Regime Change Rock
News: In the studio with "lefty redneck" Steve Earle as he wraps up an album aimed at changing minds -- and swinging votes -- in November.
August 18, 2004
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STEVE EARLE IS HAVING a tough time. He's in his recording studio outside Nashville crafting the 16th album of a three-decade-long music career -- what he envisions as a "political" album -- and he doesn't have enough songs. For seven weeks, the time he had set aside for songwriting, Earle was sidelined by two kidney stones. ("I've been through withdrawal for heroin and crack," he says, "and this was worse.") But that was not his only distraction. Earle was also arranging a limited run of The Exonerated, a play about death row inmates wrongly convicted. Appearing with him in the production would be his recently departed girlfriend of five years. ("She ran off," he notes, "with her kids' soccer coach -- the middle-class equivalent of the tennis pro at the club. But it's my fault. I didn't pay enough attention to her.") Now, halfway through the two weeks scheduled for laying down the primary tracks, he is writing a song each morning and recording it in the afternoon and evening. And this day, as he leads his band for the first time through a ballad of an on-the-run special-ops warrior called "The Gringo's Tale," his dog Beau, a three-year-old Australian Blue Heeler, throws up. "It's on the power supply," Earle shouts from the soundproof booth where he and Beau are isolated. The session is interrupted, and Earle's younger brother, Patrick, runs the dog to the veterinarian. Sucking on a cigarette, Earle says, "I can deal with losing girlfriends." He has been through six marriages with five wives. But, he adds, "there are two things I won't be able to stand: losing that dog and seeing Bush reelected." He tosses the cigarette and heads back into the booth.
The album under construction is Earle's attempt to stick it to Bush. This is no departure for Earle, who started in the music business as a professional songwriter in Nashville, became a shit-kicking country-rock star in the mid-1980s (with a gold-record album featuring the hit "Copperhead Road"). Then, after wasting years as a close-to-dead junkie, reemerged as an eclectic roots-rock veteran who easily shifts from bluegrass to rock to country to folk. Since the 1980s, Earle, a nine-time Grammy nominee, has been decrying capital punishment, and he has written several haunting tunes on the subject. ("Ellis Unit One" appeared on the album for the 1995 film Dead Man Walking.) He helped create the Justice Project, which promotes DNA testing to prevent wrongful execution. He has corresponded with 11 death row convicts; nine have been executed. "All my guys have been guilty," he says, and he claims he has not cried since he witnessed the execution of one, Jonathan Nobles, in Texas in 1998. He's no longer looking for death-row pen pals: "I can't watch anyone else die," he explains. "I don't have it in me."
Earle has not been a stranger to controversy. His last studio album, Jerusalem, released in 2002, took aim at HMOs, walled communities, and the war on drugs. But its most notorious track was "John Walker's Blues." Earle intended the dirge-like tune as an examination of why a young American would enlist with Islamic extremists. ("I'm just an American boy -- raised on MTV / And I've seen all those kids in the soda pop ads / But none of 'em looked like me / So I started lookin' around for a light out of the dim / And the first thing I heard that made sense was the word / Of Mohammed, peace be upon him.") But the song, released just a year after 9/11, was roundly condemned by conservatives as a hip-hip-hooray for the so-called American Taliban. Accused of hating America, Earle never backed down or apologized for damn thing, and despite the controversy – or perhaps because of it -- Jerusalem soared to number-one on Billboard's independent album chart. "The idea that artists are not supposed to comment on social matters -- like the Dixie Chicks -- is crap," Earle says. "Artists have always been the consciences of their societies. And I don't sing good enough to be an entertainer."
So it's not surprising that Earle, a self-described "lefty redneck" and "borderline Marxist," would want to cut and release a political album before the 2004 election. And he is making sure his tour schedule will bring him to swing states prior to Election Day. He is not shy about his intent. The album is called The Revolution Starts…Now.
Of the six tracks already in the can, five are politically loaded. There's a twangy country-and-western truck-driving song, but it's about a driver at the wheel of a Halliburton oil tanker in Iraq. ("When I pulled out of Basra they all wished me luck.") If Toby Keith recorded it, Earle muses, it could be a big radio hit: "But not for me." The title song is a one-world ode attached to a Tom Petty-ish, psychedelic riff. "Rich Man's War" offers the obvious point about working-class grunts joining the military for decent jobs and ending up pawns for the powerful. But it concludes with a hell of a twist: Ali, a suicide bomber in the Gaza Strip driven to his target in a new Mercedes, is also "just another poor boy off to fight a rich man's war." Explaining the line, Earle notes that while he despises the Sharon government he also considers Yasser Arafat a corrupt leader.
"Warrior," another of the first six songs, is a spoken-word piece about the costs of war, modeled on the prologue of Henry V and set against a Doors-y tune. It's Earle doing Patti Smith doing William Burroughs, in iambic pentameter. ("There are no honorable frays to join/only mean death dealt out in dibs and dabs.") "F the CC" is a punkish and highly explicit rant against censorship with a no-apologies chorus: "So fuck the FCC / Fuck the FBI / Fuck the CIA / Livin' in the motherfuckin' USA." When he plays it for visitors to the studio, Earle, 49, bounces up and down and beams with a boyish grin.
