Thursday, Aug 28, 2008
Rock shows are the same way, but you can change gears a lot faster. I can turn around and tell the drummer, "Speed up, motherfucker!" You know, it's not a democracy. There's only so much room for everybody else to interpret anything in my songs. That's why I've never been in a band. I haven't had that much experience in a real collaborative art form, like theater is, so it's really good for me.
What surprised me about "Karla" is that it really doesn't hit you over the head with an explicit anti-death penalty agenda.
Ten years ago that's what you would have gotten. All the editing in this play was taking my agenda out of it. It was in the text in a big way in the first draft all the way to the last rewrite, which was done the night before we opened. There was still a lot of rhetoric in it, and I had to deal with that. I learned a long time ago that you don't -- let's take the whole thing over "John Walker's Blues." You're assuming a character and you're lending a voice to somebody and it's a perfectly legitimate thing to do. I've always done it, and the characters are rarely sympathetic. Sympathetic characters usually have a voice. They usually don't have any trouble being heard.
Does it surprise you that people react to your songs in that simplistic way? Like it's just you telling us what you think?
Well, yeah. But on the other hand, a song like "Ashes to Ashes" is definitely what I think. It's this big Old Testament biblical language that probably came from writing this play and writing poetry. I never wrote that way before. That's a different gear for me. Or "Amerika v. 6.0": I believe absolutely every word in that song, so I don't have any problem with anybody mistaking that person for me at all.
But as far as "John Walker's Blues" goes -- I think I'm in a unique position to write that song because I'm not a Christian, I'm not a Muslim and I'm not a Jew, but I do believe in God. Definitely. I'm not an agnostic. I'm a true believer, but I just don't feel the need for a format to get there. My spiritual system is 12-step programs. That's the only one I've ever had. I didn't have one before that.
Did you believe in God before you quit doing drugs?
Well, I never adopted the atheism normally associated with my political beliefs. I always thought the biggest mistake Karl Marx made was denying poor people their spirituality, because it's all they've fucking got. I don't think you'll ever make a revolution by denying poor people God.
I've never been willing to say, "There is no God." Before, it wasn't important to me whether there was a God or not. Now it's of paramount importance. It's absolutely necessary that I believe there's a power greater than I am, or I'm fucked. Recovery is just completely and totally based on that. My spirituality is very simple: I believe there is a God and it ain't me. And that's as far as I've got. And it's kept me clean for eight years.
Now, Karla Faye Tucker was a born-again Christian, of course, and you take her faith very seriously in the play.
See, well, I believe Karla. There are two leaps in the play. One is that I believe that Karla Faye Tucker was absolutely sincere in her faith. I had to come to the play believing that. I know a lot of people that knew her, although I never met her. I'm trying not to cultivate any more friendships [with death-row prisoners], because I don't want to see anyone else die. [Earle witnessed the execution of convicted murderer Jonathan Nobles in 1998, the same year Tucker was executed.] But most people believed Karla, including the guards, the warden, the people who had to participate in her death.
The other leap is that there's a cult around Karla and I'm not part of that. Karla belonged to a very strange sort of church, the church that Dana Brown belonged to, the man she married while she was in jail. [After Tucker's execution, members of the church had a party to celebrate her "homegoing" to Jesus.]
This is also a play about the drug world, which is something you know pretty well.
It's in there. It's part of her story. I've never thought of it that way, to tell you the truth. It's part of her story, and when I write it becomes part of my story. The novel I'm working on now, drugs are at the center of it. I swore I'd never do that, but there are several short stories that I've written that deal with drugs, and I'm in a position to write about that very vividly. Writers are whores and they're gonna use whatever. If you can write about something, you're gonna be on that shit. Because it's gonna get you writing, and your biggest fear is an empty page.
You've talked a lot about your opposition to the death penalty. You've talked about your father writing a letter to the governor of Texas when you were 8 years old, to protest the execution of Ralph Carl Powers.
Right, well, the death penalty was being used so seldom then, even in Texas. It died of natural causes in this country. The Supreme Court throwing it out was a formality. We just became less willing to kill. In that case the murder victim's family had hired a special prosecutor to prosecute the case and put Ralph Carl Powers to death, which was legal in Texas at the time. My dad thought that was unfair and he wrote a letter to the governor, which was the first time I ever saw anybody take any sort of individual political action.
Then I saw the film version of "In Cold Blood" a few years later, -- that came out in '67, so I was 13. That was a mind-blower. Later I read it. What I always remember is the scene when Perry Smith is getting ready to be executed, and he's worried about soiling himself because he's heard that happens. He wanted them to let him go to the bathroom one more time, and they told him there wasn't time. Then the chaplain intervenes on his behalf. There's an illustration of the inhumanity of the death penalty -- in other words, what it does to us.
It took me years to be able to hang words on that. And it took talking to many murder victims' family members for me to get to the point that, you know what? My objection to the death penalty isn't that I'm trying to save anybody on death row. I'm trying to keep me from going to hell. In a democracy, if the government kills somebody then I kill somebody, and I object to the damage that does to my spirit. Period.
I object to it on political grounds as well, but that's peripheral. On political grounds I object to the government having that much power. It's always bad. The only way to make sure that it isn't abused is to not give them that power. So if anybody kills anybody, they're all dealt with the same way. That's what the ideal is to me. You know, there's 3,600 guys on death row in the United States right now. You think there's only been 3,600 heinous murders in the United States since 1974? That's ridiculous.
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