You may not know his name, but you know Harlan T. Bobo. You’ve seen him anyway. He’s a perennial sideman, best known as the bass player for Nick D. Ray’s Viva L’American Deathray Music. Now, after too many years of riding shotgun, he’s moved into the driver’s seat with Too Much Love, a beautiful collection songs about one man’s magnificent obsession.

If you’ve ever driven through Midtown, you’ve probably noticed Bobo walking down the sidewalk or riding some ramshackle bike. You’ve probably said to a traveling companion, “I wonder what that guy’s story is.” He’s a lean one, skinny to the point of being sunken with long arms dangling out of a grubby T-shirt, like Stanley Kowalski. He wore a cowboy hat so broken-down even Bob Dylan wouldn’t adopt it and a pencil-thin moustache that looked like he mugged John Waters and made off with the director’s personal grooming habits. If you’ve seen him traveling west, guitar in tow, you may have felt compelled to stop and offer a little advice: “Nashville’s the other way, buddy.”

Of course, Bobo, who began his musical career as a West Coast pedal-steel player, knows exactly where Nashville is, and he knows he doesn’t want to live there.

“I lived in Waynesboro for a while when Yvonne [Bobo] was doing an internship with these master woodworkers who live there in a place called Hippie Hollow. And we would go into Nashville, or we would come to Memphis for work. I worked at a steakhouse in Lawrenceburg back then for this guy named Beefy. He’d put his arm around me and call me ‘Little Buddy.’ He’d have me drive him around so he could shoot at mailboxes on the way to the private club to get drunk. I was fresh out of San Francisco and that was some kind of foreign to me. But we were looking for a city to move to, and Nashville is too much like a little L.A.”

Yvonne Bobo, a sculptor and installation artist, isn’t Harlan’s wife. She’s not his sister either. Right now, she is his boss. And there can be no denying she’s the muse fueling Too Much Love. Every hand-made cover (each one unique) bears a dada-inspired dedication, and the nine-song cycle tells the story of a difficult love affair. Difficult to describe anyway. It’s a personal yarn but never self-absorbed: revealing but never voyeuristic.

Harlan took Yvonne’s name as a “kind of unofficial wedding vow” after he met her in California. Everything that followed was, to hear him tell it, unofficial. It was also impossible to avoid.

“Her name is Bobo, how could I resist?” he says. “What a great name. When I met her I was living in a halfway house in San Francisco. They let me go out at night because playing music was my job. It was kind of weird for everybody else they kept there, because I’d come home smelling like booze and perfume.”

The San Francisco band Bobo played in was called Minnie Pearl Necklace, a punked up country-western burlesque extravaganza fronted by a drag queen.

“But not your every day drag queen,” Harlan points out.

Then along came Yvonne and an adventure that took Harlan from California to Brazil, from Brazil to Waynesboro, and from Waynesboro to Memphis.

“I can’t imagine a better place musically. I was able to go up to all of these guys like Greg Cartwright [of the Reigning Sound] and [Matador recording artist] Tim Prudhomme and ask them if they would help me record. To my surprise, they all said yes, and that’s where [Too Much Love] came from. All these guys would say, let’s try this, or let’s do that, and it worked out. I guess.”

Too Much Love is a folk-rock concept album cut from the same fabric as the Reigning Sound’s debut, Break Up, Break Down. As one might expect given the stellar cast of local talents (Prudhomme, Geoff Soule, Elizabeth Venable, Doug Easley, and Cartwright), it’s quality stuff. Musical content ranges from gentle Spanish guitar on the seductive Tom Waits-inspired opener “It’s Only Love” to the angular guitars riffs and manic ranting on “Too Much Love,” which call to mind “Psycho Street”-era Richard Thompson. The peculiar Billy Swan-ish vocals of “Left Your Door Unlocked,” perhaps the album’s finest cut, wrap themselves around the story of a reluctant stalker passing an ex’s house and knowing it’s temporarily unoccupied. He takes a look around just to see if things have changed and to pretend that nothing’s changed. The song is beautiful, heartbreaking, and maybe even a little creepy.

“I didn’t even know it was about a stalker,” Harlan says, laughing. “Really, I was totally welcome in that house. My presence was almost required.”

Harlan wasn’t born Harlan any more than he was born Bobo, but that’s who he is today. Actually, he’s not entirely sure who he is today let alone what he’s becoming.

“When my mom writes me she writes ‘Dear Harlan,” he says. “She paid $125 to get my birth certificate legally changed to Harlan.” But what’s in a name, right? Gone these days are the crumpled cowboy hat, the pencil-thin mustache, the grubby T-shirt, and the ragged paint-spattered boots. All the visual tropes that made Harlan T. Bobo stand out in a crowd the way his name stands out on a page have been discarded like last year’s next big thing.

