This tentative awareness seems to have evaporated in The Rising, Springsteen’s rapid response to the atrocity of September 11, 2001. Although this proved to be one of his most commercially successful and critically acclaimed albums, in the long run it may be remembered as one of his weakest. The Rising has stirring and tender moments but few songs that amount to more than the sum of their parts. Much of it sounds like a routine run-through of familiar E Street Band moods. Distressingly, it marks a retreat, after Tom Joad, to the safe ground of social patriotism. The songs preserve the brief-lived mood of empathy and solidarity that followed the destruction in New York. They evoke the anonymous, unpretentious heroism of the firefighters, the office workers trapped in the collapsing towers, and the friends and loved ones they left behind. Throughout there is a sense that this huge cataclysm has shown the rituals of ordinary life to be both precious and fragile. But there is little indication that this atrocity may carry other meanings and implications. There is no history, no context. The outside world exists solely in a passing reference to Allah and the singing of Asif Ali Khan in the background on “Worlds Apart.” In “Lonesome Day,” Springsteen sings: “House is on fire, viper’s in the grass, / A little revenge and this too shall pass . . .” but he leaves this territory largely unexplored, settling instead for gestures of affirmation that seem to float away in an insubstantial ether.
The “rising” Springsteen celebrates is not a popular insurrection but an outpouring of community feeling, and by implication an occasion for Americans to unite. The songs are hymns to national resilience in the face of devastating trauma. Though undoubtedly sincere, and free of the vindictive jingoism that marked other responses to 9/11 (including Neil Young’s “Let’s Roll”), The Rising panders to its audience—clearly conceived by Springsteen as an exclusively American one, despite his vast European following. And in doing so, it dramatically highlights the gap between Springsteen and Dylan, whose approach, whatever the politics involved, has always been more confrontational. As a picture of a people “rising” to a historic challenge, the album is worse than inadequate. For part of that “rising” was the war on terror and its spawn, the war on Iraq. And there is scarcely a hint of that reality on the album. As an exercise in lowest common denominator nationalism, it fails to do justice to its immense subject matter, and that is an artistic as well as a political shortcoming. Its vision is one-dimensional, uninflected by irony or self-doubt, personal or collective.
In the autumn of 2004, Springsteen abandoned a long-held, non-partisan posture to campaign for John Kerry. His appearances generated more excitement and his speeches carried more conviction than the candidate’s. Revealingly, he sought to deploy the ideology of social patriotism against the incumbent:As a songwriter, I’ve been writing about America for thirty years: Who we are, what we stand for, what we fight for. I believe our American government has drifted too far from American values. . . . “One Nation Indivisible” and “United We Stand” can’t be empty slogans but need to remain guiding principles of our public policy. . . . Senator Kerry, since he was a young man, has shown us by having the courage to face America’s hard truths, both the good and the bad, that that’s where we find a deeper patriotism, we find a more complete view of who we are; we find a more authentic experience as citizens . . . the country we carry in our hearts is waiting. . . .
Springsteen’s willingness to put himself on the line for his beliefs was entirely admirable. And no doubt his calls for “a deeper patriotism” moved the voters he spoke to. But the sentimental rhetoric of national unity was symptomatic of a strategy long employed to little effect on the American Left. In the aftermath of the election result, commentators were quick to invert Springsteen’s paradigm: they claimed the vote showed that it was George Bush who spoke for the authentic America, depicted as congenitally illiberal and intolerant. At their election night celebration in Washington, the Republicans even burst into a lusty rendition of “This Land Is Your Land.” Of course, they skipped over the verse attacking private property, but the fact that they could purloin the song at all testified once again to the inherent ambiguities of social patriotism.
“America” remains a dangerous construct and one that ill serves those Americans for whom Springsteen wishes to speak. In the end, it limits and indeed undermines a genuinely radical and uncompromising humanism. Reclamation or reappropriation of “America” has been at the heart of liberal and left strategies in the U.S. for many decades, but surely, in light of the rise of an aggressive new American empire, shameless in its claims on global power, rooted in popular xenophobia, the long-running attempt to sugarcoat left-wing dissent by wrapping it in the American flag must be reckoned a failure. After all, “you don’t count the dead / When God’s on your side.”
The Rising embraced the prevailing national mood and was lionized by the U.S. media. In contrast, Steve Earle’s Jerusalem challenged that mood and as a result received rougher treatment. “John Walker’s Blues,” in particular, was denounced by some as treasonous (the New York Post headlined its report on the song “Twisted Ballad Honors Talirat”). But as an artistic response to 9/11, the album was deeper in every respect. It was not only more politically acute, but less musically predictable; where The Rising is soporific, Jerusalem is alive with nervous energy. It rocks as well as rants.
