The item that refuses to die
Steve Earle and his accursed John Walker song, I mean.
Eric Olsen recently noted that both the slanted New York Post story on the John Walker song and the more balanced and informative Reuters version appeared under the same byline and were apparently based on one original. The writer, a fiddle-player in Nashville named Aly Sujo, wrote to Eric explaining that the Reuters version is pretty close to what he had written and that the NY Post's editors had Murdoch-ized it. No surprises there, I suppose. But the tale of Sujo's motivation in writing the article will strike a chord, so to speak, with anyone who has ever been, or tried to become, a "recording artist":
[I] heard about the Earle song when i was doing a demo in Nashville [a] couple weeks ago, tracked down the walker song, wrote up the story for my former employers at Reuters (vaguely hoping it would get Steve's attention and he'd listen to the fucking demo... or hand it over to his label).But noooo! Instead, I've been taken off their mailing lists and will probably have to physically defend myself if i ever bump into Earle ...
Meanwhile, Richard Bennett has an interesting post on the subject of John Walker and Steve Earle. (And thanks for the kind words, by the way.) He makes a strong case that Walker's parents are as much or more to blame than he is for the process leading to his enlistment with the Taliban. I agree with him about Walker's parents' moral culpability, though I'm not sure I agree that Walker's sentence is inappropriate: the penalty for joining up with and participating in the operations of al Qaeda and affiliated organizations which are actively engaged in a campaign to destroy America by murdering Americans has to be harsh enough to provide some degree of deterrence.
As for the relatively trivial issue of Earle's song, I think Richard has something here:
while Johnny committed a crime by going along with the Taliban, mom and dad committed a more serious crime by packing him off to Yemen. I'd like to see somebody write a song about the child abuse, his confusion, his need for black-and-white moral clarity and all the rest of it.So if there's a problem with Steve Earle's song, it's that it doesn't dig deep enough into John Walker's heart, which totally sucks because the well is now poisoned for other songwriters who could do a better job of it.