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Steve Earle and my sense of place

"Tennessee Blues", the opening track to Steve Earle's September 18 release, Washington Square Serenade, offers a surpassingly calm farewell to his longtime base in Nashville ("this ain't never been my home" he sings, but without rancor); many subsequent tracks are a kind of salute to the new home he and Allison Moorer have made for themselves in Manhattan.

Washington Square Serenade arrived within a day or two of the moment when the minimum wage here in Kentucky legally rose to $5.85 an hour.

I lived in Nashville just under a decade. Steve and Allison (and Allison's previous husband) were among the many people who made Music City an enjoyable place, who stirred the creative pot, who were alive with the doing and making of art. Who were committed to their work, and to the ideas behind it. Who were committed to the notion that there should and could be ideas behind songs. I miss very little about Nashville, for I am happy here in Eastern Kentucky. But I do, some nights, miss that community, miss walking into a small club and knowing the best musicians in the world are playing on stage simply for the joy of making music, and that Emmylou Harris just might stop by.

My photographer friend Alice Wheeler called on Friday, just back from a shoot in Portland, Oregon. Alice and I are both grunge survivors from Seattle (she has the distinction of having taken Nirvana's first promotional photo; and rather more than that), and she called with a broad smile having stepped into another vat of creative people. A number of old friends and rivals and acquaintances -- not to mention younger folk -- have sought refuge in Portland, perhaps the last affordable city on the West Coast; and perhaps that no longer, or, at least, not much longer.

Minimum wage when I graduated from high school in 1977, the summer I spent selling Fuller Brush products door to door, was $2.30 an hour. That works out to $7.80 an hour in today's money according to one my favorite and most depressing websites: http://minneapolisfed.org/research/data/us/calc/.

Minnesota, Athens, Washington, D.C., periodically Los Angeles or New York or (yes) Nashville, Austin, Chicago, Seattle, Chapel Hill, now Portland, perhaps Lincoln, Nebraska...the music industry has focused for years on "it" cities where there is a happening scene. Where there is a creative community which has been allowed to develop, to hear its own voice in the silence rather than being drowned out in the voices of what's already happening, or alleged to be happening.

Those places have had two things in common: a convergence of bright and talented people, and cheap rent.

In order for creative work to happen -- and make no mistake, our cultural exports are crucial to the U.S. economy, though I have neither the patience nor the discipline to place a factoid here to prove the passing point -- artistic people must have sufficient free time to imagine, to do, to stare out the window, to chase rabbits down empty holes. To discover.

Perhaps someday somebody will write the hidden history of the indie rock revolution, but I have a hunch -- again, I can't prove this and don't care to try -- that a great deal of the hipster bands we once revered had at least one trust fund in the background.

I don't begrudge Steve and Allison their new home, not at all. Steve is now able to bang heads with the best and the brightest in the world, to see if his prose and his intellect and his energy -- his work -- can be competitive amidst the most powerful voices (and egos) at work in the U.S. today. Moving to Manhattan in the middle of one's life is a brave thing; most of my friends there are trying to figure out how to get out. And, of course, Steve can afford it.

But being young and creative -- without the trust fund or an international reputation -- requires easy, mindless, disposable part-time jobs that pay the rent and food and the odd inexpensive instrument. It means cheap places to stay where nobody else is willing to live, though, now, the developers have gotten wise to the ways of the underground and track artistic communities as a component of real estate investment strategies.

In truth, the community needn't be that large. The rise of Seattle -- grunge -- can be traced back to a handful of very bright, very creative people. Inevitably I'm going to leave some out, but (in alphabetical order): Jeff Ament, Mark Arm, Matt Cameron, Art Chantry, Tad Doyle, Jack Endino, Bruce Pavitt, Dan Peters, Charles Peterson, Jonathan Poneman, and Susan Silver...there are eleven names (I have worried the list a bit), roughly half of them musicians, all in various ways crucial to what happened. Maybe another dozen names belong on that list, but my point is that a powerful creative community -- an artistic movement, if you must -- takes a very small number of people. They just have to be very, very good. And committed.

Those folks all lived and worked in Seattle at a time when Seattle was the end of the end of the road, when nothing important happened there, before Starbucks and Microsoft and Sub Pop put it on the map for good. Before the millionaires took over. Today one of the best graphic designers I know lives in Fort Wayne, Indiana. One of the best photographers I know works out of Ashland, Kentucky. One of ND's best writers lived, until recently, in New Auburn, Wisconsin. Even Mr. Earle hasn't yet given up his place in rural Tennessee, nor do I think he ever will.

That's the other choice, I guess: Follow Thoreau's example and live some place cheap and remote and solitary. But most of us are not solitary, not full-time anyhow (curmudgeon though I am, even I need people now and again), and most of the art we make takes collaboration. Requires the sparks which fly when strong-willed and creative people meet, sometimes at random, often at a purpose (or cross-purpose) and try to get something done.

It can happen anywhere, even here in Morehead. Especially here, for this is a college town. But it cannot happen without affordable housing and a livable wage. And it cannot happen if all the avenues of commerce become cul de sacs leading to Wal-Mart.

And, as the song goes, wherever you go, there you are.

Posted by grant on July 1, 2007 9:39 AM | Permalink