The Storm over
"John Walker's Blues"
By C.J.
(from Revolutionary Worker, August 4, 2002)

When Newsweek published that full-color photo from Afghanistan of John Walker Lindh duct-taped nude to a board, it went right off my Richter scale. The accompanying story reassured the public that CIA operatives were on the scene and supervising the "questioning" of the "American Taliban." My extreme response was clearly out of line since all alert Americans had already been drilled on the necessity and moral viability of torture for extracting info in our post-911 democracy -- and by no less an expert than liberal civil rights attorney Alan Dershowitz (needles under fingertips, okay if you use antiseptic).

While taking in this shocking image, I had to wonder, how did large sections of the populace get here -- accepting or even embracing a form of state barbarism which could not be more viciously repellant. At the same time, I was wondering what would lead a 20-year-old kid from Northern California to become a foot soldier for this particular brand of twisted, oppressive fundamentalism. The press was no help. The airwaves were flooded with crude bios of Lindh and his family, along with "profiles" of pampered, pot-growing Marin County-- an obvious breeding ground for American "terrorists" and other malcontents.

Then a couple weeks ago, I hear about a new song by Steve Earle. "John Walker's Blues" traverses this complex terrain from a different point of view, and with the thoughtfulness that Earle's audiences have come to expect from him. He wrote the song as the newspapers clamored for Walker to be strung up for treason -- no questions asked. For Earle the issue was more complicated than that.

Steve Earle: "I'm happy with the way the song came out, but I'm nervous, not for myself, but I have taken some serious liberties with Walker, speaking as him, in his voice. I'm trying to make clear that wherever he (Lindh) got to, he didn't arrive there in a vacuum. I don't condone what he did. Still, he's a 20 year-old kid. My son Justin is almost exactly Walker's age. Would I be upset if he suddenly turned up fighting for the Islamic Jihad? Sure, absolutely. Fundamentalism, as practiced by the Taliban, is the enemy of real thought, and religion too. But there are circumstances..."

Basically "John Walker's Blues" is an expression of defiance against the "good vs. evil," "our fundamentalism vs. their fundamentalism," mentality polluting the country. Told in Lindh's voice, it is a hard, painful, and truly made-in-the-USA story:

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...

If my daddy could see me now--chains around my feet
He don't understand that sometimes a man
Just has to fight for what he believes
And I believe God is great
All praise due to him
And if I should die I'll rise up to the sky
Just like Jesus, peace be upon him

A shadu la ilaha illa Allah
There is no God but God

We came to fight the Jihad
And our hearts were pure and strong
As death filled the air we all offered up prayers
And prepared for our martyrdom
But Allah had some other plan
Some secret not revealed
Now they're draggin' me back with my head in a sack
To the land of the infidel.

This is a deep rich blues. As it closes, the tune eerily slides into a recitation of Sura 47, Verse 19 of the Qur'an with a remarkably similar cadence and timbre. And the juxtaposition of Walker's story told in blues to this Islamic prayer asks the listener to consider the similarities between cultures and, at the same time, raises some questions about the power of fundamentalist religious faith to lure people onto a bad path.

There is a sadness in the song, and great irony. This kid went on a really whack trip; he thought he was doing something righteous and it all went awry: "Allah had some other plan, some secret not revealed." Is Earle hinting at the fact that Lindh was used --before and after his capture-- by some very worldly powers with hidden and colliding agendas? And how many people does that happen to? For that matter, how many American youth have been sent to fight and die for god and country? And how many are currently being psyched up to wage wars in the interest of the empire on false pretenses?

*****

Not surprisingly, the reason "John Walker's Blues" has come to public attention eight weeks before its September release is because some rampaging DJ's and other reactionary public opinion makers want to make sure you never actually hear the song. A talk-show host from Earleās hometown of Nashville, Steve Gill, led the charge last week: "This puts [Earle] in the same category as Jane Fonda and John Walker and all those people who hate America." Immediately, the New York Post tabloid and web pages were shrieking, "Twisted Ballad Honors Tali-Rat," and reporting that, "Music-industry heavyweights are already expressing outrage over the controversial song, and many predict it will be banned from the majority of radio playlists when it is released in late September." Gill suggested that "consumers" also boycott all stores selling the record: "I'm not calling for burning CDs, but people can vote with their wallets as a counter-expression to the free expression Steve's expressed in his song." (And who knows, by the time the CD comes out in September, bonfires may be in order.)

