Steve Earle "Warner Brothers Years" box set: a re-issue of
Train A Comin',
I Feel Alright, and
El Corazon, packaged with a live disc and a live DVD. Summing up his re-entry into the music business after a multi year absence due to drug addiction and brief incarceration. Steve is free, newly sober, and totally rocking. There's nothing new on the albums, no remix or remaster so i was buying this for the live discs, one of which i downloaded years ago as a bootleg, so like the Pogues 30 collection, I'm a bit annoyed...
The live audio disc is a show featuring the "Train Band": Norman Blake, Peter Rowan, Roy Husky Jr. That collection of musicians couldn't possibly do anything wrong, and here they are backing Steve Earle. I have a bootleg of a longer concert with this band, but this show has special guests Emmylou Harris & Bill Monroe at it, and while the whole show is great, the songs with Emmylou are stunning.
The live dvd is an MTV special called "To Hell & Back" , which is Steve with the Dukes playing a show in a prison, a condition of his early parole. It's his
Live At Folsom Prison and the audience, many formerly residents of the same drug ghetto Steve had gone down in, are loving his songs documenting that part of his life. Steve & the Dukes are smoking, and this is a fantastic return to form from a guy written off by the music industry years before. This show was widely taped off MTV, though, and has floated around as a bootleg for years and in fact you can watch the whole thing on vimo:
http://vimeo.com/14538666So yeah, another multi-disc package aimed at people who most like already own most of it, so wtf? I found a superbly cheap copy, so it was worth it but only just.
