A Quote by Steve Earle

He's the real deal. Eric Taylor was one of my heroes and teachers when I started playing around Houston in the early 1970s. — © Steve Earle
He's the real deal. Eric Taylor was one of my heroes and teachers when I started playing around Houston in the early 1970s.
When I first was trying to play the clubs around Houston to start playing my own songs, songwriters like Eric Taylor and Vince Bell and Townes Van Zandt and Don Sanders were just really encouraging to me and would let me sit in with them during their sets and introduce me to the person that owned and booked the club.
Taylor was named after James Taylor and claims that she knows all the James Taylor songs, and I'm a huge fan of James Taylor and know all his songs, too. My dad told me that if I ever met Taylor Swift, I had to tell her that I know every James Taylor song. We started naming albums, and we were both shouting them out.
I started playing bluegrass with my family, so there were the G, C and D chords. I was playing a Martin acoustic because that's what Carter Stanley of the Stanley Brothers played. Then I got into the really raw blues of Hound Dog Taylor and started on electric guitar.
I was also a science fiction and fantasy fan, growing up, in games and books and movies. I love Tolkien and I love Dungeons & Dragons, so the opportunity to have a fantasy-based RTS, or real time strategy game, at that time, seemed cool. I started playing it, and the early games were simple, but fun and they had these great heroes.
Jazz stopped being creative in the early '80s. After your acoustic era, where you had the likes of the Miles Davis Quintet, when it gets to the '70s it started being jazz fusion where you had more electronic stuff happening, then in the '80s they started trying to bring back the acoustic stuff, like Branford Marsalis and the Wynton Marsalis & Eric Clapton sextet. It started dying down from there. Miles was still around in the '80s and he was still being creative; he was playing Michael Jackson songs and changing sounds, but a lot of people were still trying to regurgitate the old stuff.
I started playing with digital technology early on in my work. I made digital collages with costumed figures using early versions of Photoshop in the 90s. I was trying to use the newly available digital technologies to combine real people and places with new imagined possibilities.
I suppose when I started playing guitar, it was the means to an end. I never thought of myself as a fully fledged guitar instrumentalist. And my early excursions on the electric guitar were curtailed when Eric Clapton came on the scene, and I decided I was never going to be in the same arena as a Clapton or a Peter Green.
I was interested in psychic things and in spiritualism even as a boy. I'd started doing yoga by the early 1970s.
I don't have individuals that are heroes per say but I will suggest that teachers are heroes for me, our firefighters are heroes for me, our police departments are heroes for me and our leaders are heroes for me.
My dad listened to a lot of James Taylor when I was growing up. We had a couple of his cassettes in the car, and we'd go on a lot of long family car trips. It was either strange musicals or James Taylor - or Whitney Houston. It was quite the combination there.
I started playing music when I was around 10. I always wanted to be in a band, so I started out by playing drums.
In my horror movies, I was always trying to deal with real characters and real character drama played by good actors... Laura Linney, Ethan Hawke, Eric Bana, and Tom Wilkinson, people who don't do horror normally.
You do a deal - business deal, real estate deal, stock deal - protect yourself at all times. I got that from boxing. That's from A to Z: that covers everything in life. And it started when I heard it in the ring. They don't say that in basketball or football or any other sport that I know of but boxing.
I got sober at 27 and started writing around 30 and started playing music in public around 32, 33.
The real heroes are the librarians and teachers who at no small risk to themselves refuse to lie down and play dead for censors.
Listening to Eric Taylor is better than reading a Larry McMurtry novel and easier on the eyes.
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