Completely distorting the lyrics as well as Earle's intent, these self-assigned music critics tell us that Lindh "is glorified and called Jesus-like" in the song. Just for the record, "John Walker's Blues" uses the time-honored artistic technique of story-telling -- putting the listener in the shoes of this young man and exploring the road he travelled down to get to a place where "fighting the Jihad" seemed to be the best option. This is not Steve Earle's road, and it's a terrible road for humanity, but the last time I checked, narratives in the first-person were still legal, not to mention effective for getting inside a contradiction.

It's part of the blues tradition-- songs about people getting caught up in some really negative shit. And as Danny Goldberg, the CEO of Artemis, Earle's record company, remarked, "It would be a pretty shallow culture if songwriters only wrote about nice people. From the classic songs The Ballad of Jesse James to Lloyd Price's Stagger Lee, Johnny Cash's Folsom Prison Blues to Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska, and to Steve's own Jonathan's Song, songwriters have explored the humanity of murderers and other evil-doers as part of the way they view the world."

What's noteworthy here is that it's now been deemed impermissable for a song to even raise questions about why an American boy would be attracted to the Taliban. Maybe the screamers have good reason not to want to open the fundamentalist can of worms. After all, Lindh was just a teenager when he took up extreme Islam, whereas the current head the US Justice Department who presided over Walker's vilification is a full-grown adult who covers up naked statues and thinks dancing is the work of devil -- not to mention his more secular campaigns to enforce indefinite detention without trial and establish a nation of snoops. And then there is the uncomfortable fact that the U.S. government had for years built up the Islamic fundamentalist forces in Afghanistan. And just last year, they were sending $40 million to the Taliban regime in an attempt to shore up U.S. interests in the region -- until the game plan changed and plans were on Bush's desk to invade Afghanistan before the events in New York on September 11 ever took place.

In any case, the world is a complicated place, and for revolutionary people around the world, the increased popularity of a fundamentalist Islam that promotes unexamined obedience and a cruel and extreme male domination poses urgent questions. Why are so many among the oppressed attracted to it and even see it as oppositional to western imperialism? This is a serious problem the conscious people of the planet will have to deal with; and posing revolutionary solutions also requires learning more about what is giving rise to this trend -- and why are people reacting to the dog eat dog of western culture with fundamentalist solutions.

*****

Steve Earle embraces a view of the promise of American democracy which I don't share, but to his credit, he is bravely unrepentant about this track and the whole CD, "Jerusalem," which hits other provocative notes on its highly contemporary journey. In a statement dated July 4, 2002, which appears as the liner notes of the advance pressing of the CD, Earle declares, "Lately, I feel like the loneliest man in America. Frankly, I've never worn red, white, and blue that well. I grew up during the Vietnam War and whenever I see a flag decal I subconsciously superimpose the caption: America--love it or leave it across the bottom stripe. Back then, as now, it was suggested by some that second-guessing our leaders in a time of crisis was unpatriotic if not downright treasonous....In spite of our worst intentions and ignorance of our own history, our Constitution has, thus far, proven resilient enough to withstand anything that we throw at it, including ourselves....It was framed by men whose names we are taught to remember by rote: Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Patrick Henry, Aaron Burr....In times like these, it is also important to remember the names of John Reed, Emma Goldman, Abbie Hoffman, Bobby Seale, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King...those who defended those same principles by insisting on asking the hardest questions in our darkest hours."

The distress occasioned by "John Walker's Blues" seems related to the fact that, as an AP reporter remarks, "It represents a change in the popular music world in how it responds to the war on terrorism. Until now, most offerings have been stirring calls to arms." He mentions Toby Keith's "Courtesy of the Red, White & Blue (The Angry American)" and "Freedom" by Paul McCartney (another ugly US-uber-alles track which was blasted from the stage of Madison Square Garden last September but only sold about 20,000 copies).

