Post by LS on Sept 10, 2004 2:21:36 GMT -5
Steve Earle Makes Bush-bashing An Art
By David Fricke
Singer-songwriter Steve Earle does not mention George W. Bush by name anywhere on The Revolution Starts...Now. But nearly every song on Earle's new album is dedicated, in moral energy and story line, to Bush's defeat in November's presidential election. That includes the cantina-folk indictment "Rich Man's War"; "Home to Houston," a country romp about an American truck driver in Iraq praying that he survives his next run; and the guitar firebomb "F the CC," which is pretty self-explanatory.
"I'm an unapologetic lefty," Earle declares in his high-speed Texas drawl, over cappuccino in a New York hotel. "There is no excuse for anyone to go hungry in the richest country in the world or without health care. I wanted the record to be about a lot of issues around the election. But I wrote it in a hurry, and what I'm most pissed about right now is the war."
The son of an air-traffic controller, Earle, 49, has been making protest music all his life. Born in Fort Monroe, Virginia, and raised in San Antonio, he sang against the Vietnam War as a teenager. After a decade of struggle in Nashville and vital songwriting lessons from country outlaws Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark, Earle made his 1986 debut, Guitar Town, a Number One country album and a masterpiece of personal politics, a rough guide to blue-collar life and love. The commercial success did not last. Earle's downward spiral into drug addiction made him a pariah in Nashville, cost him six marriages and, in 1994, briefly landed him in jail on possession.
Clean for the last ten years, Earle is active in campaigns against land mines and the death penalty and has continued to sing fearlessly about economic and social injustice on more than a dozen acclaimed albums. In "John Walker's Blues," a sober reflection on the life and fate of captured American Taliban John Walker Lindh, included on the 2002 release Jerusalem, Earle confronted the post-9/11 thirst for vengeance -- and spit in the eye of the hysterical right-wing media.
But Earle says that Revolution -- his best full-tilt-rock album in years - is not just an angry record: "It's immediate. And it's about democracy -- 'Don't tell me this is not open for discussion.' "
Were the songs on the new album all written for and during this election year?
This record was about a deadline. No one could have predicted the amount of damage Bush would do to this country in four years. I wouldn't have believed it. I thought, "Oh, God, another idiot. We survived his father, though. We can survive this." But this is a totally different beast.
I wrote "The Revolution Starts Now" last year at the end of a tour. Then I went to Australia in April; I wrote "Rich Man's War" on that run. And not getting those two songs out before the election -- I couldn't live with that. We got back to Nashville and started the record. I woke up every morning with a blank sheet of paper and writing a song. By two o'clock the next morning, we had the completed track.
You and Bush are both former substance abusers. He was an alcoholic; you were a drug addict. Do you see any of yourself in him?
I find it painful, but I do. You suffer a lot of damage to your spirit in the process of becoming an addict, because you have to lie. You have to be fundamentally dishonest. There's no way that George Bush wasn't coming home, lying to his wife every single night, like I was. I don't judge him for it. But I recognize it.
But the way he does things is totally based on never admitting that you're wrong, no matter what. People who are pro-Bush think that's cool. Those of us who are opposed see that as a weakness. Yeah, I believe this war is unjust, immoral and a dismal failure. But I'm always willing to admit that I'm wrong. I would love for someone to prove that I am wrong about where this administration is taking us. I don't think I am.
Can you move the unconverted with this album, or are you just rallying the faithful?
I'm preaching to the choir to some extent. And my audience doesn't agree with me on everything. I've lost the odd person. But I've had more people tell me, "You changed my mind about the death penalty" than I've had people saying, "Fu*k you."
I speak for people other than myself, which is presumptuous. But it is my job. "Rich Man's War" is about somebody in a position I'll never be in. "F the CC" is rhetoric -- that's me. But the song is based in fact. The Federal Communications Commission exists to take care of the airwaves for me. That's what its charter says, and I'm taking it at face value. I'm holding their feet to the fire on it.
What did you achieve with "John Walker's Blues," besides enraging conservatives?
A lot of smart people didn't get that I didn't agree with what John Walker Lindh did. I just had a problem with scapegoating. And I have a son that age. That's really why I wrote the song. I thought, "This guy has parents. They've gotta be sick over this."
The song made me feel like I hadn't sat by and not said anything. Having the balls to sing it, in that atmosphere, may have made people less afraid to speak out about other things. Somebody's gotta get into the swimming pool first.
I couldn't not do it. The song fell in my lap. [Blues singer] Mance Lipscomb used to call them "sky songs." That song chose me. And I was taught by the people who showed me how to write songs that no way in the world do you ever go, "Oh, I'm not writing that one."
How political were your parents?
They were Democrats, old-fashioned Lyndon Johnson types. They supported the Vietnam War until I started getting closer to draft age. My father was horrified because I was active against the war when I was fourteen, fifteen. The first time I played for more than twenty people was a rally in front of the Alamo that the Vietnam Veterans Against the War put together.
