Watching Steve Earle and The Dukes is like rooting for a nag you know has a shot at the cup if it would only get the lead out. I’ve seen this lot a few times over the last 15 years, and tonight was possibly the closest they’ve come to an all-out tour de force, yet there’s always the sense that they’re holding out on that extra ten per cent.
Notwithstanding a frequently fiery guitarist as schooled in post Amer-indie as he is in country rock, the Dukes often operate like a superior bar band, except theatres require stricter pacing. Earle himself might’ve copped his iambic pentameter off of Henry V, but he never learned to enunciate like they do at Julliard, and consequently he flubs some of his finest lines, dribbling them into his shirt in that laconic Texan mumble rather than branding them onto the heads of the back rows.
So, they approached the first 20 minutes like men settling in for a long drive rather than fixing to burn the place down. Gil Scott Heron provided the intro segue into ‘The Revolution Starts... Now’ and ‘Home To Houston’, but it wasn’t until after Earle vented some spleen by way of an intro to ‘Rich Man’s War’ that things really caught fire.
And curiously enough, for a show liberally doused with radical invective, it was the love songs that got it going: the ever-wrenching ‘Goodbye’ and the bittersweet ‘Comin’ Around’, the latter featuring opening act Allison Moore (who ended her own set with a version of ‘Carrickfergus’ so finely wrought it had me wondering if Tom Waits ever recorded it) deputising for Emmylou. This girl has a set of pipes on her. Or as Earle quipped: “You know what the difference is between a red headed woman from Alabama and a tornado? Not a fucken thing.”
But when they were on, they were on, the highlights being a scorching ‘Copperhead Road’ and ‘Christmas In Washington’, a hymn to Woody by way of Hunter S paralysed with beer and loathing in front of the tube on election night. And by encore time they were steaming through an insolent ‘F The CC’, The Beatles’ ‘Revolution’, a strapping ‘Galway Girl’, The Chambers Brothers’ ‘Time Has Come Today’ and a shitheeled take on the Stones’ ‘Sweet Virginia’.
It took two-hours-twenty, but they hit the spot.