In fact, there are more than a few artists out there these days who are not following the script when pondering such questions as "why does everyone hate America." Earle is particularly irksome to the culture cops because he's not confined to the margins and has a large and devoted audience. Since the 80s, he has stood out as a brilliant, left-leaning country-rock singer/songwriter; last year, he received his 8th Grammy nomination for "Transcendental Blues." He currently has a role in the HBO series "The Wire," and his short story collection, "Doghouse Roses," published last year by Harper Row, has gotten serious and good reviews.

In the mid-90s after a 4-month stint in jail during which he beat a drug habit, Earle emerged to tell stories from inside, and later became a tireless fighter against the death penalty. His "Ellis Unit One," another first-person narrative, this time from a CO working on a Texas death row, is a moving tale about the circumstances that put the character in that situation, and the impossibility of living with oneself while participating in death row executions. Earle has appeared at many concerts and events against the death penalty, including a couple performances of "The Exonerated," a play based on interviews with people on death row who were later found innocent. He has also written his own play, "Karla," about Karla Faye Tucker (the first woman executed in Texas since 1863), which opens this fall at Broad Axe, a theater he helped found in Nashville. Steve Earle is a busy committed artist.

Interestingly, the making of "Jerusalem" also involved the early support of a forward-looking record company executive. Earle: "One morning Danny Goldberg, who owns [Artemis], calls me up and says my next album should be overtly political. This was a change. I've always gotten phone calls from record companies saying exactly the opposite, like keep a lid on that shit. Danny thought there are some things that needed to be said, especially now, in the world after 9/11. So I told him, "well, yeah, man, I can do that.," (Goldberg, a longtime civil liberties defender, will have another controversial release in September 2002; he co-edited a collection of essays exposing the repressive measures taken by the US government since 9/11.)

*****

I noticed at the end of the AP article that they had helpfully polled their online readers as to whether "Steve Earle's controversial song about John Walker Lindh should be banned in North America." Out of 5,697 votes, 7% said Yes; 62% said No; 8% needed to know more; and 23% said Who Cares. I thought the results were kind of encouraging. They couldnāt get even 10% of this skewed grouping to call for open censorship

The controversy around this song has extra import for the people because the terms the authorities and their compliant media are attempting to set with this whole John Walker Lindh episode are very, very sinister. Recently, under threat of a death sentence, Lindh accepted a terrible plea bargain, pleading guilty to two charges: "providing services" to an organization designated as "terrorist" by US government, and carrying explosives, for which he received two maximum 10-year sentences to be served consecutively. Thus, the government successfully made their example and avoided a trial which they emphatically did not want since even most bourgeois observors agree they had little hard evidence against Lindh aside from his own vividly-coerced testimony.

But then along comes Steve Earle, suggesting in the special engaging way a good song can do, that people take another look at Lindh and the world that made him. Apparently, even a 3:41-minute track can be a dangerous proposition in a land where adherence to government edicts and official opinion is becoming mandatory. So let the music play on.(END)

During wartime--and, officially, it's still wartime--the super-patriots are ever more watchful for acts of cultural treason. And the latest victim of the red-white-and-blue lynch mob is musician Steve Earle, whose offense is writing and recording a song entitled "John Walker's Blues." Before the tune was released, the cowpies were being hurled. First, Steve Gill, a conservative talk-show gabber in Nashville, denounced the song. Then Fox News Channel and The New York Post picked up the story. The website of the latter headlined its dispatch, "Twisted Ballad Honors Tali-Rat" and claimed "American Taliban fighter John Walker Lindh is glorified and called Jesus-like in a country-rock song...by maverick singer-songwriter Steve Earle." Another Nashville DJ, Phil Valentine, called the song "politically insane." Gill declared, "This puts [Earle] in the same category as Jane Fonda and John Walker and all those people who hate America."

Wire services and The Washington Post covered the fuss, with the Post's Richard Harrington, usually a fine music critic, reporting the "song offers a sympathetic view of Lindh." Reuters echoed this sentiment: "It offers a rare sympathetic view of Lindh." The New York Post noted that the ballad is "backed by the chanting of Arabic prayers and praises Allah." While the phones went berserk at the Nashville office of Earle's manager, Earle was on vacation in Europe and declined to respond to the attacks.

The to-do says more about Earle's detractors than his song. The track, which is part of Earle's forthcoming album, Jerusalem, hardly glorifies Lindh. Nor does Earle compare him to Jesus. The tune is "sympathetic" only in the sense it seeks to understand how Lindh viewed himself. It praises neither Lindh nor his choices. It does not recommend that others emulate him. The anti-Earle criticism shows that those eager to root out traitors often don't have time to think.

