Steve Earle is still raising hell.
by Joe Tarr
Steve Earle loves America. Which may be why he's so addicted to stirring up trouble and goading talk radio hosts all over the country into a frenzy.
Long a shoot-from-the-hip critic of U.S. politics and culture, he might have pushed his biggest button yet with his latest CD, Jerusalem. On it, he shows sympathy for the U.S.-born Taliban soldier, John Walker Lindh, calls his Baby Boomer peers willing dupes, and says that all buildings fall.
He says these things because he loves this country so much. What he would most like to see survive of it are free speech and tolerance.
"I love that people are allowed to say anything that they want to," he says. "Saying something is just saying something and there's something wrong when people aren't allowed to say something no matter what the political climate is."
Of course, a lot of people would love for Steve Earle to just shut up. Fat chance.
Like most people, Steve Earle was stunned when he sat in front of the television last year, watching planes crash into the World Trade Center and Pentagon over and over again. Earle learned about the terrorist attack when his father called and told him to turn on the TV. The unity the country felt that day didn't last long.
"I think we were all on the same page for about 45 minutes there. Then I started to turn to my own agenda—how does this affect me? I think everybody does that, whether they want to admit it or not."
And what was Earle's agenda? "Number one, I have a draft age son and everybody was talking about going to war," he says. The second thing he worried about is whether the attack would be a setback to his anti-death penalty activism. (It turns out, it hasn't. As he wryly jokes, "We're more interested in killing other people than our own right now.")
A firebrand political songwriter, Earle eventually got around to addressing the topic in song. The resulting album, Jerusalem, has gotten mixed reviews. As Earle kicks off his tour in Knoxville this Friday, some of that controversy will likely follow him.
Anyone that might accuse Earle of political opportunism for Jerusalem has never really understood him. In some sense, he's always been an opportunist, viewing himself as a renegade and relishing those moments when he could run against the grain.
His 1986 debut, Guitar Town, helped lead the neo-traditionalist revolt (along with Dwight Yoakam, Lyle Lovett, and a few others) against the slick country pop machine, an uprising that reverberates through the alt-country and Americana movements 16 years later.
Thumbing his nose at expectations and conventions became a career habit. From Guitar Town he drifted into Southern country rock (Copperhead Road) and then into a debilitating drug habit and then jail. For a while, he was the poster child for wasted talent. But Earle surprised everyone once again, kicking his habit and rebounding with the acoustic Train A-Comin', which was a tour de force of songwriting and placed him as the wise, if somewhat cynical, statesman of country rock. Two solid albums, I Feel Alright and El Corazon, followed. Since then he's dabbled in bluegrass, rock, country, and folk, becoming one of the country's most politically outspoken musicians along the way.
Although he supports many leftist causes, he's been most vocal against the death penalty, writing a number of songs about capital punishment and organizing benefits.
He's also branched out into other art forms, writing poetry and, most recently, Karla, a play about Karla Faye Tucker, the first woman executed in Texas since 1863. It debuted last month at Nashville's Broadaxe Theatre. The show was a success, and now Earle is looking at producing it in other cities.
"I'd love to do it in Knoxville—there's a couple of cool theater companies there," says Earle, who spent a bit of time here working with the V-roys (and eating breakfast at Harold's). "Knoxville's a lot hipper of a town than people who have never been there think."
But music has always been Earle's forte. And although he's never shied away from political songs, it was Danny Goldberg—the owner of Artemis Records, which distributes Earle's E-Squared label—who encouraged him to make this record a statement.
"There's usually some political stuff to everything I've done, but I write more about girls," he says.
The first song on the album, "Ashes To Ashes," compares humans to dinosaurs and reminds people "nothing stands the test of time." The song has the most direct reference to Sept. 11, with "...every tower ever built tumbles/ No matter how strong no matter how tall."
"The one question I didn't hear anybody asking was what would make somebody fly planes into four targets to kill innocent people. I think it's an important question," Earle says.
"People are still pretty stunned," he adds. "I'm wired a little different than other people are—I very quickly started wondering how we are dealing with it. I'm more worried about the loss of civil liberties than being attacked by terrorists, because I think it's more likely to happen. I think people are just starting to get it."
Other songs on Jerusalem relate more to Americans' political ideals and hypocrisy than they do terrorism and war. Earle wrote "America v. 6.0 (The Best We Can Do)" before Sept. 11, for the movie John Q. Starring Denzel Washington, the film is about the evils of HMOs and emphasizing profits over patients in healthcare. Director Nick Casavettes had asked Earle for a song and was initially pleased, Earle says. "But then Sept. 11 happened, and he quit returning my phone calls," he says. "Finally, they admitted that New Line [the production company] thought it was too critical of the Bush administration."
Of course, the most infamous song on the album is "John Walker's Blues"—where Earle steps into the shoes of John Walker Lindh, the Californian who converted to Islam and was captured fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Earle doesn't explicitly condone Lindh's actions in the song, but he posits that an American cultural void led him to look outside the country for meaning. The song ends with mullahs reciting the Koran.
The radical right was outraged. Nashville radio talk show host Steve Gill said the song "celebrates and glorifies a traitor to this country" and accused Earle of writing it merely to attract attention.
"I was just trying to humanize him when everybody else was trying to make him into a poster child for our worst fears," Earle says. "I have a 20-year-old son.... I related to it as a parent. Anyone being judged as publicly as John Walker deserves to be judged as a human being, not as a boogieman."
What is particularly frustrating to Earle is the complacency he sees in so many of his generation. "Conspiracy Theory" champions a little bit of paranoia as a good thing:
Go on and tell yourself there are no secrets/ Go on and tell yourself that you don't want to know/ It's best that you believe that you don't hear the footsteps/ That follow you around no matter where you go/ Maybe you were thinkin' that it didn't matter/ Maybe you believed nobody else would care/ But once you've added every little lie together/ You finally find the truth was always waiting there.
"What I really aimed that at is my own generation," Earle says. "I don't know anyone growing up who thought one person killed John Kennedy. But the same people invested in the American dream and they've come back around to what the Warren Commission said.... I think Oliver Stone is more credible, for once, than the Warren Commission."
"People act like maybe if we keep our mouths shut, the NASDAQ will go back up. And this is same people who stopped the Vietnam War?" he adds.
The album ends on a hopeful note, with "Jerusalem," singing, "But I believe there'll come a day when the lion and the lamb/ Will lie down in peace together in Jerusalem."
Earle hasn't decided whether he'll preach politics to the crowd this Friday. "I think the songs speak for themselves so me talking to the audience might not be anything but making sure they're still out there."
Of course, Earle doesn't have any illusions that his music will have seismic impact on the political landscape. "When you start talking about political statements in art, you're going to gravitate to the ones that fit into your politics."
But, he does believe that some people can be influenced. Many of his fans disagree with his death penalty stance, but most are willing to listen, he says. "I've had people come up and tell me I've changed their mind about the death penalty. Not thousands, but hundreds," he says. "Music can't change people's minds, but I think it can change hearts."
November 14, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 46
© 2002 Metro Pulse
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