Like a lonesome man walking down a dusty road in the first light of dawn, Steve Earle's voice always stands by itself. With a recording career stretching back to 1975, his distinctive tone sets him apart from other country artists by its sheer weight and agility in perspective. Songs like \Guitar Town,"" ""Nowhere Road"" and even ""John Walker's Blues"" make it clear that Earle possesses a voice with more stories than an instrument can handle.
Putting down the guitar and laying his pick aside, Steve Earle looked at a pen and knew it could spin a few tales. The result is ""Doghouse Roses,"" a compilation of 11 stories straight from his weathered fingers and melodious mind. Sometimes autobiographical, edgy and rough, they are shaken from the dirt that gathers in the treads of a tour bus and the boots of cowboys. They bring up characters that might otherwise be forgotten as they sit in the corner of a caf??, smile from a sidewalk or die in an alley.
The book begins with what might as well be called the title track, ""Doghouse Roses."" Earle sets the rhythm of the book early on with this rambling escape drug addiction and the narrow confines of a recording studio. It flies by like the traffic on the freeway that does not care if you are stuck in third gear. In it, Bobby Charles and Kim West are on an exodus from Los Angeles and cannot leave without every ""wraith on the highway"" coming out to haunt them.
Quickly ""Wheeler County"" and ""Taneytown"" appear as humble small towns on the side of the side of the interstate. Each of these places possesses their own identity, reinforced by Earle's mastery of a troubadour's voice. Both ""Wheeler County"" and ""Taneytown"" have deep ruts running through the dirt of their shifting streets. The occupants of these places share a keen sense of desperation that is muted at times but always looming beneath the prose.
The American stands as the one person to connect three stories, ""Jaguar Dance,"" ""The Internationale"" and ""The Reunion."" It is in this wind-blown and leathery character that Earle achieves a worldly wise highwayman. The American appears as a ""wizened warrior returning home to live and fight another day.""
In ""Jaguar Dance,"" his last disastrous drug run out of Mexico turns into a dash for the border with lawmen on both sides hunting him down. The American employs every skill available to survive and comes out with a few more scars, though they never cut deeply on his thick skin.
In ""The Internationale,"" the American turns up again, this time in Paris. Composed of ""all angles and shadows,"" he makes his way to the back room to talk to the proprietor of a small coffeehouse, a withering woman with a penchant for clear recollection. Over the steam of ancient absinthe, she spins tales of revolution and tells of the time when the American would not be a lonely man, but instead a comrade in a great army of vagabonds, rebels and lovers.
""The Reunion"" brings the American to a hotel in Vietnam, where his days in the service are recalled across from a former Viet Cong officer. The exchange of soldier's stories is fascinating and shocking, striking like a bullet to the bone. Its resolution brings the dusk to the eyes of a man who has always squinted in the dawn's light.
Like any great storyteller, Earle's tales are infused with enough personal experience to momentarily escape fiction. His life has been marred by drug abuse and recording deals gone awry. Earle spent three years in jail for narcotics possession and seems to have been given enough time to see things clearly. He did not allow his addiction to burn away all the creativity and intuition that he exhibits so easily in ""Doghouse Roses."" Instead, he has taken it in, swallowed it deep and translated every aching act of his life into something honest, intelligent and eloquent.
Instead of anger and disbelief, there is faith and heartbreak. The people of these narratives are not lost and gone but standing on the edges of their personal abyss and stepping away. Whether they are stepping away from the abyss or towards it is only revealed in the last page of every story. The characters are never road warriors, but ghosts on the highways, flying over every tumbleweed and pothole. They seem to fade into the rusty landscape after it has all but consumed them.
It is easy to be shocked'and even repelled'by the stories of ""Doghouse Roses."" They give no apologies and demand a response. They raise bile from deep in the stomach and use vinegar to beat it back. They can be beautiful and elegant or coarse and piercing, like the flower of the title. But don't be fooled by the drugs, the slang, the murder or the distance'Steve Earle is honest with his characters, sympathetic to their conditions and sincere about their dreams. That is, if they still have any.
