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Oh, there were some good ones, alright: superhuman doses of this or that, a few car wrecks, a couple of adventures in the court system. I confess that chemical warfare of this sort lost its charm for me around the time an acquaintance/dealer/friend (it's always hard to tell with drug buddies) turned up dead in a field with a lot of unexplained bullet holes in him. But I also confess there's a part of me that's still seduced by the vulnerable, high-flying outlaw heroism of the reckless addict.
As a more or less former drug fiend who titled his ragged major-label finale Shut Up and Die Like an Aviator, Steve Earle would certainly relate to the wartime analogy. It's been nearly 10 years now since he was declared country music's commercial and artistic savior, a little over four since he was dumped from MCA due to plummeting sales and conspicuous drug problems. Finally, after a journey that took him through various crack houses, numerous arrests, and a round of heroin rehab, Earle has managed a comeback that reads like a small purple heart given by himself, to himself.
Arranged with a band of neo-trad elders including Pete ''Panama Red'' Rowan, Norman Blake, and Emmylou Harris (who sounds a bit weary here, tired as she must be of watching brilliant young men going down with their ships), the all-acoustic Train a Comin', released on the tiny Nashville indie Winter Harvest label, has a nostalgic vibe. Many of its songs date back to Earle's pre-Guitar Town days as a songwriting wunderkind knocking around Nashville and Austin, before his rock 'n' roll fantasies took over, back when he emulated hard-living heroes like Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark in craft and lifestyle. Train's new material travels the same dirt road, and it features some choice '60s and '70s covers--including a high, lonesome reading of the Beatles' ''I'm Looking Through You'' that's touchingly ironic (remember, this is an ex-crackhead singing).
It's this sort of dark, self-aware humor--and, of course, great songwriting--that saves Train from sentimentality: it opens with ''Hometown Blues,'' a number about how hard it sucks to come home after savoring the world, and has a chipper, old-timey, love-is-a-dangerous-drug song called ''Angel Is the Devil,'' a nod to soul brother Gram Parsons's ''Christine's Tune (Devil in Disguise)'' in which said lady drags him ''closer to the glow.'' The most striking performance is probably ''Goodbye,'' a sad, amnesiac plea for past damage done. But I keep going back to the record's two war stories--''Ben McCulloch,'' an angry graycoat's tale about a hell-for-leather general, and ''Mercenary Song.'' On the latter, Earle snarls through his wheezy tenor (his vocal cords, never the most beautiful instrument, were permanently damaged when an off-duty cop choked him with a nightstick in 1987), declaring he'll ''fight for no country, but...die for good pay.'' At the end of the tune, he admits he can't say if he's gonna ''settle down quiet,'' or head off in search of more trouble--sounding like no one so much as the Irish aviator in Yeats's ''Wild Swans,'' who goes to war not for ''law'' or ''duty,'' but for that ol' ''lonely impulse of delight.''
Speaking of Irish aviators, Shane MacGowan--who has been white-knuckling it through his own drugs and alcohol-fueled reconnaissance flights for more years now than anyone thought possible--has also made an impressive return from the near dead after being booted from the Pogues in 1991 for drunk and disorderly conduct beyond the call of duty. The Snake (Warner Bros.) is less eclectic than MacGowan's work before the fall, passing over world music exercises in favor of amphetamine jigs, sodden ballads, and Clash-like rockers. His new backup crew, the Popes, is a solid, utilitarian crew, essentially Pogues doppelgangers with louder guitars (ex-bandmates Spider Stacy and Jem Finer also pitch in, along with Sinead O'Connor and drinking buddy-aspirant rock 'n' roller Johnny Depp, who supplies guitar and ''weird noises'').
But where Earle's return finds him cleaned up and at least a tad humbled, MacGowan's is bloody and unbowed. Promoting The Snake in England and Ireland, where it was released last year, he showed up on TV talk shows in a stupor, wobbled through performances, held sozzled interviews in pubs, and touted the joys of opium to members of the press; the record itself enumerates pints, pills, poitin, a line of junk, and 10 bottles of gin in its pharmacopoeia.
Being the semi-Catholic bard he is, though, MacGowan can't help entertaining at least the notion of repentance. Like Train a Comin', The Snake begins with the dubious idea of a discharge from service: ''Rock and roll, you crucified me, left me all alone/I never should have turned my back on the old folks back at home,'' he growls on ''Church of the Holy Spook,'' a hilarious lament for old-time religion set to a lurching Eddie Cochran groove; by the time he gets to the part about ''the sacred blood of the holy ghost...boiling in my veins,'' it's clear that his idea of salvation is a little different than Cardinal John O'Connor's.
As a songwriter, MacGowan has always been fascinated with war, both as cultural memory and as metaphor (''A Pair of Brown Eyes,'' one of his greatest moments, draws a clear line connecting alcoholic self-destruction and the burden of history). But aside from one traditional number (''The Rising of the Moon''), The Snake sets most of its skirmishes on more familiar battlefields: barrooms, bedrooms, and bathrooms. Maybe MacGowan feels his personal war has gotten big enough to carry its own symbolic weight. Or maybe the idea of fighting for a ''worthy'' cause--rather than simply fighting for its own sake--has become too alien for all of us.
Shane MacGowan and the Popes play August 10 and 11 at Tramps.