Steve Earle
TAKIN' IT TO THE STREETS Steve Earle's Convictions Inspire a Personal Revolution
On his new album, The Revolution Starts...Now, Steve Earle makes no bones about his opposition to the Bush administration. But he states his case the best way he knows how: by examining the lives of common folk being ground up by misguided policies. The country-rocker has built a career on this tactic, most recently with the moving -- and highly controversial -- "John Walker's Blues," off his 2002 disc, Jerusalem, which took the human angle on the plight of "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh. On Revolution, Earle again focuses on the personal but still makes room to bust -- or lust after? -- the incumbent national security adviser ("Condi Condi") and lash out profanely against the abridgement of privacy and free speech ("F the CC"). There are moments of tenderness, such as the poignant Emmylou Harris duet "Comin' Around," but Earle's motivation here is largely political -- as is the timing of the album's release just prior to the 2004 presidential election. When he arrived in New York a few days before the start of the Republican National Convention, Earle was in full lather about the state of the Union and eager to extrapolate from the specifics of his songs to the general mood across the land in what he sees as the twilight of the Bush administration. Barnes & Noble.com's David McGee took notes.
Barnes & Noble.com: Judging from your liner notes, there was a special urgency to get this record out quickly.
Steve Earle: Yeah. I wrote "The Revolution Starts Now" and "Rich Man's War," and once I got those two songs, I really wanted it out before the election. And enough before the election so that it would get heard before the election.
B&N.com: Your approach as a songwriter is more to illustrate how policies and practices affect the rank-and-file.
SE: I think that's important. I am an unapologetic leftist. But I also know I'm relatively privileged and have been all my life. I'm lucky in that I'm pretty acutely aware that when you start trying to decide what's good for working people and you're not one [of them], there's a disconnect that happens there. It's important to remember that being able to sit around and talk about the state of the world in any kind of detail is almost a luxury; working people don't get to do it. I just think you're more effective when you try to stay aware of how it affects everybody. Even writing "John Walker's Blues," I connected to that through my son, who's exactly the same age as John Walker Lindh.... That skinny and that age, exactly. I thought, He's got parents and they must be sick. So I think it's really important to go out of your way to make sure you at least try to come to some sort of understanding of how the issues you're talking about affect ordinary people.
B&N.com: On "Home to Houston" and "Gringo's Song," I'm unsure as to whether you're really sympathetic to these people, though. In "Home to Houston," the main character is essentially a mercenary; he's a truck driver who's gone over to Iraq to profit off the war.
SE: Yeah, he's a mercenary, but he's also a working guy who took a job that was better than what he had here. Remember that guy that was driving for Halliburton and came back to Mississippi and had just gone on the news and made a lot of patriotic statements and said he was going back? I don't think he's gone back yet. I didn't buy it. So the song's not about him. It is about an imaginary guy and it's about a risk. I think there's got to be a lot more guys who went over and said, "I'm never f**king doing that again!"
B&N.com: Jump back for just a minute to "John Walker's Blues." When you wrote that, did you anticipate the kind of fury it unleashed?
SE: Yeah, [Artemis Records president] Danny Goldberg and I talked about that. He thought I was being paranoid. Paranoia, if you look it up in the dictionary, is a fear with no basis in reality. The people that reacted were the people I expected to react, and they reacted, you know, predictably. Confusing Fox News and the New York Post -- anything that has anything to do with Rupert Murdoch -- with political discussion is like thinking pro wrestling's real. It's just not. I did The O'Reilly Factor, and his big thing is "the no-spin zone." Well, in "the no-spin zone," I was edited. I zinged Bill O'Reilly, and they edited out that part of the interview. He said, "You wrote a song about John Walker Lindh, who was tried for treason." I said, "No, he wasn't." He goes, "Well, what was he tried for?" I said, "Giving aid and comfort to an enemy of the United States." He goes, "Well, you're right, but he's a traitor." They edited that part of it out when they aired it because I did my interview on tape. And people need to know that about Fox News, that that happens.
B&N.com: So has there been any reaction to "Condi, Condi"? Condoleezza Rice doesn't strike me as someone who would have a sense of humor about the song.
SE: You know, I think she's kinda hot. There's no accounting for taste. She has the usual fashion challenges Republicans have to deal with -- she needs to do something about her hair, because damn! But I'm single and she's getting ready to be unemployed, you know. Never can tell. She fascinates me, actually, her very existence. She's exactly my age. A black woman exactly my age with a really, really good education, ending up where she is, is really fascinating to me. The only reaction to the song has been in the New York Daily News, because they ran it as a cute little column piece -- the very first thing written about this record was about that song. I thought, Here we go again. It hasn't really worked out that way. In fact, I got a four-star review in the New York Post, which bummed me out! One of my proudest accomplishments was a one-star review in the New York Post for Jerusalem. It's the only review I've ever framed; I've got it in my office. I'm really thrilled with the reaction to this record so far. The reviews have been consistently good. The radio airplay is really good. It makes me optimistic about the election. I think people are starting to wake up; I think they're starting to get it.
B&N.com: It does seem as if the deep well of disdain for Bush is getting deeper. But at the same time, I vividly remember the most reviled politician of another era, Richard Nixon, and all the hostility he evoked. And he won landslide victories.
SE: Yeah, I know. It's because of fear. You know, the reason the Republican Convention's in New York is because of that hole in the ground downtown. That's the only platform they have, no matter what they say about Kerry's record. I understand conservatives. I don't agree with them. I think government is supposed to do something for its citizens. That's a fundamental disagreement. But you know what? I'm okay with real conservatives. But neo-cons aren't real conservatives. And Bush isn't even a neo-con. I fear what he's become is a fundamentalist Christian. I think he really thinks he has God on his side. If that's true, then we've got a fundamentalist squaring off against fundamentalism, and he's not smart enough to realize he cannot win that war. The other guys around him, they can't control him. He is president of the United States. Condoleezza did manage -- this is another reason I'm really impressed with her -- she did teach him to walk on his hind legs. That's an accomplishment, no doubt about it. This is a hundred times scarier than Nikita Khrushchev saying, "We will bury you," which he didn't really say anyway. When I was a small child I really believed if I ever encountered Nikita Khrushchev he would eat me. I was lucky I was rescued from that fear at a relatively early age.
B&N.com: Do you regard this new album as optimistic?
SE: Yeah, I do. I think "The Revolution Starts Now" is very optimistic. It's not about something that's going to happen in the future; it's not about something that's happened in the past. It's going on right now; it's never stopped. We may have gone to sleep but people are up there fighting every minute of every day. It's about being accountable. I believe if we are accountable and are vigilant, then democracy works through our Constitution.
B&N.com: What I like about "The Revolution Starts Now" and the penultimate song, "The Seeker," are the appeals to stay on our toes. It's suggesting the revolution start inside each of us, not necessarily in the streets.
SE: Right. Democracy requires vigilance, and there's never a time when that's not going to be true. If Kerry's elected, the work starts the day after the election. And that's really, really true. We're not in the game until we get rid of Bush. As long as Bush is president, he will continue to do whatever he wants to do, regardless of what we think. We had the whole world on our side after September 11th, and we managed to squander that in nine months. We alienated the entire world. I'm voting for John Kerry because I believe with all my heart the one thing that will happen is that the day after the election John Kerry will start reaching out to the other countries in the world. Because he has to. He's gonna be stuck with having to get us out of Iraq. I think he wants to get us out of Iraq. I don't think he's going to say that overtly as an unconditional antiwar statement, and I understand why. But I do believe we get back in the game come January 21st.
August 2004
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