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DUKE OF HAZARDS

Steve Earle
The Independent, September 2003

STEVE Earle has been called many things: saviour of country music, the new Woody Guthrie, the next Bruce Springsteen, a drug addict, a serial husband, an activist, a subversive, a playwright, an author. To that list can now be added Arsenal fan. Earle became a Gooner in the mid-80s, while producing an album by London group The Bible. The day before this interview, in a North London hotel room, he’d watched Arsenal’s ill-tempered draw with Manchester United in a pub in Islington.
  “Vieira’s out of hand,” says Earle, and it’s not something often said in a Texan accent. “He’s a great player, but he’s got an anger management problem. Arsenal play physical football, and so do Man United, but United are looked at differently, and Vieira’s largely responsible for that. It’s just like me. I took drugs for years and did a bunch of horrible shit, but I didn’t have a drug charge until I finally went to gaol. Then I got arrested three or four times in one four-month period – once you get caught a couple of times, they start watching you.”
  There isn’t time this afternoon, or room in this newspaper, to fully chronicle Earle’s luridly colourful life: the decades of addiction (Earle began using hard drugs at 13), the years lost in Nashville crack dens (depicted in Earle’s “South Nashville Blues”), the six marriages, the brief gaol term in 1994 (for failing to attend a sentencing hearing after being convicted of heroin possession), the rehab. It could fill a book, and it has – an excellent biography, Lauren St John’s “Hardcore Troubadour: The Life And Near Death Of Steve Earle”. It would be unfair on Earle to dwell too long on any of this. As he’d announced onstage at the Barbican the night before, he’s been nine years clean of heroin. At 48, Earle looks in reasonable shape, though when he laughs, as he often does, the toll the drugs exacted on his teeth is apparent. He’s lucky that a gleaming grin is all that drugs took from him – Earle’s road could have ended at any one of a hundred points, overdosing him into immortality as another doomed desperado who chose burning out over fading away.
  It looked for a while as if that was what Earle had in mind. After he spent his 20s struggling to be heard as a songwriter in Nashville, Earle announced himself at the relatively late age of 31 with a salvo of extraordinary albums, infusing America’s most musically and politically conservative music – country – with a radical conscience borrowed from 60s protest singers and New York beats. One track on his 1986 debut, “Guitar Town”, “Good Ol’ Boy (Getting Tough)”, was far from the boorish cowboy drinking shanty the title suggested, and actually a song for the air-traffic controllers sacked by Ronald Reagan in 1981 (Earle may have felt unusually strong about this – his father was an air-traffic controller, and his brother was one of those who lost his job in Reagan’s purge). Subsequent albums “Exit O” and “Copperhead Road” (“Johnny Come Lately”, the highlight of the latter, was a collaboration with The Pogues, signalling another of Earle’s lifelong musical passions) appeared to set the foundations for a durable career.
  Earle, or the devils that drove him, had other ideas. For much of the early 90s, Earle was, to a large extent, a missing person. The index of St John’s biography tells the story in headlines: under “DRUGS”, sub-titles include “Cocaine”, “Crack”, “Heroin”, “LSD”, “Magic mushrooms” and “methadone programme”. Under “CRIMINAL CHARGES AND CONVICTIONS” are references to two assaults, one bail-jumping and a handful more relating to the possession of guns and drugs. Whether one likes Earle or not – and in the last couple of years especially, he has polarised American opinion, at least – Earle cannot be accused of singing of outsiders and outlaws without knowing what he’s on about.
  Since his 1995 comeback album, “Train ’A Comin”, Earle has turned the same determination he once applied to destroying himself to creating the best records of his life and, increasingly, to becoming politically active. He attributes this re-energising substantially to the 12-step recovery programme.
  “That’s the only spiritual system I have,” he says. “I do have an interest in Buddhism, but I eat a fuck of a lot of meat. But it was Recovery which caused me to, rather than just write songs about the death penalty, to become an activist, to do the work, whether it’s picking people up at the airport, or putting on a suit and going to Capitol Hill. The difference now is that the climate is what it is, and I do think music changes things. I think music helped stop the Vietnam War.”
  Much of Earle’s recent work has been motivated by a hope that his music, at least, might have a similar deraling effect on George W. Bush’s War on Terror. Earle’s new live album, “Just An American Boy”, and an accompanying film, available on DVD later this year, chronicle his tour of America in the build-up to the war in Iraq. The title is lifted from an already notorious song - “John Walker’s Blues”, from Earle’s 2002 album, “Jerusalem”, which attempted to see the world from inside the head of the “American Taliban”, John Walker Lindh. The deliberately provocative title, and a chorus containing a fragment of Koranic scripture sung in Arabic, sent the more hard-of-thinking of America’s media into a frenzy. The New York Post deemed Earle’s song worthy of a front-page headline: “Twisted Ballad Honours Tali-Rat”. Nashville radio host Steve Gill likened Earle to “Jane Fonda, John Walker and all these people who hate America”.
  Truth may be the first casualty of war, but appreciation of subtlety and nuance in popular art rarely survive unscathed much longer. The “Just An American Boy” film contains a riotously entertaining montage of the outrage the song caused. Asked about the furore today, Earle sounds rather like he enjoyed it.
  “Well, I don’t read the New York Post,” he grins, “Except the sports pages. That front page did scare my mother to death, which I really resented. But when you write songs like that, you’re trying to piss off the New York Post.”
  Were you happy to let the song speak for itself, or did you feel obliged to defend it?
  “I did some media appearances,” he says. “I just didn’t go on any of the really stupid shows, not because they’d be hostile, but just because it would be stupid. With a lot of the media that responded, like the New York Post and Fox News, getting involved in a political discussion with them is like thinking pro wrestling is real.”
  One question seems fair: of all the characters he could have empathised with in the aftermath of September 11th and the war in Afghanistan, why Lindh?
  “I have a son the same age,” he shrugs. “I related to the story as a parent. It was a song I couldn’t not write, and nobody else was going to do it – that’s a good reason to write a song right there, if you’re absolutely positive nobody else is going to.”
  Earle won’t say if Lindh’s family have responded personally to the song, but it’s clear that his interest in the case hasn’t waned; indeed, he seems so outraged by the 20-year sentence handed down to Lindh that a sequel to “Just An American Boy” seems a fair bet.
  “I thought he’d get a hiding,” says Earle, “but I was shocked at the deal that was made. Twenty years is a long time, and no-one’s even accused him of hurting anybody. They did him for supplying services to a power hostile to the US. It was copping a plea, it was like I once pled guilty to disturbing the peace when I was charged with assaulting a police officer. It’s a plea bargain – it’s what you’re willing to agree to. John Walker agreed, for some reason, to do 20 years. I hope he knows something we don’t and he’s not going to do all that.”
  Did any of your audiences respond badly to the song?
  “There was one incident. And that was one drunk kid in Indianapolis. He came hustling towards the stage, and he was grabbed by my son, Justin – he’s a singer and guitarist too, and he’s been on my tour. I just remember thinking ‘Justin, don’t hurt him’.”

