Reviews of STEVE EARLE: JUST AN AMERICAN BOY         > Images from...

Steve Earle documentary Just an American Boy is a chronicle of bravery.

The singer-songwriter tradition has a lot to answer for. Thousands of
listening hours have been needlessly hijacked by minute attention to the artist's
feelings – which are not all created equal, brother. Therapists must sometimes
be bored to death. I feel their pain whenever the dread specter of
late-edition, "spiritual" Madonna's lyrics actually register past the beats. For every
Fiona Apple or Joe Pernice, capable of weighing the usual neurosis, depression,
and bad relationships in genuinely interesting verse, there are umpteen
musicians whose inner lives would be better left unexplored – in the public sector,
at least. New depths of horror were plumbed during that wee explosion of "Dear
Diary" divas a few years back – when Jewel made Carly Simon look like Sylvia
Plath. Confessional art and masturbation really do have much in common: both
are legitimately hard to resist, yet as a general rule it takes involving
somebody else for your act to help make the world a better place.

Not least among singer-songwriter Steve Earle's many plus points is how
seldom his songs dally in the land of me. He's a storyteller – one gets the sense
he never thought twice about whether other people are inherently interesting.
Just an American Boy, the Artemis Records-produced documentary by Amos Poe, is
a fittingly unpretentious portrait of its subject. Earle is more down-to-earth
than anyone with this many ex-wives, addiction recoveries, and record labels
on his résumé ought to possibly be. He's stout, bearded, balding, and equally
plausible as a lumberjack or lit professor. He makes being a lefty-activist
singer-songwriter of variably rock, bluegrass, country, folk, and blues tunes
seem like the most natural thing in the world – which in an improved climate
might well be just the case.

Of course, our real climate doesn't agree and hasn't since Texan Earle first
hit the fan with 1986's rockabilly-esque Guitar Town. Then as now, his music
was too much to even fit into the onetime Nashville "outlaw" niche as country.
A rocky relationship with that particular industry inevitably led him toward a
loyal if modest audience that's just a piercing or two separated from Ani
DiFranco's. If he preaches to the converted – anti-Iraq war, anti-death penalty
in several memorable songs – it's not for lack of a populist touch. It's just
that marketplace musical populism is exclusively apolitical these days.
"Don't let anyone tell you it's unpatriotic to question any damn thing," he
says during a San Francisco show at one point, post-Sept. 11. Hoo lawd: we live
in an era when that qualifies as a controversial statement. Indeed, more
people paid attention to Earle than had ever bothered before when he released
"John Walker's Blues," a song that dared to adopt the voice of the Marin-bred
"American Taliban" youth. There's a difference between empathy and sympathy, which a delighted, scandal-seeking media raced to ignore. Just an American Boy duly
charts the resulting flap, its gist ideally encapsulated in the New York Post
headline "Twisted Ballad Honors Tali-Rat."

That's one concentrated flashback in a movie otherwise rather disinterested
in Earle's career back pages, not to mention his nonworking life. Instead we
get a lot of concert footage, routinely jazzed-up in visual terms but offering
decent highlights from a vast songbook ("Ashes to Ashes," "Copperhead Road,"
"Jerusalem," "America v. 6.0," etc.). There's also Earle in rehearsal, doing
radio interviews, frustratedly entering the uncharted realm of playwriting with
Karla (about executed Texan murderer Karla Faye Tucker), visiting City Lights
Bookstore, acting as a 12-step-reformed hell-raiser (named Waylon, no less) on
HBO series The Wire, and hanging backstage with his musician son and Conan
O'Brien.

Just an American Boy at first impresses as a nothing-special portrait of a
pretty special artist. But its agreeable looseness seems more encompassing as it
goes on. Like many other "roots" musician-centered flicks, it's intended for
eventual DVD-purchasing fans, yet ultimately might make a new fan of anybody
else who stumbles onto it. Earle is a solid rather than exhilarating live
performer – though in his case steady does win the race. This movie captures no
lack of similarly admirable personal-behavior moments, on- and offstage. Blabbing
at length about personal heroes – Abbie Hoffman, Joan Baez, Gov. George Ryan
– in one concert hall, he responds to one punter's yell "Sing the song,
Steve!" with rolled eyes and advice to "get another drink; be with you directly."
Like his idol Woody Guthrie, Earle makes radical agitprop seem like plain old
good manners.

