Earle on Elvis
The great Steve Earle pays his respects:
"How different would your music be now if you'd made it all the way to CBGB?I missed the punk thing when it started. I was living in Mexico. But I was up in Austin, staying with a friend, and someone said the Sex Pistols were playing at Randy's Rodeo in San Antonio, which was a block from where I grew up. I rode with them, and it was an awful gig. Sid Vicious got hit with a bottle in the second song. He just staggered around and bled for the rest of the night. But on that same trip, I went by the house of another friend in Austin, and he said, "You gotta hear this." It was My Aim Is True, by Elvis Costello. I went, "OK, now I know why I need an electric guitar." There would have been no Guitar Town without that."