What did you sing?
"I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag" [by Country Joe and the Fish]. I was fifteen. The other anti-war activists I knew in town were the hippies at the Gatehouse, this coffeehouse where I played. The main thing that radicalized me was that I wasn't old enough to play in places that served liquor. I played coffeehouses and listened to songwriters, rather than getting a Marshall amplifier. Then I met Townes Van Zandt when I was sixteen.
He was an unlikely mentor, in that he never wrote topical songs. What did you learn from him?
To quote Townes, you write "for the sake of the song" -- and no other reason. I ran across this creature making art with absolutely no regard for how big or small his audience was, or even who was in his audience. He made the art for himself.
Yet you went to Nashville in the mid-Seventies, the commercial and conservative capital of country music.
It's where the best songwriters were. I could go to L.A., but what were my chances of meeting Tom Waits or Randy Newman? In Nashville, you could see Townes or Guy Clark, even Neil Young passing through. I was on my way to New York when I first went to Nashville. I never got any further.
How different would your music be now if you'd made it all the way to CBGB?
I missed the punk thing when it started. I was living in Mexico. But I was up in Austin, staying with a friend, and someone said the Sex Pistols were playing at Randy's Rodeo in San Antonio, which was a block from where I grew up. I rode with them, and it was an awful gig. Sid Vicious got hit with a bottle in the second song. He just staggered around and bled for the rest of the night. But on that same trip, I went by the house of another friend in Austin, and he said, "You gotta hear this." It was My Aim Is True, by Elvis Costello. I went, "OK, now I know why I need an electric guitar." There would have been no Guitar Town without that.
Is Guitar Town a country record or a rock album?
I was making Born in the U.S.A. I had seen Bruce Springsteen on that tour as I was starting to write those songs. Bruce opened with "Born in the U.S.A.," and while I'd been a Springsteen fan, I got it in a way I never had before. It was like, "If I make a record that says something about who I am, I'll be able to live with it, be proud of it." The rest took care of itself.
The way I write songs is true to what I believe is important in country music. I was playing a country joint in Las Vegas when Guitar Town came out, and there was a big dance floor in front of the stage. This guy went dancing by, and he said, "Play something country." I stopped the band in its tracks, and I said, "I have the Number One country album in America. This week, I decide what's fu*king country and what's not."
By David Fricke
Singer-songwriter Steve Earle does not mention George W. Bush by name anywhere on The Revolution Starts...Now. But nearly every song on Earle's new album is dedicated, in moral energy and story line, to Bush's defeat in November's presidential election. That includes the cantina-folk indictment "Rich Man's War"; "Home to Houston," a country romp about an American truck driver in Iraq praying that he survives his next run; and the guitar firebomb "F the CC," which is pretty self-explanatory.
"I'm an unapologetic lefty," Earle declares in his high-speed Texas drawl, over cappuccino in a New York hotel. "There is no excuse for anyone to go hungry in the richest country in the world or without health care. I wanted the record to be about a lot of issues around the election. But I wrote it in a hurry, and what I'm most pissed about right now is the war."
The son of an air-traffic controller, Earle, 49, has been making protest music all his life. Born in Fort Monroe, Virginia, and raised in San Antonio, he sang against the Vietnam War as a teenager. After a decade of struggle in Nashville and vital songwriting lessons from country outlaws Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark, Earle made his 1986 debut, Guitar Town, a Number One country album and a masterpiece of personal politics, a rough guide to blue-collar life and love. The commercial success did not last. Earle's downward spiral into drug addiction made him a pariah in Nashville, cost him six marriages and, in 1994, briefly landed him in jail on possession.
Clean for the last ten years, Earle is active in campaigns against land mines and the death penalty and has continued to sing fearlessly about economic and social injustice on more than a dozen acclaimed albums. In "John Walker's Blues," a sober reflection on the life and fate of captured American Taliban John Walker Lindh, included on the 2002 release Jerusalem, Earle confronted the post-9/11 thirst for vengeance -- and spit in the eye of the hysterical right-wing media.
But Earle says that Revolution -- his best full-tilt-rock album in years - is not just an angry record: "It's immediate. And it's about democracy -- 'Don't tell me this is not open for discussion.' "
Were the songs on the new album all written for and during this election year?
This record was about a deadline. No one could have predicted the amount of damage Bush would do to this country in four years. I wouldn't have believed it. I thought, "Oh, God, another idiot. We survived his father, though. We can survive this." But this is a totally different beast.
I wrote "The Revolution Starts Now" last year at the end of a tour. Then I went to Australia in April; I wrote "Rich Man's War" on that run. And not getting those two songs out before the election -- I couldn't live with that. We got back to Nashville and started the record. I woke up every morning with a blank sheet of paper and writing a song. By two o'clock the next morning, we had the completed track.