Here are the complete lyrics to "John Walker's Blues":

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

A shadu la ilaha illa Allah/ There is no God but God

If my daddy could see me now--chains around my feet/ He don't understand that sometimes a man/ Just has to fight for what he believes/ And I believe God is great/ All praise due to him/ And if I should die I'll rise up to the sky/ Just like Jesus, peace be upon him

We came to fight the Jihad/ And our hearts were pure and strong/ As death filled the air we all offered up prayers/ And prepared for our martyrdom/ But Allah had some other plan/ Some secret not revealed/ Now they're draggin' me back with my head in a sack/ To the land of the infidel.

Earle's song--which features his growling voice over sparse, guitar-driven instrumentation--explores what Lindh was thinking. Earle speculates Lindh believed he would receive Jesus-like treatment if he sacrificed his life for jihad. It is Lindh who is praising Allah, not Earle--not that there would be anything wrong with Earle doing so. And the ending--mullahs reciting a Koran passage--is eerie, not an endorsement. This is storytelling. In fact, Lindh ends up screwed in the song. He expects holy reward but finds himself shit-out-of-luck in chains and a sack. If you had to squeeze a morale out of the song--and I doubt Earle set out to preach--the lesson could well be, kids, don't try this at home. But since the song does not blast Lindh--what rhymes with scum-sucking maggot?--it's deemed a pro-Taliban anthem. Apparently, 9/11 killed nuance, as well as irony.

Earle is a lefty redneck. Once a rising country-rock star, he became a close-to-dead junkie and then resurrected himself and his career as a gritty, eclectic, whiskey-voiced singer-songwriter. He has long been a passionate foe of the death penalty. "I'm somewhat to the left of Mao," he told me five years ago. (See "Death-House Troubadour," The Nation, August 25, 1997.) And he's no fool. He foresaw the storm. When he performed "John Walker's Blues" at a Canadian folk festival earlier this month, he cracked, "This song just may get me fucking deported."

In the PR material for the new album, Earle says of the track, "I'm happy with the way the song came out, but I'm nervous, not for myself, but I have taken some serious liberties with Walker, speaking as him, in his voice. I'm trying to make clear that wherever he got to, he didn't arrive there in a vacuum....My son Justin is almost exactly Walker's age. Would I be upset if he suddenly turned up fighting for the Islamic Jihad? Sure, absolutely. Fundamentalism, as practiced by the Taliban, is the enemy of real thought, and religion too."

The new album, due out September 24 on the Artemis Records label, contains several topical or political songs. On "Amerika v. 6.0 (The Best We Can Do)," Earle pokes at HMOs, walled communities and the war on drugs. "The Truth" questions the over-reliance on incarceration to fight crime. The title track challenges the belief that conflict in the Middle East is inevitable and ends on a hopeful note. The album reflects Earle's worry that post-9/11 fear has trumped democratic principles. He calls the USA Patriot act "an incredibly dangerous piece of legislation. Freedoms, American freedoms, things voted into law as American freedoms, everything that came out of the 1960s, are disappearing, and, as any patriot can see, that has to be opposed."

In a statement he wrote on July 4--before he started catching flak--Earle declared, "Lately, I feel like the loneliest man in America. Frankly, I've never worn red, white, and blue that well. I grew up during the Vietnam War and whenever I see a flag decal I subconsciously superimpose the caption: AMERICA--LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT across the bottom stripe. Back then, as now, it was suggested by some that second-guessing our leaders in a time of crisis was unpatriotic if not downright treasonous....In spite of our worst intentions and ignorance of our own history, our Constitution has, thus far, proven resilient enough to withstand anything that we throw at it, including ourselves....It was framed by men whose names we are taught to remember by rote: Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Patrick Henry, Aaron Burr....In times like these, it is also important to remember the names of John Reed, Emma Goldman, Abbie Hoffman, Bobby Seale, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King...those who defended those same principles by insisting on asking the hardest questions in our darkest hours. God bless America, indeed."

