Steve Earle – “I have an agenda, and I am unapologetic about that agenda”

ND: What do you make of John Walker?

SE: I think he’s a really incredibly American phenomenon. Everything I think about John Walker’s in the song. John Walker was a kid from Marin County. He came from parents who were pretty open, who taught him that you didn’t have to be a Methodist or a Presbyterian to have a spiritual path. His mother is a practicing Buddhist. John Walker was one of millions of white kids listening to hip-hop and being influenced in the way that they dress and do things.

And then the Spike Lee Malcolm X came out. He talked to his mother about it, and his mother said, Yeah, well, you should read the book that that’s based on, because she, being who she was, grew up cutting her teeth on The Autobiography Of Malcolm X; we all did. And so he read that. He bypassed nationalism — it didn’t apply to him anyway, because he was white — and arrived at the fact that Malcolm had found a more mainstream form of Islam by the end of his life. That’s where he got interested in it, and he started going to a pretty mainstream mosque.

But the wild card was, he was really smart, and he graduated from high school when he was 16 years old. He’d always been told that if he wanted to study abroad, he could. He got on the internet, and found that Yemen was the place to go to learn to speak Arabic and to study the Koran because the form of Arabic spoken in Yemen is closest to the dialect that the Koran is written in. But, Yemen’s also a fundamentalist hotbed.

He was 17 when he got there. He went to Yemen for nine months, for a school year. He came back, and discovered his parents had split up. Not only are his parents split up, but his dad’s come out. And he’s been exposed to a certain amount of fundamentalism by this time, and fundamentalist anything is pretty fucking hard on homosexuality, so he just went back.

The next time his parents heard from him he wrote a letter saying that he was going someplace cooler for the summer, which was Afghanistan, as it turned out, and the next time they saw him he was duct-taped to a board naked. You don’t duct-tape people to boards naked. I don’t care what the situation is, we’re supposed to be above that. Period.

ND: “This is a desperate attempt to jump-start your flagging career.”

SE: I’d love to sell more records than I do simply because I could take a year off. And I can’t. I don’t have a dime saved. I don’t own anything except this house, and all of my copyrights beginning with Transcendental Blues. I don’t control any copyrights before that. I have shares in them, I publish various parts of them, but I don’t administer the copyrights. And that’s all I got!

ND: “Your record, and that song in particular, are an attempt to recapture the glory days of the Vietnam protest era.”

SE: We did something really, really important, and we’re trying to forget about it.

ND: And then we threw it away.

SE: The people that made it happen got older and started having kids. I’ve been there. “Christmas In Washington” is about the fact that I got older, I started having kids, and, well, the things that were important to me at 19 years old went on the back burner.

ND: Well, it’s your line from “Amerika 6.0”, is cheating on our taxes and writing letters to the editor the best we can do?

SE: Exactly. You get older and you start raising your kids and your priorities start being different. I think the difference in my attitude is, I almost died. I got a second chance in a really, really big way. People don’t come back from where I went very often. Most of the people that went where I went are dead. And for some reason I’m not, and so I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to figure out why I was spared.