“I saw a picture of myself,” he explains with a shrug. “I guess I’ve been trying to market myself lately. I’ve been making all these one-sheets and taking pictures, stamping my name on every single cover: Harlan T. Bobo, Harlan T. Bobo. After a while it’s like, who is that guy Harlan T. Bobo? Tim Prudhomme says I have to imagine myself like a character on the stage. I used to try to write songs like that character in the cowboy hat. They just weren’t true. They just weren’t honest. They just weren’t me.” n

Harlan T. Bobo

Too Much Love record-release party

The Hi-Tone CafÇ

Saturday, May 22

Look around. There’s doctors down on Wall Street sharpenin’ their scalpels and tryin’ to cut a deal. Meanwhile, back at the hospital we got accountants playin’ God and countin’ out the pills

Yeah, I know, that sucks — that your HMO ain’t doin’ what you thought it would do

But everybody’s gotta die sometime and we can’t save everybody. It’s the best that we can do. — “Amerika v. 6.0 (The Best We Can Do)” by Steve Earle

“It is never, ever unpatriotic or un-American to question anything in a democracy, no matter what anybody else says what an insult it is,” the ever controversial Steve Earle recently told a New Zealand reporter.

Earle had made the list: The New York Post‘s now-infamous list of traitors who dare to disagree with our infallible president.

“I just wasn’t raised as an artist to believe that you censor yourself because of being afraid of offending someone,” he says.

Earle is nothing if not an artist. But the descriptions author, activist, poet, actor, and troubadour also fit. As a musician, he’s always been impossible to categorize by trend or genre. Is he the proud papa of alt-country or the last of the real Texas Outlaws? When Earle and Randy Travis made the Nashville scene in the mid-1980s, the industry coined the term new country just for them.

Earle’s earliest recordings flirt with classic rockabilly, but his earliest releases drew comparisons to Springsteen. Over the years since his 1986 debut Guitar Town alerted critics (if not the public) to a new light shining in the forest of American roots music, Earle has recorded classic rock, country, Celtic, folk, and bluegrass. He’s harmonized with Emmylou Harris and Sheryl Crowe. He’s gotten down in the gutter with the Pogues. He’s become a genuine workingman’s hero with serious academic appeal.

At age 49 Earle’s name is still occasionally linked to Springsteen or John Mellencamp. When he sang “Shadowlands” on the politically charged album Jerusalem, he fomented his ties to Hank Williams and the heart of Honky Tonk.

Way out yonder, where the wild wind blows

There’s a place where lonely fools can go

Where if you hold your money, it’ll burn your hand

So you buy you a ticket to the shadowland.

More and more frequently, however, Earle’s name is paired with cultural icons and cult heroes like Bob Dylan, Merle Haggard, and Townes Van Zandt, Earle’s wayward mentor.

“Good teacher, bad role model.” That’s Earle’s standard description of “Pancho and Lefty” songwriter Van Zandt. He was an incorrigible drunk who Earle, while still in his teens, once tied to a tree to keep him sober. Of course, we’re going “behind the music” here, and naturally Earle follows in Van Zandt’s footsteps. While writers at Rolling Stone penned a glowing “Country Album of the Year” review for Guitar Town, Earle was cruising the streets of south Nashville looking for a fix. He’s blamed a few of his many failed marriages on “mutual interest in drug abuse,” and he did a few months jail time in the early 1990s. But that was then.

If there is an artist who Earle may be rightly compared, it’s the Man in Black: Johnny Cash. He’s been a mean-eyed cat, sampled all the best sins, and come through all the better. His tireless campaign to end the death penalty has made him a hero of the left while his redneck anthems have made him the darling of gun-rights-Republicans. For almost 20 years his songs have redefined traditions and defied trends. Through it all Earle has never been a man to beg for mercy. Justice has been his chief concern.

Bubba and the Beast are the two fictional personas Earle assumes when he writes his songs. Bubba’s a redneck. He’s the guy wailing, “I learned a thing or two from Charlie don’t you know. You better stay away from Copperhead Road.” The Beast is a malevolent spirit that draws down depression like lightning. It’s the voice of “Shadowlands,” and “John Walker’s Blues,” a sympathetic look at the young American Taliban fighter John Walker Lindh.

“I don’t like Kid Rock, and I’m not trying to impress Charlie Daniels and Hank Williams Jr. or any of those people,” Earle told the New Zealand press. “[I have] some friends I think are really politically aware and are scared, but I wouldn’t name any names. But they are terrified about the effect [that speaking out against the government] would have on their careers And the government has capitalized on that.”

Bubba, the Beast, rebel rocker, country torchbearer, political shack-shaker, social activist, uncompromising artist not to be missed, ladies and gentlemen, Steve Earle. n

Steve Earle headlines Artrageous, a fund-raiser for the Greater Memphis Arts Council on Friday, May 21st at United Warehouse, 138 St. Paul Ave. (one block east of S. Main’sCentral Train Station). In addition to Earle, Artrageous will showcase a variety of visual and performing artists. Tickets are available through Ticketmaster.