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Steve Earle: Self-Professed Newspaper Addict |
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by Greg Mitchell via a fan
(No verified email address) |
05 Nov 2003
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Steve Earle will be at The National Conference on Media Reform in Madison, Wis., this weekend, along with Billy Bragg. |
Steve Earle used to shoot drugs. Now he mainlines the latest news. Like Woody Guthrie, Will Rogers, Phil Ochs, and many other social critics before him, Earle is a self-professed newspaper "addict." He is also one of the best songwriters of his generation, a playwright, political activist, ex-con, fiction writer, and star of the Amos Poe documentary, Just an American Boy, to be released in movie theaters this month.
Earle, who is equally adept at rock 'n' roll, alt-country, folk protest and bluegrass music, has recorded more than a dozen semi-popular and excellent albums. He is best known to mainstream audiences, however, for the controversy surrounding his 2002 song "John Walker Blues," which landed him on Nightline and Crossfire. Critics did not understand that it was the song's narrator defending the Taliban, not Earle himself. It was like confusing George Harrison with the "taxman" and John Lennon with the "walrus." Still, for awhile, he got "Dixie Chicked," as the saying goes.
To his credit, Earle not only talks the talk of political activism, he also walks the walk. He has written three anti-death penalty songs but has also slept on the sidewalk outside the U.S. Supreme Court in protest -- and attended an execution. He wrote an early Farm Aid song and played at their benefits. He campaigned against landmines after touring Cambodia, and last year wrote the best rock song ever about the Middle East conflict, "Jerusalem," after visiting the tortured city. A man's got to read the morning papers to keep up with all of those issues and others, though he also finds time for reading books (such as his current project, Robert Caro's tome on Lyndon Johnson's Senate years).
This month, Earle embarks on the "Tell Us the Truth" tour with Tom Morello, Billy Bragg and others, which hits The National Conference on Media Reform in Madison, Wis., this weekend. His two-disc live CD, Just an American Boy -- the Audio Documentary, has just been released. With one collection of short stories to his credit, he is now working on a novel. And he recently lost 60 pounds on the "A & E" diet-- Atkins and exercise. E&P sat down with Earle last week in New York at a Tribeca hotel.
Tell us about the origins of the John Walker flap.
Earle: It started with the New York Post and its headline "Twisted Ballad Honors Tali-rat." It was weird how it happened. There's a guy who is a stringer and also an aspiring songwriter, Aly Sujo, and he comes to Nashville every once in a while. I played "John Walker's Blues" for a friend in a studio, I'd just written it, and he mentioned it to Sujo, who was in Nashville pitching songs, and he wrote the Post story. The funny thing was, after all this happened, this guy Sujo sent me a tape of his songs!
Do you still read newspapers a lot?
Earle: I used to think people who lived in Nashville and read The New York Times were pretentious until Gannett bought The Tennessean. That was a real crime; it had such a great tradition. As John Seigenthaler's paper, it was a great American newspaper.
So now I read The New York Times almost every day. My drummer Will Rigby is a newspaper addict too, so when we're on the road one of us will try to find it and then hand it off. Also, I subscribe online. I still have trouble reading it on the computer, so what I'll do is download it and e-mail it to my tour manager and he'll print it out for me.
Where I grew up we had both the San Antonio Light and the Express-News, which was locally owned. One's gone, and one's a chain paper now. It's just a shame. When I moved to Nashville in 1974 we still had the Banner, and it was the Republican afternoon paper and the Tennessean was the Democratic morning paper. I miss that. I'm much more comfortable with a media that has a point of view. I have no problem with a right-wing rag, if we still have a left-wing rag.
Actually, I like it when I'm in London and can read the papers there and sort things out for myself. Also, if I have to watch CNN I will watch CNN. I think my filters are good enough so that I know what to look for when I watch CNN. But it scares me sometimes when I know people are watching it and accepting it verbatim.
You think the media is now swinging to the right?
Earle: It's not that it's right-wing or left-wing, it's just that they're doing the same thing radio is doing -- doing market research and pandering to a market they've identified. I'm ready to do the Bill O'Reilly show on Fox this month, but equating that with a real political discussion is like believing pro wrestling is real. It's just pandering to our worst instincts, and it works. They've just identified a market and can sell to it. It sells more beer.
I don't have a problem with the existence of the right, but the right has a problem with my existence. We just have a different definition of patriotism. One day this country will be remembered maybe for rock 'n' roll, maybe for baseball, and a few other things, but our Constitution is going to be like Hammarabi's code. It's a hipper document than its framers intended it to be.
The people that I've pissed off were all people I was trying to piss off. And for the most part the press that I read, and trust to some extent, was pretty good on the "John Walker" thing. But I think it has eroded to the point where it is not about bias but under-reporting things that are real important. For example, the real story in the 2000 election in Florida was not hanging chads but the thousands thrown off the voting rolls for having the same last name as some criminal. And it's not as if people who write about politics were not aware of that.
You know, in Vietnam, CBS correspondents were giving helicopter pilots bottles of whiskeys to take them out and find out what was going on there. The government's not going to let that go on now.
Newspapers have always had to turn a profit and they lived and died. It was a volatile industry and now they have sort of stabilized with nearly everything being owned by a few corporations. It comes back down to every three months, they have to report to the stockholders. For the same reason a public stock offering is a bad way to subsidize art, it is a bad way to subsidize journalism.
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Greg Mitchell is the editor of E&P.
© 2003 VNU eMedia Inc.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com |
See also:
http://www.steveearle.com/
http://www.billybragg.co.uk/
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