'Jerusalem'
In describing, Jerusalem, Steve Earle's newest CD and his sixth album in six years, Earle says, "This is a political record because there seems no other proper response to the place we're at now. But I'm not trying to get myself deported or something. In a big way this is the most pro-American record I've ever made. In fact, I feel URGENTLY American. I understand why none of those congressmen voted against The Patriot Act, out of respect for the Trade Center victims' families. I've sat in the death house with victims' families, seen them suffer. But this is an incredibly dangerous piece of legislation. Freedoms, American freedoms, things voted into law as American freedoms, everything that came out of the 1960's, are disappearing, and as any patriot can see, that has to be opposed."
"John Walker's Blues, which deals with John Walker Lindh, the erstwhile Marin County teenager and admitted Taliban fighter. Opening with the lines, "just an American boy, raised on MTV…I seen all the boys in the soda pop bands and none of them looked like me" and finishing with a recitation of Sura 47, Verse 19 of the Qur'an, Earle wrote the song as the newspapers clamored for Walker to strung up for treason. For Steve, the issue was a little more complicated than that.
"I'm happy with the way the song came out, but I'm nervous, not for myself, but I have taken some serious liberties with Walker, speaking as him, in his voice. I'm trying to make clear that wherever he got to, he didn't arrive there in a vacuum. I don't condone what he did. Still, he's a 20 year-old kid. My son Justin is almost exactly Walker's age. Would I be upset if he suddenly turned up fighting for the Islamic Jihad? Sure, absolutely. Fundamentalism, as practiced by the Taliban, is the enemy of real thought, and religion too. But there are circumstances. Walker was from a very bohemian household, from Marin County. His father had just come out of the closet. It's hard to say how that played out in Walker's mind. He went to Yemen because that's where they teach the purest kind of Arabic. He didn't just sit on the couch and watch the box, get depressed and complain. He was a smart kid, he graduated from high school early, the culture here didn't impress him, so he went out looking for something to believe in."
Jerusalem is mainly a rock record, full of punkish grind suitable to the brimstone feel of the tunes like "Ashes to Ashes" and the neo-rap/talking blues of "Amerika v. 6.0 (The Best We Can Do)." But with Steve, ever the eclectic sponge, you can always expect quirky musical surprises. Perhaps most stunning here is the R&B-inflected "Conspiracy Theory."
"Yeah," Steve notes, "that's different. It isn't like anything I've done before. I didn't use the band, I played all the instruments myself, whipped it up at home, in a couple of nights. I picked up the idea from spending a lot of time in England and Ireland, where they have these "University bands," which attempt to make intelligent dance music for college students. I really liked this band, The Latin Quarter, they had a great girl singer, really cool vocals. Siobhan Maher-Kennedy did the vocals here. She really can sing. The idea of 'Conspiracy Theory' is something that came about in the midst of the now gone prosperity---do you want to sit around thinking about what happened to John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, want a Mercedes?
The notion is that if you don't want the Mercedes you must be some kind of nut. Well, I've had two or three Cadillacs in my life and I still think what happened to John Kennedy is pretty much what Oliver Stone said happened to him. I killed 17 deer with bolt action rifles and believe me, no one could have done what they said Oswald did."
Steve says Jerusalem is his "most Old Testament record," noting that "I've only got one chick song on it, the one I sing with Emmy." But he's far too wily (and talented) to hit anyone over the head with the portentous or the preachy.
"I remain optimistic," says the artist, "I am really fucking optimistic. That's the idea of "Jerusalem," the last cut on the disk. "You hear the bad news. You know it is not a lie. What happened on 9/11 was a horror, what happens every day in Israel and Palestine can be a horror. But you try to see past that. You have to believe this will be better. To some redemption, I'm someone who has always wanted to believe. I'm good at it."
Talking about the genesis of the project Steve, who can by his own admission "talk the ears off a wooden Indian," and isn't too shy about expressing his admiration for Emma Goldman and John Reed says, "one morning Danny Goldberg, who owns the company, calls me up and says my next album should be overtly political. This was a change. I've always gotten phone calls from record companies saying exactly the opposite, like keep a lid on that shit. Danny thought there are some things that needed to be said, especially now, in the world after 9/11. So I told him, `well, yeah, man, I can do that.'"
Earles' history is the stuff of legends, particularly to his fans. They know how Steve, out of nowheresville Schertz, Texas, son of an air traffic controller, dropped out of 8th grade to go on the road, and lie on ratty Austin couches with his Texas troubadour heroes. Townes Van Zandt, whom Steve called "a good teacher and bad role model" once had his prize student tie him to a tree, in an unsuccessful self-invention to stop the older man's drinking. They know, too, how Steve went to Nashville, where he wrote a bunch of songs, raised much hell, and, in 1986, made Guitar Town, a legitimately great record, a latter day Grapes of Wrath for the pick-up truck set, still a most eloquent expression of lefty redneck/populist complaint.
That's when people were calling Steve Earle the savior of country music, the thinking man's antidote to a thousand guys in ersatz cowboy hats, the hillbilly Bruce Springsteen, the next Hank Williams. Some more records followed, including the colossal Copperhead Road, except Steve wasn't a savior anymore. They had a statue of him over in the Country Music Hall of Fame, and three miles cross town in black South Nashville, Earle was trawling Lewis Street trying to score Dilaudid and listening to Dr. Dre's The Chronic. He was a junkie, had been, really, since he left Texas. Hard travelin', indeed. Steve pawned all his guitars, wrote no songs, and disappeared for four years. Tsk, tsk, said everyone up on Music Row, what a waste.
One morning Steve didn't feel like making one of his not uncommon court appearances, the judge took offense and slapped the singer in jail, four months in a burnt orange jump suit, bad hats all around. When he got out, he was ravaged but clean, going to meetings to stay that way. From there it started, one of the greatest creative streaks in American music since Bob Dylan arrived in Greenwich Village from Dinkytown. Train A-Comin', an acoustic marvel of the story songs at which Earle has no real rival, came out in 1995, followed by I Feel Alright, a rocking chronicle of the hillbilly Orpheus descended to Hell and returned to tell thee. Next was El Corazon, the genre-busting rocker, and The Mountain, an all bluegrass disk, as honest as they come. Two years ago saw the sonic love fest of Transcendental Blues, and then, most recently Sidetracks, sweet romance melded to the death row nightmare of "Ellis Unit One."
Six disks in six years. This is not to mention touring 150 nights a year, three hours a night. Or publishing Doghouse Roses (no musician's vanity project of a short story book but a real one,
with real-good-reviews). Or opening the Broadaxe Theatre in Nashville along with his honey Sara (Steve's original play Karla, about Karla Faye Tucker the first woman executed in Texas since 1863, goes up this Fall). Or acting in three episodes of HBO's "The Wire," or working tirelessly to fight the death penalty and landmines---generally agitating against what needs agitating against.
All of it begs the question: has any American musician produced anything to equal the passion, eclecticism, and (dare we say it?) social/moral relevance to match what Steve Earle has mustered in the past half decade? The answer is: no. Sometimes listening to whatever speed rap on whatever Russian novel he's just read, hearing that big-natured cackle audible from anywhere in a crowded room, and you're just swept up in the inspirational fecundity of it all, and there's nothing left to do but forget he's a Yankee fan and say, "thanks, dude, for everything."
Read about Transcendental Blues
Read about Sidetracks