If you happened to be a playground chum of either Justin Townes Earle or Jordan Zevon and if your father was a hell-raising singer-songwriter, I'm sorry, but their dad was better at it than yours. Guaranteed.
Fast-forward to the present, where albums from Earle (son of Steve) and Zevon (son of Warren) are part of a boom of offspring entrances that include debuts from Jakob Dylan and Liam Finn (son of Crowded House's Neil Finn). As well, new discs are arriving next month from singer-songwriter Teddy Thompson (who doesn't write British folkies Richard and Linda often enough) and Martha Wainwright, whose parents (Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III ) should be proud of I Know You're Married But I've Got Feelings Too, their daughter's charming, second full-length release. Young Dylan, popular as the photogenic frontman of the radio-friendly rockers the Wallflowers, is set to take his solo bow with the June release of Seeing Things.
All these singing-songwriting sons and daughters are following in famous footsteps, but none have done it so literally as Earle. The true legend is that baby Steve Earle was born in Virginia, but took his first steps on Texas soil. His grandfather and uncle took dirt from the Earle farm in the Lone Star state and shipped it in a Prince Albert tobacco can to Virginia, in order that the tyke walk first on his family's own ground.
The family did the same with baby Justin Townes, sending a coffee tin of its farm dirt to Nashville, where the first son of Steve was born.
Earle, 25, spent his chaotic teen years thieving and brawling - up until four years ago he was addicted to heroin. The jaunty, fiddled Hard Livin', which opens his country-roots disc The Good Life, alludes to the habit. "When I was young, there was a certain romanticism," Earle says, speaking on the way to Portland, Ore. "That's the unfortunate thing about most young musicians. They look at all their heroes, and they were drunks and [screw-ups]"
The album's shuffling, good-natured title track, akin to Roger Miller's King of the Road, paints a footloose portrait of a ne'er-do-well. One of Earle's heroes was, naturally, his father - a heroin-addled "hardcore troubadour" whose destructive lifestyle was alluring to his son. "I thought that's the way it needed to be for a very long time, and I did everything possible to kill myself early on."
He almost succeeded. Respiratory failure after a two-week binge landed him in the hospital, where "you know you're in trouble when the scissors come out and they start cutting your clothes off." Now sober for nearly four years, Earle, who kicks off a short Canadian tour in Toronto tomorrow, recalls his hell-bent ways as a confusing act of revolt. "I was defying my father, like most teenagers do, even though, in reality, it wasn't rebelling, but following his footsteps by doing it."
Which raises the question: Just how does a ruffian's son rebel against his father? In the case of Jordon Zevon, you go the other way. "My mom used to beg me to let my hair grow, and I would always cut it short," he says, speaking from his home in Southern California. "I actually, at one point in my life, asked them if I could go to military school."
West Point's loss is, many years later, music's gain. Last month, Zevon, at the advanced age of 38, released his debut album Insides Out. On a smart collection of power pop, the son does take his dad's Studebaker out for a ride, but influences lean more to Canada's the Odds (now regrouped as the New Odds) than his father's weirder, rockier fare.
Not that Zevon doesn't share his father's sardonic wit. On his website, while announcing the album release and an appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman, Zevon blithely wrote "not too much to report this week."
Zevon is ready for the inevitable comparisons to his boozing, maverick father, but doesn't see his own fledgling livelihood as a legacy act. "I just don't want anybody to think I'm trying to continue his career," explains the late-bloomer, who once worked on the business side of Arista Records. "This is my first record, not my dad's 18th record."
These guys, Steve Earle and Warren Zevon, whatever their transgressions, you'd have to think they had valuable advice to offer. In the case of the elder Zevon, who had cleaned himself up in the years before his death by cancer in 2003 at age 56, his counsel was clear. "He told me 'Don't write about love - anything but love' - and 'don't do anything in three-quarter time, it's a crutch.' "
The advice from Steve to Justin Townes Earle (he is named after the late, hard-living Texas singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt), was not as simple. For one thing, until the young Earle was 13, his much-married father was a train wreck - a "tragic mess," in his son's words. "I don't count a lot of the stuff that he said to me when I was a kid," he says.
His dad was adamant though that it didn't take calamity to make a successful artist, and Earle concurs. He sees his father, and himself, as "hyper sensitive - the people that nowadays in school they try to put on medication." And while the southern singer-songwriter sees value in intense life experience, he's not advocating extremes. "It doesn't take tragedy to devastate a sensitive person," Earle reasons. "Life is devastating enough."
Justin Townes Earle plays Toronto's Horseshoe Tavern tomorrow; Wakefield, Que., Monday; Montreal, Tuesday; Saint John, May 29 to 31.