—Dennis Harvey, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Jan. 7, 2004

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Steve Earle is in an odd position: once praised for his songwriting prowess and outlaw image, he's now equally known for his politics. With the release of last year's controversial John Walker's Blues, which insisted that American Taliban fighter John Walker Lindh was just a dumbass kid rather than a fearsome international terrorist, he became a whipping boy for the right and a poster child for the left—a macho liberal, sort of a tattooed modern version of Woody Guthrie. The image will be cemented with the Nov. 7 release of the documentary Just an American Boy, which follows Earle on his 2002 tour and addresses both his music and his messages (he's strongly anti-death penalty, to the point of writing a play about executed Texas inmate Karla Faye Tucker, and opposes the war in Iraq).

Earle, a reformed addict who's done time for narcotics possession, was interviewed in New York last week by New York Press. He was unrepentant, to say the least.

"I'm not one of these people who decided to be against the war only when it seemed to be going badly," Earle says. "I think this war is being fought for a lot of reasons that are suspect, under the cover of fighting terrorism. September 11 was the pretext for this war, and I don't think it's right to use September 11 in that way. This administration has used September 11 as an excuse to do a lot of the things it always wanted to do but didn't think it could get away with. I think using September 11 that way is obscene."

Earle seems bitterly amused by how his song about Lindh became an object of conservative ire while country singers who support bush–including Charlie Daniels and Toby Keith–were never condemned for talking politics. "Charlie Daniels is a big dumbass redneck, and so is Toby Keith. It's just the same old jingoistic bullshit," he says.

"The death penalty was my main issue for a while, but I'm off that a little bit right now. We've got an emergency situation here. Job one is getting that cocksucker out of the White House."

He's not a political obsessive, though. Earle makes time for music and keeps up with current bands. Right now he's fond of New York rockers, including the White Stripes and the Strokes, who are currently the subject of a minor media backlash.

"I'm tired of every broke-dick jealous musician in town running down the Strokes, 'cause I think they're really good. I think the White Stripes are pretty great, too. I think they need a bass player, but I probably think that because I'm old and I used to be a bass player. I'd be their bass player if they'd ask me."

—Matt Zoller Seitz, New York Press

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Poe's modesty aside, Just An American Boy is indeed a riveting and complex picture of a man and a nation at a crossroads. He began the project when the ashes were still smoldering after September 2001, a time Amos regards now as "living through present history." "It was more than about just making a political movie. It was the need to politically engage oneself as an artist," he says. Through Earle, Poe reveals the solitary voice of dissent in a society cast in the repressive shadows of imperialist rage and revenge.

"Steve had already been deeply politicized by his public opposition to the death penalty, having written a play about Karla Faye Tucker [the first woman executed in Texas]," Poe explains. "And the power of his work is his innate ability to empathize with his subjects."

It was of course that very empathy that made Earle a veritable lightning rod for our patriotic paranoia and nationalist militarism in the wake of 9-11. "John Walker Blues" was recorded for his album Jerusalem. The lyrics show a man trying to understand how a young kid from an open and enlightened family in Marin County could get so turned around that he would join the Taliban in Afghanistan, Earle was a beloved voice from America's trampled heartland. He was critically revered in the worlds of rock and roll and country music as one of the last honest outlaw poets standing -- put on par with Neil Young and Willie Nelson. After the song was released, however, many people considered Earle a traitorous enemy-sympathizer.

Poe understands how Earle's beliefs work. "John Walker's Blues", Poe says, reflects "the same need we have for retribution with the death penalty that made us want to go after Bin Laden, Afghanistan, Iraq and ultimately this confused kid from California. Steve was just saying 'this could be my son.' That's the card he plays -- empathy -- to show the meaning of life and the nature of humanity. But for me, when Steve says, 'I saw my son in this kid,' I think he's really seeing himself."

Earle was crucified by the right-wing media for the song (at least until the Dixie Chicks came along to take heat for their anti-Bush sentiments). No one seemed to understand that it was not a ballad -- that instead, he was simply singing the blues. "Earle's not celebrating John Walker [with this song], he's just trying to understand Walker's point of view and how he got there."

Amos Poe not only understands this fundamental difference. The same balance is manifest in Just An American Boy, which is neither a typical celebratory rockumentary nor even just a story. In this film, Amos Poe does Steve Earle in the only way one can, by simply trying to understand his point of view, and just how he got there.

—Carlo McCormack, Paper Magazine

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