Earle’s career trajectory is an anomalous one. Unlike Dylan and Springsteen, who had produced much of their definitive and most popular work by their early thirties, Earle blossomed on the far side of forty. When he first emerged in the mid-eighties with “Guitar Town” and “Copperhead Road,” he was feted as Nashville’s answer to Springsteen, a hard-rocking balladeer with a social conscience. Commercial and critical success, however, was accompanied by personal crisis. Heroin addiction and a prison sentence led to a hiatus in the early nineties. But after a painful process of self-reconstruction, Earle returned with a string of major albums. Like Dylan in his youth, Earle in his middle age seems blessed with a gift for song, and he’s made up for lost time, composing song after song, recording, performing, writing and agitating. He’s a distinctive stylist with a strong personality who nonetheless moves easily from genre to genre, mood to mood. He dips into folk, country, blues, bluegrass, punk, grunge, reggae, psychedelia, and even hints of “world music”—with a disregard for musical categories that seems to come naturally to a man reared on Highway 61 Revisited.
Earle has penned a series of haunting songs about prison and the death-penalty, influenced by early Dylan and, behind him, Harry Smith’s Anthology (resurrecting Dock Boggs on “The Truth”). He’s also created songs of hesitant self-renewal, lost loves and irrepressible erotic hopes, instant classics that manage to blend hard-earned wisdom with self-deprecation. He’s wry, righteous and raucous, but also tender and melancholy. In Earle’s mature work, the fusion of Nashville and Greenwich Village that Dylan and Gram Parsons first essayed has been given new life and depth.
In “Christmas in Washington,” written following Clinton’s re-election in 1996, Earle surveyed the sorry state of the union and declared that what was needed was a reawakened radicalism, embodied in the spirit of America’s greatest musical champion of working class politics:So come back Woody Guthrie
Come back to us now
Tear your eyes from paradise
And rise again somehow
Like the young Dylan in “Song to Woody,” the middle-aged Earle is painfully aware of the gap between his era and Guthrie’s:I followed in your footsteps once
Back in my travelin’ days
Somewhere I failed to find your trail
Now I’m stumblin’ through the haze
But there’s killers on the highway now
And a man can’t get around
Where Dylan embraced Guthrie as a model of personal authenticity, Earle calls out to him across the decades as the voice of an oppositional movement that needs to be renewed. As a song-writer, Earle has proved himself a faithful disciple of Guthrie not only in
his commitment to left-wing politics but even more in his determination to use his art to discomfit the rich and powerful and console the oppressed. In Jerusalem, he fulfilled that task with a collection of songs which, though varied in subject matter, style and mood, spring from a conviction that the crisis of the hour required the utmost honesty from him as an artist and a citizen. This was no time to pander to America’s delusions.
In “Ashes to Ashes,” Earle kicked off the album like an Old Testament prophet (or Shelley in “Ozymandias”), reminding his fellow citizens that “every tower ever built tumbles / No matter how strong, no matter how tall.” As he invokes the destruction of the dinosaurs—the giant powers of the past—it’s impossible to miss the echoes of 9/11:The sky gave way and death rained down
And made a terrible sound
There was fire everywhere and nothing was spared
Superpower illusions of invulnerability and omnipotence lie shattered, “twisted and covered in rust .” The arrogant are humbled. What could be farther from the social patriotism of The Rising than this stark declaration of America’s impermanence? What’s more, Earle suggests that America is being punished for its presumption: “I’m the next big thing/ and the gift that I bring/ comes directly from God/ so there ain’t no holdin’ me down . . . “ In “Ashes to Ashes,” you can hear the apocalyptic Guthrie of “So Long It’s Been Good to Know You” as well as the Dylan of “All Along the Watchtower,” but with the hard gaze that belongs especially to Earle’s maturity. It was exactly what the country did not want to hear at this moment of trauma, and therefore a fulfilment of the prophetic duty to “speak truth to power.”
Really, this was the song that should have alarmed the guardians of American exceptionalism, but that honour fell to the more flagrantly topical “John Walker’s Blues,” in which Earle projected himself into the heart and mind of the 20-year-old California Taliban captured in Afghanistan. The U.S. media had demonized the confused young man as the embodiment of America’s enemies, without and within. In response, Earle imaginatively recreated Walker’s personal journey and endowed his tragedy with dignity and humanity.
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
Ash’adu la ilaha illa Allah
The intake of breath that attended Dylan’s declaration of kinship with Lee Harvey Oswald was reproduced on a much wider scale in response to Earle’s song. But in Earle’s case, the offence was politically informed, purposeful and sustained. Walker is described as “just an American boy” and his journey as a typically American search for identity and authenticity, a reaction to the emptiness of the MTV society. The designated enemy has turned out to be one of us.
In embracing that enemy, Earle daringly reached across national boundaries at the very moment that those boundaries were being policed with even greater vigilance than usual. He also reached across musical boundaries, insinuating Koranic chanting into his country rock ballad. Earle’s careworn growl climbs the ascending notes of the spare Middle-Eastern style melody, which is underpinned by an electrically-produced drone, evoking—and modernizing—the drone that unites early American folk with the traditional musics of Asia and Africa.
