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Our guest is not in town to sign books or sign records or play a concert, he's here to play for those of you who listen on the radio and listening in this room. And also, to talk about a great new record called "Jerusalem". Please welcome to the KGSR airwaves, Mr. Steve Earle.
A: (While picking Baby Let Me Follow You Down) I used to be a folk singer. Now I'm a recovering folk singer. The thing about the folk singer thing is there was a lot of rules and I had to give it up. Some rules are okay. I don't mind following rules that I agreed with in the first place. One rule that was okay was the great Jimmy Driftwood told me at the 1972 Kerrville Folk Festival that when I played a song for folks, I ought to tell everybody where I learned it from. So I'm going to tell you-all right now up front I learned this song off of a Bob Dylan record. Bob says right on the record where he learned it from. He says he learned it from a guy from Cambridge, Massachusetts, named Eric Von Schmidt.
Now, another rule if you're a folk singer you had to ramble around a lot. And my rambling brought me to a town in Central Mexico called San Miguel de Allende by the late 1970s. Nice town. Every dog has a bandana around it's neck and a frisbee in his mouth. Kind of like Austin before the whole dot com thing went to hell. I discovered that my neighbor across the street in San Miguel was none other than Eric Von Schmidt from Cambridge, Massachusetts. No, really. Lived right across the street. But he wasn't being a folk singer anymore, he was being a painter. And he was painting Custer's Last Stand because his dad had painted Custer's Last Stand, the one that we all grew up with in the Smithsonian. But he got it wrong. And Eric was going to correct that. There's something about the Indians were coming from the wrong direction and Custer had recently been back to Washington and had had a haircut, which, considering how it all turned out, I think is sort of a moot point.
I lived there for two years and I thought, you know, the folk singerly thing for me to do would be to go across the street and introduce myself and learn something from him and sing it for you-all and tell you-all where I learned it from. But in all that time, I never got up the nerve to go across the street and talk to him. So like I say, I learned this song off of a Bob Dylan record.
(SONG: Baby Let Me Follow You Down)
Q: Steve, I've been spending the last few days with the new album, "Jerusalem". And I thought you were going to come out here and tell us about conspiracy theories and "Jerusalem" and all the heaviness of that record. And you came out singing folk songs.
A: Well, those are folk songs.
Q: Yeah, that's true.
A: Yeah, I mean, there's actually -- I'm going to do a couple of songs from that record. But there's really only two that acoustic versions exist at this point. And I'm going to play some other stuff, too.
Q: Yeah, 'cause this record, the production is different. I mean, you stretched in a lot of different ways with the backing vocals and the sounds and --
A: Well, Conspiracy Theory itself is a little different from the rest of the record. It sort of arrived at, you know, completely the opposite of the way I normally make records. It was a -- you know, I hooked up a loop and then I put a bass part down. And then I started writing lyrics, which is not the way I normally do it.
Normally, you know, what we do is we've got some guys that can play and some good microphones and we plug the microphones into a tape machine and we turn it on. And that's pretty much it. And the rest of the record was basically made that way. I didn't pay much attention to the way this record sounded, really. It was pretty much totally idea-driven. And it was just sort of same gear we've always used. New studio, because we moved room and board into a newer -- a better room.
But it was just sort of -- like "Transcendental Blues" was -- I was -- you know, it was mostly chick songs. And I was sort of fascinated with texture and melody. And so there were a lot of overdubs. You know, a lot of time went into what we were going to -- what weird instrument we were going to pull off the wall and put on it. And it was musically driven. And this is idea-driven. So it really got to more we'd bash it out and then we'd listen to it and it'd be, "oh, we'll just put a tambourine on it and mix it." And it was pretty straight ahead, pretty quick process.
Q: Not that you wouldn't have addressed the subjects that you address on this record, but I heard that, in an unusual statement, your record label president actually asked you to make an overtly political record?
A: Well, actually, Danny Goldberg asked me to make an overtly political record before September 11th, and I wasn't really that keen on the idea. I mean, because I thought it would be boring. And I'm sort of dedicated to writing more chick songs as I get older, because it prevents my audience from becoming exponentially hairier and uglier as time goes on. (Laughter). Because I've got to look at y'all, too. And I play small places, so I can see you.
But it was -- I don't know what other record I would have written. And I basically -- September 11th did happen and I suddenly found myself writing that record that I thought I'd never write.
