DAVE'S DIARY - 12 NOVEMBER 2005 - STEVE EARLE & ALLISON MOORER UPDATE
FOR STEVE AND ALLISON THE HONEYMOON STARTS NOW
"Last night I had a dream/that the world had turned around/ and all our hopes had come to be/and the people gathered 'round/ they all brought what they could bring/and nobody went without/and I learned a song to sing/the revolution starts now!"
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Singing
author and playwright Steve Earle and seventh wife Allison Moorer
made the most of a belated honeymoon in New Zealand with a little
fly-fishing. It's not clear if they hooked anything as big as the new Kiwi Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters but it was a pleasant pre-tour interlude. Earle, 50, and Moorer, 33, arrived in the land of the long white cloud almost a week before their first gig at the James Hay Theatre in historic Christchurch on November 10. No details have been revealed about whether Steve did the decent thing and gutted his own trout or left that task to his singing spouse. |
But Moorer
- former wife of songwriter partner and producer Doyle "Butch"
Primm - has thrown herself into being Earle's support act and on stage
duet partner.
Allison joins her husband to perform Conspiracy and takes Emmylou
Harris's role in Comin' Around and Lucinda Williams in You're
Still Standing There.
The couple were wed at the ornate Hermitage Hotel in Nashville on August
11 and debut in Australia at the Prince Of Wales in St Kilda on Tuesday
November 15.
Fans hope that hotel - former locale for PBS-FM (one of the few major
radio stations to play Earle and Moorer in Australia) - will be equally
productive as a song source on his sixth Australian tour.
Earle told his POW audience on a previous visit that he wrote Harlan
Man at the pub - owned by a pair of Warrnambool born brothers - during
a "Stevedores strike."
He also confessed he wrote Jerusalem at the same locale.
AND THE REVOLUTION
| "The
Revolution Starts ... Now and Rich Man's War we were actually
playing at the end of our tour of Australia and New Zealand last April,
on encores," Earle revealed last year. "Rich Man's War I finished in Australia. Warrior was a riff that we'd been playing all through the tour; it was just a sound check thing, and I thought, "I sort of like this idea, and I've kind of always wanted to be Patti Smith. I thought it would be a spoken-word piece, and I came up with the idea of war as a character. Then I wrote The Gringo's Tale; once that idea came up, they were sort of companion pieces. The end of the first week, I still didn't have lyrics for it, but I was doing The Exonerated - the play that was up for a year and a half; I did it in New York in January and then it closed in March. |
 |
It's unlikely that U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice will be making a cameo at Earle-Moorer concerts unless we source new pre-emptive strikes here.
So what was
the source of Earle's calypso love song - Condi, Condi.
"National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was in town, speaking
at Vanderbilt University, and the chancellor at Vanderbilt and his wife
weren't even speaking to each other because he had brought her in to speak,
and I happened to run into them at a party," Earle recalled.
"I was very aware when Rice got to Nashville, and I wrote it the
morning after she left. I needed a song. I don't know, I just sort of
imagined those Rastas at the back of the beach, in the grill, that come
up and give you a quarter pound of pot and say, "Hold my dope, mon,"
and they come back the next day with the money. I just imagined one of
those guys saying, "Listen, mon, I'm lookin' for Condoleezza Rice."
NO
ALTERED STATE AT THE ALTAR
Earle recently told the New York Times he had moved to Manhattan from
his digs at Fairview off the interstate between Nashville and Memphis.
When I interviewed Earle at his home in construction in 1988 he was wed
to fifth wife Teresa Ensenat - the record company executive credited with
signing Guns & Roses.
But fate stepped in and he later remarried fourth wife Lou-Anne Gill who
became his sixth spouse.
So when Earle was interviewed last year for CMT he told writer Edward
Morris he was talking precautions to ensure his cupid would be cupped.
"I'm done now," he told Morris.
"I'm retired. I'm thinking about ripping out the toilet in my upstairs
bathroom and having it installed in the middle of the living room, just
to keep any girl from moving in."
That was before he began touring with Moorer, younger sister of Shelby
Lynne, and again faced the marital music.
"But it's the first time I've ever been married sober," Earle
told the New York Times.
Earle was promoting his play Karla, written in Nashville and produced
there in 2002, on the eve of a 16-performance showcase in Greenwich Village
until November 13.
