Changing Keys

THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE: "I learned more about U.S. involvement in El Salvador from The Clash than I ever did from Tom Brokaw," says Tom Morello.

The Tell Us the Truth tour's artists spread the word without sacrificing the rock.

by Sam Adams

When the lead singer of Jethro Tull is threatened with a boycott for suggesting that Americans might be draping a few too many flags on their SUVs, while the president can say one thing and do another with apparent impunity, it’s a safe bet American politics has gone through the looking glass. In a perfect world, maybe politicians and newscasters would tell us everything we need to know, but with important stories often underreported, musicians have been using their microphones to do more than just sing. As Audioslave’s Tom Morello recalls, "I learned more about U.S. involvement in El Salvador from The Clash than I ever did from Tom Brokaw."

Morello is one of several artists who have leant their support to the Tell Us the Truth tour, which stops at the Keswick on Friday. Though the onetime Rage Against the Machine guitarist's music has taken on a decidedly nonpolitical cast in Audioslave, the music he makes as The Nightwatchman draws on the whole history of political folk, substituting the thunder of biblical imagery for the screech of distorted guitars. "In my day job, my influences are wide and diverse," Morello says. "As The Nightwatchman, it's all about three chords and the truth."

Though the 12-city tour includes representatives from different organizations at each stop, its core themes are media consolidation and fair trade, particularly the proposed expansion of NAFTA to all of Central America. For Morello, the two issues are intimately linked. "There's a connection between bad policies and bad journalism. When presidents and politicians lie, it's the job of the press to expose and challenge those lies. When the press fails, then the lies becomes laws. The point of the tour is to help others make these connections, and to show them that activism can change the policies of this country." (Further information is available at www.tellusthetruth.org.)

It's easy to mock celebrities for daring to share their beliefs, regardless of how well-informed they might actually be: One local writer smeared the Truth tour's Steve Earle with the epithet "naive," a word not often applied to recovering crack-addict ex-cons who have watched their friends die in the execution chamber. But as Jenny Toomey, whose Future of Music Coalition helped organize the tour, points out, "This censorship environment is completely ahistorical, in that the origins of rock 'n' roll are incredibly political. I would suspect that the Dixie Chicks pay more in taxes than our president does, and the idea that they shouldn't have a say in what happens to their tax dollars is incredibly naive and stupid."

At the same time, no one wants a replay of the horrible moment in Rattle and Hum where Bono sneers at his lecture-weary audience, "Am I bugging you? I don't mean to bug ya." Rage Against the Machine's bombastic anthems to the contrary, most of the Truth tour's artists have a history of putting politics into a human framework, the way Earle's "What's a Simple Man to Do?" dramatizes an illegal alien's slide from factory worker to drug dealer, or how Billy Bragg's "From Red to Blue" mourns the loss of faith of an aging ex-leftist. And besides, as Toomey points out, "This is not a Sermon on the Mount. This is a rock show. Steve Earle is as tickled about getting the chance to play with Lester Chambers, whose songs he's been covering for years, as he is that we're talking about these issues."

Skeptics will cry that the Truth tour's artists are preaching to the converted, a charge that doesn't much trouble Toomey or Morello. Earle has said in the past that he views playing to like-minded audiences as "rallying the troops," a sentiment Toomey amplifies. "We live in a culture right now that feels very paralyzed, like there's nothing you can do. Even though I'd lived in D.C. my entire life, I had never been up to the Hill until about three or four years ago. I was amazed to realize that all you have to do is walk through the front doors and into your congressman's office, and you can talk to his legislative aide, and sometimes you can talk to him or her." Toomey's revelation came as a result of the FMC's long-standing battle against media consolidation, which made headlines this year as the FCC's bid to relax rules on media concentration without public debate was narrowly averted by an outraged public, and a lawsuit filed in Philadelphia by the Prometheus Radio Project. Having conducted one of few empirical studies on the negative effects of radio consolidation, the FMC found itself with a seat at the table.

"Honestly, if you have better information, people listen to you," Toomey says. "The fact that we can wage these battles against these incredibly entrenched industries shows that the system works, if you engage the system. But people have been made to feel that they can't. That's a lot of what this is about -- making people feel the hope, the joy, the possibility of change."

(sam@citypaper.net)

The Tell Us the Truth tour happens Fri., Nov. 21, 8 p.m., $27.50, with Billy Bragg, Steve Earle, The Nightwatchman, Lester Chambers, Jill Sobule, Boots Riley and emcee Janeane Garofalo, Keswick Theatre, Easton Rd. and Keswick Ave., Glenside, 215-572-7650.