It was like a stiff shot of whiskey exploding behind my eyes and shooting through me like liquid fire.
It’s before my time but I’ve been told
He never come back from Copperhead Road
I was already a Steve Earle fan, right from the opening chords of “Guitar Town” in 1986. The haunting “bagpipe” intro and the ringing mandolin chords of “Copperhead Road” made me a Steve Earle obsessive. There was an almost frenzied edge to the album, which Steve called “heavy metal bluegrass” and Rolling Stone called “power twang.” That desperate edge suited me down to the bone in that year of 1988.
I was living in a basement apartment in Berkeley, California, working a dumb-ass sales job to pay the rent with my graduate student fiancée. And the wheels were coming off. A relationship that I thought was the future was already the past. I knew it in my guts, though my head and heart weren’t ready to come to grips with that cold fact.
Maybe I was trying to tell myself something, prowling the highways and byways of the Bay Area at night, snarling along with Mr. Earle.
You got no place to fall
When your back’s to the wall
The whole thing went in the ditch and I took a bad liver and a broken heart back to Southern California. There were a couple of wild years in there for an angry young man — with a soundtrack of Steve Earle and Guns ‘n’ Roses (interestingly, Steve’s third wife was the A&R rep who discovered GnR).
Here we are, 30 years down the road. Both Steve and I have our shit together, more or less. Sober, but still rockin’. Steve Earle & the Dukes are taking Copperhead Road out on the road for a 30th anniversary tour, playing the whole album through — and then some.
When they announce a West Coast leg on that tour, I’ll be there, singing along, every song, word for word.
RLT says
I was listening to “Copperhead Road” when I high-sided a motorcycle back in 2012. I may not have the bike anymore, but I still got Steve. And Townes. And the Pogues. Would love to see Earle in concert again.
JimC says
That is so epically appropriate.
felonious monk says
http://www.wrath-bearingtree.com/2018/02/interview-taylor-brown-author-gods-howl-mountan/
Note: Link repaired
Paul McNamee says
In my area the week before Los Lobos …. hmmm..
JimC says
You must.
Paul McNamee says
Oh, and just for the trivia, if I’ve never mentioned this before … I grew up on vinyl records and cassette tapes.
When I finally got on the CD bandwagon and bought a CD player .. COPPERHEAD ROAD was my first CD.
JimC says
Yes!
deuce says
I was the same with vinyl. G n’ R Lies was my first CD, but Copperhead Road was purchased not long after.
JimC says
I am detecting an utterly unsurprising common ground here….
deuce says
A good buddy of mine is pretty much a straight-ticket metal/hard rock guy. He bought his coppy of CR not long after me. I think it’s still his only country CD.
Damn, thirty years…
JimC says
More than a few folks like that.
deuce says
“Oh, and just for the trivia, if I’ve never mentioned this before … I grew up on vinyl records and cassette tapes.”
Paul, you piker. I bought one cassette in the course of the ’80s: Nugent’s “Scream Dream”. After a buddy’s tape deck ate it, I never bought another prerecorded tape (I did make numerous mix tapes from my LPs).
BTW, I bought Appetite For Destruction the first week it came out. On vinyl. The original “banned” cover. We played it literally every day the next summer when I put my first band together. Pretty much our soundtrack. The Flood of 2012 essentially destroyed it, though I suppose I could’ve tried to save the actual record. One less of that rare LP out there now.
JimC says
I wonder how many copies of that original cover there are in circulation…
Thom Eley says
Great story, Jim. When did you live in Berkeley?
JimC says
About four months at the end of 1988. Was there often from 1984-88 when I was at Santa Cruz and the GF was at Berkeley.
Saddle Tramp says
Jim,
Great song!
Great story!
Great associative memory trigger!
The power of a album and specifically a song.
Just glad you have not followed Steve’s numerical path of marriages.
True story …
(at least my involvement)
From milk to whiskey:
For at least three years I would typically dead head from Wisconsin over to Fair Oaks, Indiana for a load at one of the largest, if not the largest dairy farms in the country called Fair Oaks Dairy Farm. We had a small office and shop on the drop yard in the middle of a corn field there. Loads of milk would get us down south and down to Florida for orange juice loads back to California. Dairy barns were scattered all over both sides of Interstate 65 with complicated routings to get to them on country roads (gravel and paved). Cows rotated in and out from their holding pens outside from a giant carousel as they were being milked on the fly.
A bizarre and surreal scene, but highly efficient.
One load I got was a load for me going for the first time to Mayfield Dairy Farms in Braselton, Georgia which processes milk, ice cream and all the rest. I got there real early in the morning before the unloading bays were open. Another driver was ahead of me (not one of ours) and said we could scale ourselves in. He instructed me on scaling in and we both pulled around to the unloading bays to be first in line to get unloaded. We got to talking as we waited. He was a Kentucky country boy through and through. A wiry and wild outlaw trucker. Friendly though. He told me (and I have no reason to doubt him) about his moonshine runnin’ grand daddy. He said one night on a dark Kentucky country road the law was in hot pursuit of his grand daddy who had several jugs of shine up in the front seat. As they sped along he proceeded to grab them one at a time by the ring and then he broke the jugs on the side of the car and flung the rings off to the side of the road continuing to grab jug after jug until they were all gone. Years later he said his grand daddy took him out squirrel hunting one day when lo and behold under a tree there lay one of the broke off jug rings embedded in the ground…
Apocryphal? My gut instinct said no.
Somewhere in my stacks of old road notes I wrote it all down with more details that I can’t quite accurately recall right now including the title, but the skeleton of the story above is accurate.