The play is about Karla Faye Tucker, the murderess who in 1998 became
the first woman executed by the State of Texas since the Civil War.
That was despite a jailhouse conversion and a flood of opposition from
abolitionists.
SURFING BYRON BAY
 |
Earle
plans to learn to surf at Byron Bay when not treading the other
boards on his eagerly awaited tour. "I've lost a little weight, so I've got a better chance of staying afloat." |
Earle is touring to promote his 18th album The Revolution Starts Now and Moorer is showcasing tunes from her fifth album The Duel that suffered an identity crisis in ads as The Jewel until PBS-FM Acid Country host David Heard pondered aloud on air if it had been given a fashionable re-birthing.
DUKE OF EARLE
Timing is
everything in show business and unlike a character in fellow Texan Kenny
Rogers hit Lucille the singer is arriving, not leaving, as Premiers Bracks
found some new digs west of the world's most liveable city for chappies
with a reported penchant for a spot of paintball at King Lake.
This will no doubt be a source of new material for these singing sweethearts
of the rodeo.
Unlike chappies and chappettes whose careers are built on refrying used
songs neither is suffering malnutrition from interruptions to the publishing
royalties stream.
Earle wrote Coming Around, the duet with Emmylou, for the soundtrack
of Robert Redford-Jennifer Lopez movie An Unfinished Life.
"It's a real cool story," he notes.
"I like to write stuff for films because it gives me a chance to
do a track that has a concept of its own outside of everything else I'm
doing, whether it becomes a part of my album or whether it goes on a soundtrack
record."
Moorer enjoyed her first big break when Redford used her song Soft
Place To Fall in his Horse Whisperer movie.
Director John Sayles picked another Earle composition Amerika v. 6.0
on Jerusalem for another movie, Silver City.
"I wrote it for another film," Earle said, "and it got
thrown out after the September 11 terrorist attacks because the director
thought it was too socially critical."
Earle also wrote the tune Outlaw's Honeymoon for the movie Niagara,
Niagara but withdrew the song after a publishing dispute.
Doghouse Roses, a collection of 11 short stories, was published
in June 2001 in the US and July 2001 in the UK.
Earle had a brace of his songs appear on movie soundtracks as diverse
as The Rookie, The Horse Whisperer, Psycho and Dead Man Walking.
His embryonic cameo was in 1976 docco Heartworn Highways with Guy
Clark, Steve Young, Rodney Crowell, David Allan Coe and the late Townes
Van Zandt.
The other Coalminer's daughter Patty Loveless has covered Earle tune My
Old Friend The Blues for her 13th album Dreamin' My Dreams
and Arkansas star Joe Nicholls has cut it on his fifth album with the
quaint title of 111.
FAMILY TREE
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Earle
was born in Virginia and raised near San Antonio in Texas where his
dad was an air traffic controller. Steve, eldest of five children, has wed seven times - to Sandra (Sandy) Henderson, Cynthia Dunn, Carol Hunter, Lou-Anne Gill, Maria Teresa Ensenat, and again to Lou-Anne, and Moorer. Steve has three children - two sons (Justin mum is Carol) and Ian (mum is Lou), and his stepdaughter Amy (the daughter of Lou.) Steve's mum and dad now live in Nashville and a brother, Mark, lives in Lubbock, Texas. The youngest Earle, Patrick, is living near Nashville and tours with Steve. |
His youngest
sister, Stacey, lives in Ashland City, Tennessee, with her husband, Mark
Stuart.
Stacey and Mark are both former members of the Dukes and both have had
recording careers in Nashville.
Former Saltbush pedal steel guitarist Mark Moffatt produced Nashville
sessions for Stacey when she was writing for the expatriate Australasian
publisher and manager Barry Coburn and wife Jewel.
The Coburns who wed in Christchurch - hometown of Barry and starting point
of the Earle-Moorer tour - have been publishers for fellow expatriate
superstar Keith Urban since before his U.S. career began.
Justin Earle also plays in Nashville band The Swindlers with Dustin Welch
- son of Kevin - and Travis Nicholson (son of Gary.)
CLICK HERE for Tour Dates from TonkGirl's
Gig Guide.
CLICK HERE for Steve Earle features and interviews in the Diary on February 5, 2004.
CLICK HERE for Allison Moorer from the Diary on May 16, 2004.