except one. My abilities and skills were practically nonexistent as was the punk ethos people assumed you had if you were playing rock/roll even in 1998, as the late stages of its lifespan rusted the iron lung keeping it alive. Earle was all the things/ the real deal/ the mad savant who smoked and didn’t smoke at the same exact time. I’ve since seen him go in to the original Primanti’s and show me and my brother how to order the sandwich with fries on it and what the fuck was happening at that moment? I still don’t know. He was ineffably human. Raw. Insane. Genius. Cocky and sweet and maybe lying at times, I never could tell. It didn’t matter. I was hungover that first time he came around at SXSW and tried to woo us to sign with his little record label, E2. We had killed the night before. Or maybe we hadn’t, I don’t remember that either. I only remember bumming him smokes and watching the sky reflected in his sunglasses as he rambled on and on about people. He would say shit like, “And one time in Nova Scotia, Kris gave me his copy of Thich Nhat Hanh’s first book which no one else has ever read but me and Kris and he looked at me and said, “Boy, you need to eat something,” as he passed it over.” And then he’d giggle like a kid. And if you didn’t understand that he was talking about Kris Kristofferson and that what he was saying might have happened or it might not have (50/50) and that by calling Kris Kris he was kind of fucking with you and your head, then that was all on you. Or on me, as it turned out. And after that morning, I went back to my room feeling as if I’d been given the key to something by someone who had it for real. Now I see that the thing we shared in this world wasn’t music at all. He had me outgunned from every angle with that. What we shared, I think, was a lovely kind of nervous energy which makes other people suspicious of you or maybe want to fuck you or stab you in the throat. I felt as Steve Earle was talking to me by talking right through me. Which he was and which he did. But he was him and I was me. And by us standing together on account of our band, I was lifted from my old life and set down in this other. Where I was an imposter, I guess. I think Earle knew that. But here’s the thing. He never said a fucking word to anyone. He could have, but he didn’t. And that, to me, is the greatest gift I think I ever got.
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