Every time I hear Copperhead Road it conjures up several memories including the above story. Another is of someone I knew, who long before I met him had grown Pot in Northern California using water bed mattresses buried in the slopes of hills for a sophisticated watering system. Of course they had equally sophisticated protective systems. He gave up his outlaw ways and got away from all of that, but his green thumb continued on. He gave me great advice and resources and I built my first raised bed garden (vegetables mind you) long before it was de rigueur…
Copperhead Road. Yeah!!
And I came home with a brand new plan…
JimC says
Those are some good outlaw stories there.
lane batot says
Saddle Tramp, yer great stories make me think of another old favorite song–“Rambling Man”–you ARE INDEED the “Rambling Man” of Frontier Partisans! You weren’t born in the back seat of a Greyhound bus going down highway 41, were you?
JimC says
Tryin’ to make a living’ and doing’ the best he can…
Saddle Tramp says
Thanks Jim!
Just one of thousands of road encounters.
I never lacked for unusual characters and yes it has been a long strange trip…
Also, just heard on a Berkeley radio station that John Perry Barlow is now truly with the Grateful Dead and no more Mexicali Blues…
Feel like A Stranger
JimC says
Oh, no…
I heard he’d been ill, but I didn’t know he was terminal. Damn! Dead binge tomorrow. Thanks for the word.
John C. says
At Jim and Marilyn’s wedding, they had a piper. The processional was traditional, but the bagpipe skirl from Copperhead Road was the recessional tune. Still gives me goosebumps.
Sidebar – at my wedding reception, the band knew how to play Gimme Three Steps, but didn’t know the lyrics. Jim stepped up to the mic, and killed it.
Good times, Bro!
JimC says
Ah, fine memory, that…
lane batot says
Where I lived on the N. C./Tennessee border was just a little south of where the subject matter of this song took place, and nothing unrealistic about it! I LOVED living in those isolated mountains, and miss them fiercely, so this song is terribly sentimental to me……
JimC says
I bet.
Matthew says
Your sentimental about the time you grew drugs 😉
lane batot says
Ha! No, I never grew drugs, but some of my neighbors sure did! Marijuana growing was the #1 form of income in Cocke County, Tennessee, where I lived at the time. Incidently, #2 was car theft and chopping, #3 was STILL moonshining(some still preferred the “old plan!”), #4 was wildlife poaching(a big black bear gall bladder ring, amongst other such), and #5 was lumbering–the only legal(sometimes) form of income of the top five. I say “sometimes” because sometimes it wasn’t legal–tree poaching could be quite lucrative, too. A rather economically depressed area, to say the least–which is WHY, of course, it was still WILD, and why I loved it so! What little I walked-the-whiteman’s road to get by only involved whatever menial labor jobs I could scrounge up–an unpredictable scenario at best in Outback Southern Appalachia. Financially, I was always well below the National poverty level. But I managed, and off work, I had the freedom of those mountains–TRUE riches– to roam with my wolf-hybrid pack–no livestock, no roads(at least where we tended to range), and very, very few people–all easily avoided when necessary! This included the seasonal appearances of drug enforcement teams, with their helicopters and ATV’s! Pitifully easy to dodge, I’m afraid. I knew where marijuana plots were in various locations, and just avoided those areas during the growing season–for two reasons: I didn’t want to make my neighbors nervous, although I did not fear them much, once they got to know me(I WAS suspected of being a Narc for awhile, I later learned!)–mainly by often finding and returning their lost hunting dogs–no better way to ingratiate yerself to the local mountain folks than that! But I DID fear the DEA agents. I WAS NOT involved in planting marijuana AT ALL, but those officers were SO DESPERATE to arrest SOMEBODY, that I doubt they would have hesitated to nail me, a long-haired guy out roaming in the general proximity of those plots! Yeah, RIGHT–I was just out enjoying Nature–I’m sure they wouldn’t have believed THAT for a second(true though it was). But as I said, it was embarrassingly easy to avoid them–no sneaking up with a noisy helicopter or ATV’s-I and my pack would just go over a coupla ridges from where they were searching, and we were quite safe……And WE knew the country for miles and miles AFOOT better than anyone around(especially better than any city cops…..). Some of the places we frequented, NOBODY EVER went! Not many places like that in the lower 48 any more(sigh)…..
lane batot says
…..And yes, there were LOTS of Copperheads, and Timber Rattlers, too! I treated them like I treated my human neighbors–you leave them alone, and they’ll leave you alone!
Matthew says
I was, of course, joking, but that is one interesting life you’ve led.
JimC says
Lane, you have lived well.
lane batot says
I figured you were joking, Matthew, but I’ll rarely pass up the chance to tell a tale! At least where it’s tolerated, like right cheer on “Frontier Partisans”!
felonious monk says
Fantastic! thought I was reading Pickney Benedict’s_Dogs Of War there for a minute.
If you ever find yourself snowed in, be sure to have a copy of Annie Proulx’s_Barkskins
at hand. I think you’ll like it, not many do, William T. Vollmann does. I think its the bee’s
roller skates. A Native doesn’t cut down a tree without talking to the spirit of that tree.
JimC says
Vollmann. There’s a mad genius for you.
Jim Devor says
Been away awhile and haven’t had time to keep up with Frontier Partisans. Missed a lot of great posts Jim. Hard to believe it has been 30 years. My son is a musician, love hearing him play this on the mandolin.
JimC says
Welcome back. Yeah, it is hard to believe. I bet Steve Earle can’t believe he even made it this long, let alone still writing great songs and touring.
ReeseC says
His second best. His tribute to Townes is still the greatest work he has done in my opinion.
JimC says
It’s a good un for sure. Colorado Girl is perfect. Got to see him touring that CD solo acoustic. Wonderful show.
I’m really enjoying his current CD — So You Want To Be An Outlaw.