Any rightwing commentator who pays true attention to what Earle writes, sings or says--which is often over-the-top--can find plenty of material worth a debate. But "John Walker's Blues"--neither anti-American nor pro-Taliban--does not warrant the hair-pulling. The hyperbolic reaction to it, though, confirms Earle's fears about post-9/11 America. He might want to thank his critics for making his point for him.

http://www.thenation.com/capitalgames/index.mhtml?bid=3&pid=84

Steve Earle
Singer, songwriter

[Note from Artists Network: Steve Earle, a long-time death penalty opponent, has also appeared at two performances of "The Exonerated" the play by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen based on interviews with people exonerated from death row.]

Cultural Treason? The Right Targets Musician Steve Earle (The Nation)

STEVE EARLE attacked 2 months before his CD comes out "Earle's Lindh Song Hits Sour Note in Nashville" Washington Post

from Rolling Stone
(July 16, 2002)
By Andrew Dansbury

Earle's "Jerusalem"
Due This Fall

Singer-songwriter also to appear in HBO series this month

Steve Earle will release his tenth studio album, Jerusalem, on September 24th. The album follows Sidetracks, a collection of odds and ends that was released earlier this year, and is his first album of new material since 2000's Transcendental Blues.

Among Jerusalem's eleven tracks is "I Remember You," a duet with Emmylou Harris. "It's a very, very, very political record," Earle told Rolling Stone earlier this year. "There's no reason to write songs about girls right now."

Earle will appear in three episodes of HBO's new series The Wire as a drug counselor, starting July 21st. He's also the subject of Hardcore Troubadour: The Life and Near Death of Steve Earle, a biography by Lauren St. John, which will be published in the U.K. in November and in the U.S. early next year.

Track listing for Jerusalem:
Ashes to Ashes
Amerika v. 6.0 (The Best We Can Do)
Conspiracy Theory
John Walker's Blues
The Kind
What's a Simple Man to Do?
The Truth
Go Amanda
I Remember You
Shadowland
Jerusalem

DOGHOUSE ROSES, short stories by Steve Earle Steve's book, a collection of 11 short stories, was published in the U.S. in June 2001 by Houghton Mifflin and in the U.K. in July 2001 by Secker & Warburg. The book is entitled Doghouse Roses after one of the stories in the book.

Doghouse Roses was released in paperback in the U.S. by Mariner in June 2002 [ISBN 0-6182-1924-2] and will be re-released in paperback in the U.K. on 1 August 2002 [ISBN 0099422425].

"Could be I'm just some Big City sucker for a hard-rocking, Nietzsche-reading, Che Guevara-quoting redneck country singer, but ... if Steve Earle isn't a Great American, he'll have to do until the real thing comes along."÷
Mark Jacobson, Men's Journal

BIO from
BOMB magazine, 1998
Steve Earle

Steve Earle is the country singer of choice among literate people with leftish politics, cutting-edgish tastes and a bit of attitude. That is, among people like Steve Earle, who reveres such classic Nashville songwriters as Hank Cochran and Harland Howard while listening to Beck and the Geto Boys, and whoās equally happy to talk about Ray Price or Raymond Carver.

Earleās first two albums, Guitar Town and Exit 0, were among the best and most influential country records of the eighties; his lyrics had the literary virtues of plot and character, and his music combined the ache of country with the energy of rock. Like such contemporaries as Lyle Lovett and the O'Kanes, though, Earle was too smart and edgy for country radio, and his third album, the loud aggressive take-no-prisoners Copperhead Road, with its title song about a dope-growing Vietnam vet, ended whatever career he might have had as a corporate country star. Meanwhile, his own drug problems were getting worse. He released two more albums, the under appreciated The Hard Way and the live Shut Up and Die Like an Aviator before heroin took him down; in 1995, he was busted for possession of heroin, served three months in jail (on a one-year sentence) and got clean.

Earle's comeback began with the spare acoustic set Train A-Cominā. He returned to his trademark mix of rock and country on I Feel Alright, and his most recent album, El Coraz—n, may be his best since the eighties. It ranges from pure acoustic bluegrass to grungeoid rock with feedback guitar and even a stuttering sampler. It opens with an elegiac invoca-valediction to the late Townes Van Zandt--and adds up to a self-portrait of a complicated, conflicted and passionate man.

From BOMB Spring 1998
Interview by David Gates