Sunday, May 11, 2008
The radical country rocker and composer of "John Walker's Blues" blasts the war on Iraq, denounces the death penalty and explains why ex-druggies believe in God.
Nov 13, 2002 | From a distance, it seemed unlikely: Steve Earle, the radical country-rock singer-songwriter of "John Walker's Blues" fame, had written a play about executed Texas murderer Karla Faye Tucker -- and was producing it in Nashville, of all places. But when I got here, to the two-block stretch of 21st Avenue South at the heart of the Music City's Hillsboro Village neighborhood, it stopped seeming weird at all.
Hillsboro Village is where Nashville gets its modest but concentrated dose of upper-middle urban bohemia, a culture that has long since spread beyond the coasts into the American heartland. I've encountered it, to greater or lesser degrees, in such places as Reno, Nev., Utica, N.Y., and Lexington, Ky. All it requires to take root is a thousand or so undergraduates, a few dozen Harper's subscribers and a couple of espresso machines. No doubt it exists wherever you live too.
In Hillsboro Village you'll find two coffee shops (neither one a Starbucks), a used-book store, a kitsch-antique emporium, a used-clothing boutique, a sushi bar, a brewpub and a venerable breakfast eatery (the Pancake Pantry, legendarily patronized by Garth Brooks). Dyed hair and black leather are routine. Nobody assumes that two men dining together in intimate conversation must be brothers.
Talking to a friendly couple in the lobby of the Belcourt Theatre, I tell them I've come here from New York to see Earle's play "Karla." "You know what?" the guy quips. (He's wearing a black leather jacket.) "There's people in this neighborhood who are under the impression this is New York."
When I repeat this joke to Earle a bit later, he laughs like he doesn't think it's very funny. "I have all these friends that have moved here from New York and L.A. when they had kids," he says, "under the mistaken impression that it's easier to protect your kids from Baptists than from gangs."
No, although Nashville is a lot hipper than I expected, it isn't really much like New York at all (and I mean that in the best possible way). "Karla" played for two weekends earlier this fall in the Belcourt, a semi-renovated 1920s movie palace that briefly housed the Grand Ole Opry during the Depression. Like Earle himself, the play and the scene around it are an odd combination of elements that somehow come together to form a plausible whole: political activism, heavy-duty religious faith, the eccentricities of regional theater, and a desire to challenge taboos and smash orthodoxies.
You might wonder whether Earle, who was already ambushed by the right-wing press this year for writing a song in the persona of American-born Taliban fighter John Walker Lindh, is inviting further trouble by producing a sympathetic play about a junkie prostitute who helped chop up two people with a pickax. Nashville's a fairly cosmopolitan town these days, but it's also in the middle of the Bible Belt; will the public be outraged by a drama in which a character, naked from the waist up and covered in blood, cries out, "Fuck you, Jesus!" before apparently ascending to heaven?
The answer, evidently, is no. "Karla" got glowing reviews from the city's daily and weekly papers, and both performances I attended were packed. Furthermore, it's a serious and ambitious work of theater, if also unevenly paced and awkwardly structured. Earle is a longtime activist against the death penalty -- he says he has befriended 11 death-row inmates who have since been executed -- and the play begins with the 1998 execution of Tucker, who became a kind of poster child for both death-penalty opponents and fundamentalist Christians after her jailhouse conversion.
There are no overt politics in the play, no George W. Bush mocking Tucker while signing her execution order, no didactic lectures on the immorality of the death penalty. Instead, "Karla" (as directed by Darrell Larson, a theater pro who works in both Los Angeles and New York) is a sort of Jean-Paul Sartre "Twilight Zone" episode, where Tucker -- who's surprised not to find Jesus waiting for her with open arms in a field of white light -- must confront a group of other restless spirits waiting for her in some anteroom to the next world. There's her flamboyant mother, a prostitute who died before Tucker's crime; the biker boyfriend with whom she committed the murders (film and TV actor W. Earl Brown, in the play's standout performance); and, most importantly, the two people she hacked up with that pickax at the end of a psychosis-inducing 24-hour methamphetamine marathon.
Sara Sharpe (who is also Earle's girlfriend and the artistic director of his company, BroadAxe Theatre) gives a strong performance in the title role, but I don't think Earle's text, as gripping, adventurous and often funny as it is, finally succeeds in reconciling the reborn Karla with the original version. How did the hard-as-nails tomboy junkie who could kill two people and brag about it -- telling friends that striking the fatal pickax blows made her come -- become the angelic girly-girl who went to her death with a smile and a prayer on her lips?
Tucker's own answer, of course, was that she had been saved by Jesus Christ and was forgiven, and for Earle, who describes himself as a man of faith but not a Christian, "Karla" may be more a public grappling with the religious themes that keep surfacing in his work than a death-penalty drama. It is also, undeniably, a harrowing story of drug culture, something with which Earle has considerable experience.
Today, Earle is a thick-set, middle-aged man with glasses, who looks more like a creative writing professor at nearby Vanderbilt University than a rebellious rocker who once described himself as "slightly to the left of Chairman Mao." He bears only a slight resemblance to the skinny longhair from South Texas who broke into the country-rock scene with a bang in 1986 with the album "Guitar Town."
Get Salon in your mailbox!