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Who
Steve Earle with R.B. Morris and Justin Earle

When
Thursday, Oct. 7 and Friday, Oct. 8

Where
Bird's Eye View in the Old City

Why
Benefit concert for Tennessee Coalition to Abolish State Killing

Ticket Info
$20 advance, $25 at the door

The Earle File

Music:
Steve Earle released his first album, Guitar Town, in 1987. Since then, he's recorded and toured relentlessly with the exception of an oft-documented layoff due to drug addiction and subsequent jail time. His 1990s albums—Train A Comin', I Feel Alright, El Corazon, and The Mountain—established him as a keystone of the "alternative country" scene. Entertainment Weekly named El Corazon the country album of the year, and Spin put I Feel Alright on its list of the decade's best discs.

Production:
Working under the name Twangtrust with partner Ray Kennedy, Earle has produced albums for a host of his contemporaries. Most notable is his work on Lucinda Williams' wildly acclaimed Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.

Knoxville connections:
Earle wrote the definitive East Tennessee moonshine anthem "Copperhead Road," which includes the line, "He's headed down to Knoxville with the weekly load." More recently, of course, he's produced both of The V-roys' albums, Just Add Ice and All About Town. He's also spent the last two New Year's Eves here, making guest appearances at The V-roys' annual Dec. 31 bashes.

What's next:
He's working on "a rock album" to follow up the acoustic bluegrass of The Mountain. It's tentatively scheduled for a May 2000 release.

Steve Earle contemplates life and the death penalty

by Jesse Fox Mayshark

Tennessee's electric chair is in a small, whitewashed cinderblock room at Riverbend Maximum Security Prison in Nashville. Under the sterile light of overhead fluorescents and surrounded by blue velvet ropes, it looks like a museum exhibit. If Steve Earle has his way, that's all it will ever be.

"In Illinois, 12 people have been cleared by DNA evidence and released [from prison] in the last 18 months," Earle says, his Lone Star rasp as conversational and straightforward as it is in his songs. "That's equal to the number of people they've executed in the same time. Those aren't real good odds."

It's not likely Steve Earle needs an introduction, especially not in Knoxville (see "The Earle File"). If all you know of him are his redneck anthems—songs like "Guitar Town," "Copperhead Road," and "Hillbilly Highway"—his left-wing politics and adamant opposition to the death penalty might take you by surprise. But if you've been paying attention to his more recent work, his benefit shows this week at Bird's Eye View for the Tennessee Coalition to Abolish State Killing are a logical step.

Earle was playing the Philadelphia Folk Festival a few years back when he got a call from a Hollywood actor he'd never heard of, a guy by the name of Tim Robbins. Robbins had just finished directing a movie and was looking for songs for the soundtrack. He was a fan of Earle's and wondered if the singer would watch the film and maybe contribute a tune. The movie was called Dead Man Walking.

"He provided me a tape, a rough cut of the movie, and we watched it on the bus between the Philadelphia Folk Festival and the hotel," Earle says. "Normally, musicians leave skid marks on their way off the bus to the hotel. But when we got there, everybody, all the guys in the band, the crew, the driver, stayed and watched the movie all the way through."

One scene in particular stuck with him, in which Sister Helen Prejean (Susan Sarandon, who won an Academy Award for the film) talks with a death row prison guard. From it, Earle wrote "Ellis Unit One," an achingly dark song in which the chariot of death invoked by the "Swing low, swing low" chorus is a lethal injection machine.

"I was trying to illustrate that this diminishes all of us," he says. "My concern is as much for me and the people who have to participate in this process as it is for the men and women on death row. I resent the damage the death penalty does to my spirit."

"Ellis Unit One" was a high point of the somber Dead Man Walking album and a turning point in Earle's social activism, but it was hardly the beginning of his involvement with the issue. His awareness of the death penalty reaches back to his Texas childhood.

"My father wrote a letter to the governor," he recalls. "He probably supported the death penalty up until that point, but there was a particular case where a wealthy [victim's] family was allowed under Texas law at the time to hire a special attorney to assist the prosecutor. That seemed unfair to my father. I was about eight years old when that happened, it was 1963. And that started my attitude toward the death penalty."

Shortly afterward, he saw the movie adaptation of Truman Capote's lyrical true crime book In Cold Blood.

