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“ ‘Guitar Town’ was doing okay as the second single,” Earle said. “Then, around that same time, Bruce Springsteen walked into Tower Records in L.A. and bought a couple of things. He got Willy DeVille’s first solo record, and he bought Guitar Town. A kid who worked there at Tower reported it, and it ended up in a column in Billboard. I sold fifty thousand records the next week and got booked all over the place. So that was it: I had a career largely because Bruce bought my record and it got into print.” But it all mattered to Steve Earle for reasons beyond that. Had Sylvester Stallone picked up Guitar Town that day and talked about it on Johnny Carson, it wouldn’t have meant the same thing. “I’m a singer-songwriter, and I knew how good he was,” Earle told me. “When Bruce’s first and second records came out, I was in Houston still. There’s a really famous bootleg from ’74 in Houston, Liberty Hall. I was at that show. This is just to say, I was a fan from the beginning. I knew he was the guy. I knew what he was doing. I knew he was trying to be a singer-songwriter post-disco, and that required having a rock band. I was paying attention. I was a folkie, but I knew that he was a songwriter, that we had the same job.” Nebraska, though, allowed Earle to watch Springsteen doing the job, in just the way Earle was accustomed to seeing it done by Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt.
Deliver Me From Nowhere
Warren Zanes
Maslow stated that, ‘We are generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments; under the most perfect conditions, under conditions of greatest courage we enjoy and even thrill to the godlike possibilities we see in ourselves at such peak moments, and yet simultaneously shiver with weakness, awe and fear before the same possibilities.’
Fear - The Friend of Exceptional People
Geoff Thompson
The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not. He will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation. The artist must be like that Marine. He has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable. He has to take pride in being more miserable than any soldier or swabbie or jet jockey. Because this is war, baby. And war is hell.
The War of Art
Steven Pressfield
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