You and Bush are both former substance abusers. He was an alcoholic; you were a drug addict. Do you see any of yourself in him?
I find it painful, but I do. You suffer a lot of damage to your spirit in the process of becoming an addict, because you have to lie. You have to be fundamentally dishonest. There's no way that George Bush wasn't coming home, lying to his wife every single night, like I was. I don't judge him for it. But I recognize it.
But the way he does things is totally based on never admitting that you're wrong, no matter what. People who are pro-Bush think that's cool. Those of us who are opposed see that as a weakness. Yeah, I believe this war is unjust, immoral and a dismal failure. But I'm always willing to admit that I'm wrong. I would love for someone to prove that I am wrong about where this administration is taking us. I don't think I am.
Can you move the unconverted with this album, or are you just rallying the faithful?
I'm preaching to the choir to some extent. And my audience doesn't agree with me on everything. I've lost the odd person. But I've had more people tell me, "You changed my mind about the death penalty" than I've had people saying, "Fu*k you."
I speak for people other than myself, which is presumptuous. But it is my job. "Rich Man's War" is about somebody in a position I'll never be in. "F the CC" is rhetoric -- that's me. But the song is based in fact. The Federal Communications Commission exists to take care of the airwaves for me. That's what its charter says, and I'm taking it at face value. I'm holding their feet to the fire on it.
What did you achieve with "John Walker's Blues," besides enraging conservatives?
A lot of smart people didn't get that I didn't agree with what John Walker Lindh did. I just had a problem with scapegoating. And I have a son that age. That's really why I wrote the song. I thought, "This guy has parents. They've gotta be sick over this."
The song made me feel like I hadn't sat by and not said anything. Having the balls to sing it, in that atmosphere, may have made people less afraid to speak out about other things. Somebody's gotta get into the swimming pool first.
I couldn't not do it. The song fell in my lap. [Blues singer] Mance Lipscomb used to call them "sky songs." That song chose me. And I was taught by the people who showed me how to write songs that no way in the world do you ever go, "Oh, I'm not writing that one."
How political were your parents?
They were Democrats, old-fashioned Lyndon Johnson types. They supported the Vietnam War until I started getting closer to draft age. My father was horrified because I was active against the war when I was fourteen, fifteen. The first time I played for more than twenty people was a rally in front of the Alamo that the Vietnam Veterans Against the War put together.
What did you sing?
"I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag" [by Country Joe and the Fish]. I was fifteen. The other anti-war activists I knew in town were the hippies at the Gatehouse, this coffeehouse where I played. The main thing that radicalized me was that I wasn't old enough to play in places that served liquor. I played coffeehouses and listened to songwriters, rather than getting a Marshall amplifier. Then I met Townes Van Zandt when I was sixteen.
He was an unlikely mentor, in that he never wrote topical songs. What did you learn from him?
To quote Townes, you write "for the sake of the song" -- and no other reason. I ran across this creature making art with absolutely no regard for how big or small his audience was, or even who was in his audience. He made the art for himself.
Yet you went to Nashville in the mid-Seventies, the commercial and conservative capital of country music.
It's where the best songwriters were. I could go to L.A., but what were my chances of meeting Tom Waits or Randy Newman? In Nashville, you could see Townes or Guy Clark, even Neil Young passing through. I was on my way to New York when I first went to Nashville. I never got any further.
How different would your music be now if you'd made it all the way to CBGB?
I missed the punk thing when it started. I was living in Mexico. But I was up in Austin, staying with a friend, and someone said the Sex Pistols were playing at Randy's Rodeo in San Antonio, which was a block from where I grew up. I rode with them, and it was an awful gig. Sid Vicious got hit with a bottle in the second song. He just staggered around and bled for the rest of the night. But on that same trip, I went by the house of another friend in Austin, and he said, "You gotta hear this." It was My Aim Is True, by Elvis Costello. I went, "OK, now I know why I need an electric guitar." There would have been no Guitar Town without that.
Is Guitar Town a country record or a rock album?
I was making Born in the U.S.A. I had seen Bruce Springsteen on that tour as I was starting to write those songs. Bruce opened with "Born in the U.S.A.," and while I'd been a Springsteen fan, I got it in a way I never had before. It was like, "If I make a record that says something about who I am, I'll be able to live with it, be proud of it." The rest took care of itself.
The way I write songs is true to what I believe is important in country music. I was playing a country joint in Las Vegas when Guitar Town came out, and there was a big dance floor in front of the stage. This guy went dancing by, and he said, "Play something country." I stopped the band in its tracks, and I said, "I have the Number One country album in America. This week, I decide what's fu*king country and what's not."
The world could use a lot more like him who have the balls to stand up and say what's on their mind and aren't afraid to say what needs to be said out loud.