"It just scared me to death," he says. "There's a scene where they're getting ready to hang Perry Smith and they've got him all strapped into the harness and everything, and he decides he wants to go to the bathroom because he didn't want to embarrass himself when they hung him. And they told him there wasn't enough time. That for some reason illustrated to me how calculated and cold-blooded and how much it diminishes us to participate in state-subsidized killing."

Earle's first effort to deal with the death penalty in his music was the typically unsentimental "Billy Austin" on his 1990 album The Hard Way. Told from the point of view of a murderer on death row, it concludes:

I ain't about to tell you that I don't deserve to die/ But there's 27 men here, mostly black, brown, and poor/ Most of 'em are guilty, who are you to say for sure?/ So when the preacher comes to get me, and they shave off all my hair/ Could you take that long walk with me, knowing hell is waitin' there?/ Could you pull that switch yourself, sir, with a sure and steady hand?/ Could you still tell yourself that you're better than I am?

For the past few years, he's alternated including either "Billy Austin" or "Ellis Unit One" in his live sets, joking that he won't play both together because "we don't want the audience to kill themselves." (The Bird's Eye shows will be an exception.) He usually accompanies them with a short sermon on the issue, which doesn't always go over well with the rowdy crowds who come to hear "Guitar Town."

"The average Steve Earle fan probably doesn't oppose the death penalty, or at least doesn't oppose it as strongly as I do," he acknowledges. "I don't get shouted down, but they do get quiet and they do get uncomfortable. I get uncomfortable. And I want to get uncomfortable when I deal with this issue."

His current small-venue tour is strictly a Tennessee affair, with shows here and in Chattanooga, Nashville, and Memphis. The impetus is the looming likelihood that Tennessee will perform its first execution since 1960. The state has more than 100 inmates on death row, and two of them are on their final appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. The small-venue performances will benefit local chapters of TCASK in each region.

Marcus Keyes, a member of the East Tennessee branch of TCASK, says the organization can use the help. The local chapter is "a small group, a struggling group," he says. "It's not the most popular issue in this area."

Accompanying Earle on all the dates is Knoxville poet-rocker R.B. Morris. The two met in Nashville a few years back, but this is their first time on the road together. Although he's never addressed capital punishment as directly as Earle in his songs or writing, Morris has a clear philosophical take on it.

"I think in the overall human movement of things, that eventually the death penalty goes the way of cannibalism and Oedipus, and even murder," he says. "If you think about it, you see that's the direction that goes in...It's a moral or spiritual evolution of sorts in the culture. It's where enough individuals in the culture rise to that understanding. An eye for an eye, and everybody goes blind."

Morris and Earle will both be reading poetry at the shows in addition to singing. That's nothing new for Morris, but it is for Earle, who says he's only started seriously writing poems in the last few years. Will he be nervous without a guitar between him and the microphone?

"Yes," he says with a chuckle. "I'm scared shitless...I'm very comfortable in my craft, which is writing songs. I really needed something that I was not comfortable with at this point in my career."

He does more than write and sing about the death penalty, though. In the past several years, he's corresponded with about a dozen death row inmates. Two of them have been executed. He's aware of their crimes and of allegations that he's giving succor to murderers.

"I'm not real particular about who I associate with," he jokes, but then he turns serious. "I don't think of it that way. All the guys who I write to on death row are guilty. It's not about guilt or innocence to me. It's about the existence of the death penalty."

On the other hand, he says, "I have to be very sensitive to victims' family members. They have a right to their anger, they have a right to their pain. I do understand why they go the route that they do and advocate for the death penalty. But I also know people who have found another path to dealing with that...I have seen healing. And I know about healing, I'm a recovering heroin addict."

In the long run, Earle and TCASK want to see the death penalty abolished, as it has been throughout Europe and much of the rest of the world. But for now, they'll settle for a moratorium.

"We always have this dialogue in this incredibly super-charged atmosphere, and I think that's created by the fact that there's actually killing going on," Earle says. "I think if the killing stops long enough for us to have a discussion of it, the discussion can be had much more reasonably."

Keyes agrees. The local chapter of TCASK will have petitions at the Bird's Eye shows urging a hold on any executions in Tennessee.

"I think it's a very healthy and helpful thing," Keyes says of the concerts. "Because people will come to hear [Earle's] music, people who may be totally for the death penalty—and we respect people who are—but at least we can engage them in a discussion...It's putting the agenda out there before people so at least it doesn't happen without people realizing what's at stake here."