After Beau's vomit has been cleaned up, Earle resumes recording "The Gringo's Tale" with the band. Eric "Roscoe" Ambel, an original member of Joan Jett and the Blackhearts is on guitar; Will Rigby, a founder of the dB's, a 1980s New York City band, is handling drums; and Kelly Looney, who has played with Earle for two decades, is on the bass. (Ray Kennedy, Earle's co-producer since the mid-1990s, is at the control board.) Earle is fingerpicking a guitar and pushing Rigby to develop a quirky, galloping drum beat. When he listens to the second take, Earle declares that the band has struck "a vibe." "I've been doing this a while, and I have a good intuition," he says. "We usually get a song in two or three takes." But he's worried his voice is too flat and decides to record a new vocals track. His gravelly voice has a hard-livin', cigs-and-whiskey timbre. And for this track, he wants the grit to be sharp. So he punches in the vocals line by line. "This is not the fun part," he remarks. And the word from the vet is that Beau ate a tennis ball, and it has lodged in his stomach. Surgery has been scheduled for the next morning.
"A POLITICAL ALBUM -- it's a dangerous thing," Earle says. "I may have come into this record with no songs, but I knew what I wanted to say. It's about the war." The trick, Earle maintains, is knowing when to "communicate in human terms" -- that is, telling a story that makes a point -- and when to "communicate in rhetorical terms." The FCC song is definitely an example of the latter. Does singing about political matters -- war, the death penalty, and lousy HMOs -- have any noticeable impact? "I've had people tell me the stuff I've written has changed their minds on the death penalty." Anyway, he notes, "Pete Seeger said all songs are political; lullabies are political to babies."
After finishing "The Gringo's Tale" late in the night, Earle heads home. The next morning, he rises early and -- once again -- it's time to come up with a song. He does it in little over three hours and heads to the twelve-step meeting he tries to hit every weekday. (He's about to mark his tenth year of sobriety.) Shortly after lunchtime, Earle arrives at the studio and informs the band he has composed a "chick song." (He also announces that Beau is doing fine.) He plays the new tune on a guitar. It's a familiar sounding, slow chord progression -- "early Stones," he says -- and the chorus warns the "chick": "If you're thinkin' 'bout breakin' my heart / you might as well pick up your little black dress and go / somebody else already tore it apart." Is the track too reminiscent of other yearning-for-love slow-dance songs? A roots-rock, rough-edged "Color My World"? "All the things it's reminiscent of are reminiscent of something," Earle says. "I needed a chick song. So far six of the seven songs are political. If I don't do chick songs, my audience will just get hairier and uglier." But how realistic is it? After all, the narrator doesn't tell the "chick" to take a hike if she's not serious until after the dress is off. How many men operate that way? "Right," Earle says. "Guys don't do that. That's why it's a chick song. That's what women want to think guys do."
When the band finishes recording the track, Earle is again out of songs. "I need something that's positive," he says. Is it hard to do a positive song without being sappy? "We're all too afraid of being sappy," says the fellow who wears a ring bearing a skull. Midnight has passed, and he gets into his black PT Cruiser and drives off. He'll be back with another song in about twelve hours.
EARLE GREW UP in Texas, the son of an air traffic controller. He hitched to Nashville at the age of 19. His rise from day laborer/songwriter to top of the country charts star was followed by a dramatic descent of self-destruction that lasted five years and landed him in jail and rehab in 1994. His 1995 return-to-music album, Train a Comin', a collection of acoustic tracks, was nominated for a Grammy, and since then he has released an album almost every fifteen months. His CDs, he says, reliably sell 100,00 to 150,000 copies domestically. He tours 150 or so nights a year. "I like my job," he says, "I make an obscene amount of money for doing what I do. My politics come from this. I feel guilty. So you give something back."
Earle's political interests extend beyond the death penalty. He has played FarmAid and done benefits for the anti-landmines campaign run by the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation ("That's coalition building on my part," he quips. "I do landmines for Emmylou Harris, and she does death penalty for me.") Last year, Earle was part of the Tell Us the Truth tour, which featured Billy Bragg, Mike Mills of REM, Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, actress/comedian Janeane Garofalo, and rapper Boots Riley. Sponsored by the AFL-CIO, this music-and-politics road show denounced media consolidation and corporate globalization. And his politics, he notes, have not tarnished his commercial appeal. His audience has come to accept, appreciate or humor his politics and outbursts. Executives at MCA, his label in the 1980s, complained about his outspokenness. But since 2000, Earle has recorded for Artemis Records, an independent label run by Danny Goldberg, a former heard of Warner Bros. Records and an ACLU official. "No other record label in the world would put out this record," Earle says.