STEVE Earle talks like he sings, in a deep, deadpan growl. In delivery and content, he’s frequently reminiscent of his fellow Texan iconoclast, the late comedian Bill Hicks, with whom Earle also shares a fervent belief in the necessity of further human evolution.
  “Retributive justice,” he says, “is like cowboys going round with guns shooting at each other. I don’t think we can do that and call ourselves human and evolving.”
  Earle could be talking about the War on Terror, but he’s discussing another subject which can’t be a comfortable one to raise before American audiences: his opposition to death penalty. Earle’s campaigning has gone as far as corresponding with Death Row inmates. One, a murderer called Jonathan Nobles, asked Earle to witness his execution by lethal injection in 1998. Earle sang of the experience in “Over Yonder (Jonathan’s Song)”, from his superb 2000 album “Transcendental Blues”; like Earle’s other song about a misguided young man called John, it was a first-person narrative which caused some offence among the professionally indignant with its refusal to make an explicit moral judgement on its subject. Again, it seems reasonable to wonder where Earle’s empathy with the pariah comes from.
  “I’m not trying to save anyone on Death Row,” says Earle. “I’m trying to keep me from going to hell. In a democracy, if the government kills somebody, I’m killing somebody. And I believe that the next step in evolution is the idea that the way to break a cycle of violence is for someone to forgo retribution. Dealing with crime, with violence, should never be about reaction. It should be about stopping it happening again. I’m not the kind of abolitionist who stands outside prisons yelling ‘Murderers!’ at the guards. I had amazing empathy for the guards who strapped Jonathan to that table and killed him – I mean, Jonathan was out of there. Nobody should have to do that to another person. It diminishes every one of us.”
  Steve Earle is a great songwriter, and we can never have too many of those, but he also finds himself in a more important position: a left-wing (“Out-and-out pinko,” he corrects) figure in an America lacking a meaningful counter-culture. When it’s suggested to him that it’s weird that circumstances have conspired to make Earle, of all people, about the only plausible heir to Phil Ochs and Woody Guthrie, he looks abashed for the first and only time.
  “Aw, hell no,” he says, with a slight laugh. “There will come a time when I make another record that’s mostly chick songs. It won’t be the next one, because this war’s still gonna be going on, but I’m not a political writer. I’m just a songwriter who has never excluded politics from what I do, and I find it hard to write about anything else right now.”

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