Q: I was mentioning earlier, you're here to play for the people on the airwaves, the listeners that are here. Are you going to do a conventional tour around this record? But you've got a lot of other stuff happening at the same time.
A: Yeah, the tour starts November 15th in Knoxville, Tennessee. And we're going to work the eastern part of the United States back as far west as Chicago. Just mainly hitting the big cities in the East, like between now and Christmas. And then shut down for Christmas and we'll start again in January, which is probably going to bring us to Texas sometime in January. Probably late January, because we're going to start about the middle of the month. And yeah, we'll be out all next year with this. At least.
Q: Because I know you're working on a play, right?
A: Yeah, the play is finished. It's in production. It's -- we're in rehearsals right now. So that's what I'm doing right now. I'm running out and doing the promotion that I need to do and that they want me to do and trying to -- and then -- I mean, I flew to Toronto and did press night before last -- I mean, day before yesterday flew back and was in rehearsal all day yesterday and got on a plane about 9:00 last night to come down here.
We've got a family thing going on in Lubbock. My brother manages the airport there and he's got this museum that he's helped put together, this glider pilot's museum at the Lubbock airport that they're dedicating tomorrow. So Patrick and I are going to that tomorrow and then back in rehearsals on Monday. And the play goes up October 25th. And it's called "Karla." And it's about Karla Faye Tucker. And it's really not strictly an historical piece, because it begins with Karla's execution. And it's turned out to be something bigger than I think all of us involved in it... and -- which is -- you know, I knew a lot of people -- I knew a lot of guys on death row in Texas. And the women are in a different place. And there in Mountain View, which used to be Gatesville Boys Reformatory. When I was growing up, that's what they used to scare the hell out of me with was, you'll end up in Gatesville. Instead I ended up in Nashville, which might be worse. But it's -- it goes up the 25th. And we're going to -- it's about a two-week run in Nashville. And then I start rehearsals for the tour.
Q: Well, let's talk a little bit more, but let's hear a little bit more.
A: Thanks. Well, let's get this out of the way. This is not the only song on this record, although you would have thought it was two weeks before the record came out and before a lot of people had actually even heard it. But I'm not one for explaining myself very much. But I will say that I think I saw something different than a lot of people saw when I saw John Walker Lindh on television duct taped to a board. I saw an underfed, 20-year-old kid. And I've got a 20-year-old kid. And he always looks underfed, even when I feed him. And the first thing that occurred to me was that he has parents and that they must be sick. And there were enough people vilifying him. And I think anybody, when we judge people, they have a right to be judged as a human being and not as a poster child for, you know, whatever we're afraid of at the moment.
This is called John Walker's Blues.
(SONG: John Walker's Blues)
A: Thanks. I think what that song is, is me telling a story in someone else's words and trying to get inside someone else's head. I mean, I don't condone what John Walker Lindh did in the sense that he took up arms. I have a problem with anybody that takes up arms against anybody for any reason. And I get more like that the older I get. And I don't know how to explain it. I don't even hunt anymore. I finally, one day, looked down the barrel of a rifle and couldn't shoot the deer. And that was after killing 17 of them. Don't have any problem with people that do, but I can't do it anymore. I occasionally humiliate a fish before I put it back in the water. (Laughter). That's as violent as I get.
But I've done that before. And I've -- you know, it's something I've done as long as I've been writing. I just find it interesting, because when you write in the first person, you have to try to assume that character.
Tim Robbins called me and sent me this movie a few years back that he was working on, called "Dead Man Walking." And I was already familiar with Sister Helen's book. And he called me and he said, "I just want you to watch it and see if it inspires anything," which was sort of like, you know, I think everybody that -- the record, if you've ever heard the record, there's a lot of really inspired work on that. I think it affected everybody the same way.
And this has a Texas connotation. Ellis Unit One doesn't exist as death row anymore. And I bet you most people in Texas don't even know that. They moved the guys to a different facility. And it's more modern and they're even more -- they're less likely to die of heat exhaustion in their cells, which has happened, especially on the third tier. But they are -- it's a much easier place to keep them alive until we're ready to kill them. But it's -- on the other hand, it's more dehumanizing. It's a pod-type prison, if you've ever looked into that. And the way pod -- they separate the inmates even more from each other.
But for a long time, death row in Texas was called Ellis Unit One. And this is -- the person telling the story is a correctional officer.
(SONG: Ellis Unit One) |
Listen to a clip from the interview
