August 2005 –

Protest Too Much? 
Steve Earle's Anti-War Message of Hype

With the election long past and with no backup band, Steve Earle is making the rounds on a western swing of what must be considered the region's secondary concert venues. Wednesday, it was the Avalon Theatre in Grand Junction, Colo. Late in the afternoon, I called to see if tickets were still available for the 8 p.m. show. They were. Any danger of a sellout? None whatsoever.

I didn’t go to Grand Junction, but Friday I drove up to the tiny town of Lyons, where Earle was appearing at the Rocky Mountain Folks Festival. That's an annual event staged by Planet Bluegrass, which produces the Telluride Bluegrass Festival and other summer music events. By performers, the Planet property must be considered among the best of small venues. It's a 20-acre expanse bordered by red rock cliffs, with a stand of trees shading the St. Vrain River, where fest goers can ride inner tubes a mile downstream and take the bus back.

I wondered what Earle might do for an encore, to rile the crowd now with a smaller palette of colors. Last fall, his 16th album was newly minted, and its anarchistic tone fit perfectly into the political debate. Several tracks from "The Revolution Starts…Now" punctuated his shows as he raged against Bush and the war in Iraq. This year, the biggest controversy engendered in that tune is whether, by selling its title track for use in Chevy Truck commercials, Earle sold out his avowed borderline Marxist beliefs.

Earle took the stage looking lean and fit, in a green T-shirt much like the one I always put on to clean the garage. With acoustic guitar and harmonica, he ambled through a 10-minute intro to a three-minute song. He learned the tune from a Dylan record, whose liner notes said Dylan learned it from a man who, amazingly, Steve told us, later became Steve's neighbor by chance in Jacksonville, Texas. But in two years in the neighborhood, Steve never made it across the street to ask the man about the tune. "So I learned it from a Dylan record," he said, and finally played it.

The anti-climax was for comic effect, but it seemed at that moment the show might either pick up steam or crash slowly onto the rocks. It did neither, although the small area I'd staked out on the lawn gradually was becoming less encroached upon. People were leaving after a long day of roots music, suddenly seeing no reason to stay to the bitter end. A hard core Earle fan screamed, "Wake us up!" Failing to do that was even "Copperhead Road," Earle's 1986 blockbuster about a guy who takes to growing pot, following the footsteps of a daddy who ran whiskey and a moonshinin' granddaddy.

Dylan was once reviled for bringing electric instruments into the act. I'd have been happy to see Earle plugged in at least part of the time, or backed up by a solid bluegrass band, or with most any accompaniment beyond a just C harp and G harp. His vast recorded discography features some of the hottest electric and acoustic pickers in Nashville. He once toured internationally with the best in bluegrass, Del McCoury and his boys. Go to a Steve Earle show, and you expect some instrumental punch.

Even the many Earle tunes that could work well in a stripped-down setting, if mixed with a few breakdowns or electric blasters, tend to go flat when they come in endless succession. The night's second number was "Tom Ames' Prayer," Earle's story of a cornered Texas bank robber who spits out these words before his death:

I ain't never prayed before
But it always seemed to me
That prayin' is the same as beggin' Lord
And I don't take no charity

The lyrics were all there, but none of their bitter defiance. (To hear the song as its best, check out Robert Earl Keene's version on "Gringo Honeymoon.") I'd make the same criticism of his delivery of "Billy Austin," told in the first person by a man sentenced to the electric chair. Except there, the narrator is resigned to die, so maybe the low key is appropriate. Maybe.

Earle grew up in Texas. He came of age during Vietnam, and by 15 was singing anti-war protest songs in coffee houses. He left San Antonio after the briefest of appearances in high school, bounced around Texas, then made his way to Tennessee. In Nashville, he hung out with songwriting legend Townes Van Zandt, described later by Earle as a "a real good teacher and a real bad influence." They shared an interest in guns and heroine. Drugs eventually landed Earle in prison, which he says saved his life. But they pretty much killed his mentor, who died officially of a heart attack in 1997. Earle says he's been clean since 1994.

Along the way have been seven marriages, and two blockbuster albums that won him many comparisons to Springsteen.  But "Copperhead Road" and "Guitar Town" both came before 1990, and their acclaim and commercial success haven’t been repeated. Earle has taken on the role of a high-profile spokesman for leftist causes. His activism against the death penalty originated when he was an inmate, he says, witnessing its disproportionate toll on minorities and the poor.

"Rich Man's War," from his Revolution album, sent a similar message to the Friday night crowd. The song profiles less fortunate American kids who join the military as way to move up economically, then find themselves "rolling into Baghdad, wondering how it got this far." And "Dixieland" is a bluegrass-inspired tale told by a fictional composite character named Buster Kilrain. He's a poor Irish immigrant and a "fightin' man" who arrives in America just in time to ply his only trade, in the Civil War. Earle hammered out the song on solo mandolin, convincingly, even with skills far short of his acoustic guitar mastery.

"Someday" is the lament of a kid stuck pumping gas in a small town as the world passes by. Someday he'll take his ' 67 Chevy and "put her on that interstate and never look back." The dark "Taneytown" portrays a black kid who is chased from town by racists, and he knifes one of his assailants. He escapes punishment but vows never to go back.

Steve Earle has penned some of the best, most thoughtful songs in American music. But it is one thing for us to critique a song as art, and another to consider it as social commentary. And to me, his anti-war rhetoric rings a bit hollow. In my book, a few points are lost by someone who was bellowing out war protests at 15 when they're still doing it at 50. (Is it sincere or is it grandstanding?) A few more points come off for someone who spent much of his twenties and thirties in a chemically induced stupor. And finally, I say sell your revolutionary message to General Motors if you want to, but then don't rage against the machine you sold it to.

Still, it's a free country. (Earle reminds us of that in a rant titled "F the CC," not performed Friday. The song wishes equal ill will toward the FCC, FBI, and CIA.)  He announced Friday that in two days his entourage would make a previously unscheduled stop in Crawford, Texas.  He'd join Joan Baez in the ongoing war protest staged for President Bush by Cindy Sheehan, whose son died in Iraq. Then he and his new wife, Allison Moorer, would return to Nashville for a honeymoon break, followed by more touring.

He closed with "Christmas in Washington"--a song about heroes, he said, including some of his own: Joan Baez; her husband, the once-jailed war protester David Harris; and Abbie Hoffman, the 1960s anti-war radical. As Steve Earle fans marched out into the night, the final, hopeful chorus implored:

So come back, Emma Goldman
Rise up, old Joe Hill
The barricades are goin' up
They cannot break our will
Come back to us, Malcolm X
And Martin Luther King
We're marching into Selma
As the bells of freedom ring


Write to me at  tom@larocque.biz