Earle Takes On Amoeba Hollywood
In the midst of a seven day, seven city promotional tour to support his new release Townes, Steve Earle landed on the stage of the world’s largest record store last night in front of an enthusiastic crowd. Amoeba Records in Hollywood follows Easy Street and Music Millennium earlier this week and he’ll be in SF today and then on to Denver, Houston and Austin.
Doing a 60 minute set, he mixed the Townes material in with several of his older songs and like Kim reported from Seattle’s show, there was an especially nice transition from “Rex’s Blues” into “Ft. Worth Blues”. He was in a pretty darn good mood, cracked a few jokes, reminisced about Townes, and generally had a lot of things to say about almost every song he performed. “Tom Ames’ Prayer” was a highlight for me, as was the standard Earle closer “Copperhead Road”.
Steve acknowledged the seven independent record stores he was playing at this week as “some of the last ones left in the world” and encouraged the crowd to keep coming back if they wanted to see them stay open. The lines at the resisters were long when I left, with probably a third of the folks clutching the vinyl edition at $22.99. This morning I got an email that said for today only, you can download the entire Townes release for a mere $2.99 on Amazon. Just sort of underscores the challenge of brick and mortar to compete with cyberspace.
For those of you interested in such stuff, he was playing the Martin M-21 that he designed with NY guitar man Max Umanov and that’s currently available as a numbered special edition model. He uses just a thumbpick and his bare index finger to get that sound he gets and was in standard tuning except for one song in drop D.