Once back in the studio -- which is decorated with Beatles memorabilia -- Earle paces about in sandals, runs his hands through his patchy hair, and explains the song du jour. He had a piece of melody lying around that he had written on a mandolin. But he wants the dominant sound of the track to be a sparkling electric twelve-string guitar. Not too much like the Byrds, he cautions. He plays "The Seeker" on a 12-string acoustic guitar for the band. It is an upbeat number: "Whatever you do," he sings, "be a seeker." After the band has recorded two takes of the song, they listen to it. "It's unapologetic country rock," Earle concedes. "It has that Byrds thing." He complains his voice is more raspy than usual and blames the pollen and the extra smoking that comes with on-demand songwriting. But still he, the band, and Kennedy like the cut.
Earle keeps saying that he has never produced an album in such a slap-dash fashion, that he always has his songs written before stepping into the studio. But he is a frenetic sort of person. In addition to making music and crusading against the death penalty, in recent years he has written a play (about Karla Faye Tucker, the first woman executed in Texas since the Civil War) and a book of short stories, Doghouse Roses. He started a theater company in Nashville (and left it after his ex showed up at the premiere of The Exonerated with her soccer coach friend). He appeared in HBO's The Wire. And he has been writing a novel about a defrocked doctor haunted by the ghost of Hank Williams. During the kidney stones episode, he was on pain medication that zonked him out. He couldn't concentrate on writing, but he found he was able to paint. Having recently dropped sixty pounds, Earle had tossed out his entire wardrobe and purchased new clothes to demonstrate his commitment to keeping the weight off. That meant he had nothing old to wear while painting. So, he says, he painted in the nude and when done just walked into the shower. In this stretch, he produced only paintings of skeletons in Day of the Dead style, including a skeleton in an astronaut suit.
In the studio between songs, Earle talks about…well, practically everything. His mind races, his mouth moves, as he veers from one (seemingly) unconnected subject to another. Les Blank's brilliant 1982 documentary Burden of Dreams. The difficulty of distributing wheelchairs in the third world (the locals can't get parts to fix them). Crooked accounting in the music business. The shoot-out at the O.K. Corral. ("That was a Republican versus Democrat gunfight. Local mining interests were Republicans; cattle interests were Republican. The Earps were aligned with the Republicans.") He shares his views of musicians, calling Roger Miller (of "King of the Road" fame) a genius and blasting John Fogerty of Credence Clearwater Revival as "dumber than a bag full of nails." (But the lyrics on Fogerty's "Bad Moon Rising," he acknowledges, were spectacular: "It must have been beamed down to him.") He expounds on President Andrew Jackson, whose home is a mile or so up the road: "Jackson is the first redneck president, and the first thing he did was to remove the Indians. Imagine if you're Jewish in Germany today and you go to the ATM and pull out 20 euros and you see Adolph Hitler on the bill. That's what every Native American goes through in this country." When a visitor remarks, "it's a wonder Steve's head doesn't explode," his guitar technician, Greg "Chief" Frahn, replies, "He gets it all out."
ONCE "THE SEEKER" IS DONE, Earle plays for the band a reggae riff on electric guitar; it's a deep, circular groove that could roll on for hours. This, he says, will be the basis for tomorrow's song: "I think this one is called 'Condoleeza.'" The band members don't know if he's joking. But the next day, Earle returns with "Condi, Condi." Since the lyrics are unfinished, he and the band record only the musical tracks. After several takes, they listen to the tape (Earle records in analog, not digital). There's a debate over whether Rigby added an unnecessary drum hit at the start. After Rigby tries to make a correction, Earle says, "I feel like we've lost the groove." He and the band listen to the opening over and over. "It sounds weird," Earle complains. "Am I losing my mind?" But, he adds, "I don't want to make it too smooth. Then it will sound like the Spin Doctors. They were a good bar band; they just didn't have the songs -- like Hootie and the Blowfish."
Finally Earle is won over. "I like the looseness," he says. Next he tries the vocals again on "The Seeker." He's having difficulty singing. "I'm supposed to use an inhaler," he says. "But I've done some real damage to my voice and you can get infections from those steroids. I've learned the hard way." Afterward, he sits at the control board listening to the new vocals track: "It still sounds too raspy. But unless we're not counting on meeting the release date, I'm singing with allergies. I don't hate that vocals. I hit all the notes."
He then goes off to complete the lyrics of "Condi, Condi." When he comes back and plays it for the band, they all smile. In this song of unrequited love, an unidentified protagonist pines for a woman named Condoleeza and says, "Skank for me Condi / show me what you got / They say you're too uptight / I say you're not." (Skank is rasta-slang for dance.) When he finishes recording the vocals, Earle says he hopes it will piss somebody off. "This makes ten," he declares -- referring to the number of recorded songs -- "and I think we have an album." He calls in Ambel to add extra guitar tracks to "Warrior." His sole guidance: "this should sound like Neil Young 30-feet tall."
At his house the next day, Earle says he never wants to record an album in such a helter-skelter way. But, he explains, he was eager to meet the deadline so the disc would come out in September, in the homestretch of the presidential election. "I could have written the right country songs and made a lot more money," Earle says, reflecting on his career. "I made a conscious decision to do what I do." That said, he pauses, gazes out at the farmland that surrounds his home, and muses, "But I really need to write a record of chick songs."
David Corn, Washington editor of The Nation, is author of the best-selling The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception (Crown Publishers). He writes a blog at www.bushlies.com/blog
