‘His ache is real’: Bob Dylan and more on the wild genius of honky-tonk hellraiser Gary Stewart

Worshipped by everyone from Willie Nelson to Joe Strummer, the country star with the amazing voice imploded in a blaze of guns, knives, drugs and infidelities. What’s behind his astonishing posthumous rediscovery? ‘He sings like a man arguing with destiny. It sounds like the ache is real, that the ruin is real,” Bob Dylan tells me. “There’s a cracked truth there. What’s unsettling about him is that he sounds like he’s already living in the aftermath.” Dylan is talking about the late US singer...

By Garth Cartwright