It’s a sad commentary on the state of rock music when an angry young man gets treated as something of a novelty. Steve Earle is one of the few artists willing and—more important—able to translate his passion into great music. Just an American Boy: The Audio Documentary (Artemis), a live two-CD set, is a blistering soundtrack to an upcoming film about him. There’s a lot of material from his last album, Jerusalem, but there’s also a bluegrass interlude and a monologue about a Christmas Eve return to his boyhood home of Schertz, where the “only people that remembered me were the cops.”
