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November 21-27, 2002 music Positive Charge
For all the controversy, Steve Earle's Jerusalem ends on a profoundly optimistic note. You’d never know it from the last few months, but Steve Earle doesn’t consider himself a political songwriter. “I’m not a preacher, I’m not a politician,” he says from his manager’s office in Nashville. “I’m making music about the way I feel, and what I see going on around me.” He’s taking a few days off between the closing night of his play Karla, an impressionistic portrait of Karla Faye Tucker, who was executed in Texas for double homicide, and the beginning of his tour. Apart from a small handful of in-store performances (including one in Philadelphia), this will be the first time Earle’s played his controversial Jerusalem album for American crowds, but if he’s nervous about the new songs going over, he doesn’t show it. "I've got a pretty good relationship with my audience," he says. "Over the years the number's probably grown, but it's probably just over 50 percent of the people in my audience oppose the death penalty," which Earle has campaigned against for years. "But [the others] are willing for us to have that dialogue, and I like that." Of course, no recent Earle song has given audiences as much opportunity to disagree with him as "John Walker's Blues," which paints the American Taliban as a confused teenager searching for something to believe in, not the pariah the popular media made of him. It's possible Earle's deep-seated tendency to identify with the outsider -- also on view in Jerusalem's "What's a Simple Man to Do?", a peppy number about an out-of-work Mexican factory worker who turns to drug-running to support his family -- not to mention his instinctual contrarianism, overdrive his empathy for John Walker Lindh to the point where the song is more of an exercise than an achievement, but Earle hasn't backed down from the song one bit. Back at his Philadelphia in-store, he recalled being grilled about the lyrics of the then-unheard song on various TV news shows, boasting, "Nobody laid a glove on me." More importantly, he says, "The cool thing about those in-stores was at every single one of them, younger Muslim people came up and thanked me, people who'd never listened to my music before. Whatever shit anyone else gave me, that made it worth it."
While talk-radio hosts would paint Earle as a bomb-throwing radical, the album's title track is a poignant call for peace -- and, incidentally, a better song than the underwritten "Conspiracy Theory," the blunt, clumsy "Amerika V. 6.0 (The Best We Can Do)" or even the pilloried "John Walker's Blues." The song's chorus ends the sometimes contentious (and occasionally apolitical) album on a note of profound optimism. "I believe that one fine day all the children of Abraham/ will lay down their swords forever in Jerusalem." "It requires faith to be that optimistic about Jerusalem," Earle admits. "I'm not a Muslim, I'm not a Christian and I'm not a Jew, but I do believe in God. I'm a recovering addict, and the way I stayed clean for eight years is 12-step programs, which requires that I believe in a power greater than I am. It doesn't work otherwise. As a recovering addict, I don't believe in accidents. We have been coming back to Jerusalem for 2000 years, and my experience is when our attention keeps turning over and over and over again to one spot on the planet like that, it means we missed something. There was something we were supposed to do that we didn't do. The Dome of the Rock and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and the Western Wall are on one piece of real estate the size of a small shopping mall. We've got to get it right there. If we don't, we're fucked. I really believe that the future of mankind depends on us having enough faith to realize that no one's going to back down from three of the holiest sites in these three major belief systems that are also closely related, and that eventually we need to find a way to coexist in that space. And if we can do it there, everything else is easy." That's a big "if," though. "We're very close to drawing a line in the sand that we really don't want to draw, and that's a war against Islam. Nothing could be more un-American than going to war with somebody over religion. We're doing all the right stuff to ensure that it happens." Steve Earle plays Sat., Nov. 23, 9 p.m., $28-$30, with Garrison Starr, The TLA, 334 South St., 215-336-2000. 
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