Nashville radio hosts lambasted him as psychopathic traitor, a self-hating American. Yet the irony was that the song, like Earle’s work as a whole, was deeply rooted in American musical traditions. In addition to being a self-confessed “borderline Marxist,” Earle is a master of musical “Americana”—the rich spectrum of North American folk, country, rock, blues and bluegrass, whose resonance extends far beyond America’s shores. As Earle himself would insist, he’s a faithful son of Hank Williams as well as Woody Guthrie. “John Walker’s Blues” is true to the country traditions in which the individual is trapped or tormented by remote forces, in which the drama of personal survival is played out against a bleak, unforgiving landscape. He locates the left-wing politics in the classic Nashville territory of loneliness, heartache and loss. “John Walker’s Blues” is an outlaw ballad, but to its credit far less romanticized than either Guthrie’s or Dylan’s exercises in the genre. Earle’s outlaw is deluded and defeated—but so is the society that produced him, then judged and jailed him.
Earle and others who demurred from the mood of national unity celebrated in The Rising were accused of cynicism, an accusation more justly targeted at those who sought to exploit that mood to promote policies serving their own economic self-interest. The title-track of Jerusalem is in fact a stirring protest against cynicism, the artfully and relentlessly propagated belief that injustice must be accepted as a fact of life:I woke up this mornin’ and none of the news was
good
And death machines were rumblin’ ’cross the
ground where Jesus stood
And the man on my TV told me that it had always
been that way
And there was nothin’ anyone could do or say
And I almost listened to him
Yeah, I almost lost my mind
Then I regained my senses again
And looked into my heart to find
That I believe that one fine day all the children of
Abraham
Will lay down their swords forever in Jerusalem
The beauty of “Jerusalem” is its refusal to give way to hopelessness, which Earle portrays as a self-betrayal, a submission to the powers-that-be. And in this he shares common ground with the Dylan of “Let Me Die in My Footsteps” and “When the Ship Comes In,” enriched and made more credible by the experience of years. (“And the words that are used for to get the ship confused/ Will not be understood as they’re spoken.”) In “Jerusalem,” Earle, like the young Dylan, portrays the violence of the public world invading his inner life (“the storm comes rumblin’ in/ and I can’t lay me down/ the drums are drummin’ again/ and I can’t stand the sound”), but he remains defiantly utopian; he insists that peace is possible in the middle east, that one day “there’ll be no barricades, there’ll be no wire or walls” and argues that the greatest obstacle to peace is the belief that war is endemic in human nature—the denial of the our own capacity to act to change the world. And that makes Jerusalem, as an album, a truer and more enduring affirmation than anything Springsteen offered on The Rising.
Earle’s songs are enriched by an internationalism rare among the U.S. liberal intelligentsia. “Frankly, I’ve never worn red, white and blue that well,” he merrily admits. Crucially, he’s an internationalist with a Texas accent, working in an accessible idiom, as unashamed of his American roots as he is angry at America’s rulers. Those roots were put down during his teenage years, in the 1960s, and his song-writing has long been haunted by the avoidable tragedy of Vietnam. He’s covered the Chambers Brother’s epochal “Time Has Come Today” and the Burritos’ paean to draft dodging, “My Uncle,” as well as The Beatles’ “Revolution” and Dylan’s “My Back Pages”—two of the great repudiations of 60s radicalism—remaining loyal to the lyrics in all their reactionary glory.
In the late 80s, Earle and his band toured with Dylan for four months. After thirty days opening for the reclusive, tight-lipped master in venues across the country, Earle was informed that Dylan had a problem with his language on stage. “Well, what do you mean?” Steve asked. “He thinks you say ‘fuck’ too much,” he was told. Earle paused, then replied: “Well, fuck him.” Two nights later, Dylan suddenly materialized, said, “Steve, you’re doing a great job,” then disappeared.
Earle concluded: “He’s a weird cat, no doubt about it.”
This American pride thing, that doesn’t mean nothing to me. I’m more locked into what’s real forever.
—Bob Dylan, 1985
In 1974, Dylan and The Band returned to t
he road. Among the old favorites they performed was “It’s Alright Ma.” When Dylan sang the line “even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked,” the crowd roared. Nixon was in the midst of his Watergate ordeal and would resign that summer. It was a kind of vindication for those who had opposed him and his war policies. And the tour itself was something of a vindication for Dylan and The Band. In contrast to 1966, they were playing to vast arenas packed with adoring, uncritical fans. But the music was among the worst either Dylan or The Band ever made. It was the first sixties revival tour, a package dreamed up by businessmen. The tension between audience and performer had gone slack. The confrontation with the new had been replaced by the comforts of the familiar.
Dylan’s forays into politics in the years since the sixties have been sporadic. In “George Jackson” in 1971 and the epic “Hurricane” of 1976, he once again paid homage to the martyrs of institutional racism. In 1974, he appeared at a benefit organized by Phil Ochs for the victims of the U.S. sponsored coup in Chile. (It was to be Ochs’s last political intervention.)
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