On a July night that felt like October, Steve Earle shared the stage at South Park Friday with a mentor, Townes Van Zandt, who's been dead for 12 years.

Earle turned up on a solo acoustic tour for "Townes," a tribute record to the talented Texas singer-songwriter who died after a life of privilege, addiction and homelessness, the latter related to manic-depression.

Earle, on guitar, mandolin and harmonica, had no problem with filling the hillside with sound, and the lack of the Dukes afforded him the chance to spin stories between the songs, like the one about Van Zandt heckling him early in his career.

"I'd been stalking him for a few years," Earle said, relating that Van Zandt showed up at a club where Earle was playing, plopped down in the front row and after every song was hollering out "Play 'The Wabash Cannonball.' " "Oh great," Earle said, "I'm being heckled by my hero... Had to admit I didn't know 'The Wabash Cannonball.' So I played this..." Earle said, launching into a cover Van Zandt's taut gambling tune "Mr. Mudd and Mr. Gold" -- then and now.

He set up "Marie," one of the darkest ballads you'll ever hear, with a long discussion of how Van Zandt would bring home homeless people -- much to the dismay of his wife -- and how at one point, Earle himself "hit a rough spot" with addiction. "You know you're in trouble," he said, "if Townes is at your house to give you a temperance lecture."

The coal miner dirge "Lungs," stripped of its semi-urban beat from the record, came with Earle's blasting of "clean coal technology" and the warning about the lyrics: "If this doesn't scare you to death, you may be over-medicated." Of course, Earle did Van Zandt's biggest song, the country-west ballad "Pancho and Lefty," and got down to some dirty blues with "Brand New Companion."

So, it wasn't The Best of Steve Earle, but he did manage to squeeze in a good share of his own tunes. The poetic "City of Immigrants" sparked a monologue about his Brooklyn neighborhood and the hard-working multi-lingual Asian man who owns the corner deli. He also did favorites like "Someday," "Taneytown" and "My Old Friend the Blues," plus "Jerusalem," before which he expressed his disappointment with Obama's handling of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Earle closed the set with Van Zandt's "To Live is to Fly," and a send-off of "see you when I get there, maestro!"

Before the encore, he looked up at the hillside and said, "This is the most people in Pittsburgh I've played for in a long time. I had to play it for free to do it." (It was a strong turnout, despite the rain shortly before.) Earle recalled one of his first touring gigs, opening for George Jones in 1986 at the Syria Mosque. "This is first song I played in Pittsburgh," he said, rocking into "Guitar Town" with the line "Everybody told me you can't get far with 37 dollars and a Jap guitar," to which he added "Watch!"

For last, he saved his own biggest song, "Copperhead Road," closing out a show that was way too good to be free.