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A JOURNEY TO JERUSALEM WITH STEVE EARLE.
Quick, what is it saying, before it disappears!

CD ‘Jerusalem’ by Steve Earle.
Produced by The twangtrust.
Released July 2002.
Musicians: Steve Earle, Will Rigby, Eric Ambel, Kelly Looney.
Tracks: Ashes to Ashes, Amerika v. 6.0 (The Best We Can Do), Conspiracy Theory, John Walker’s Blues, The Kind, What’s A Simple Man To Do, The Truth, Go Amanda, I Remember You, Shadowland, Jerusalem.

I have no idea at present whether or not ‘Jerusalem’ will turn out to be a classic Steve Earle album, one that is taken down and played every so often.
Actually I suspect not, and that, to an extent, goes against the spirit of this feature. However, I find it difficult to let this album pass by, because of its contemporary political significance, as every commentator reviewing it has pointed out, but without saying why.
And that is why I will probably never be a ‘classic’, because it may not appeal to the timeless, and in 10 years time, when what he is singing about is long forgotten (i.e. the infamous ‘9/11’ in New York City 2001, and the subsequent American invasion of Afghanistan), the album may suffer the same fate.
Or it may be seen as a warning, even a kind of solution, ignored at the time.
The contemporary core of the album though, the first four songs, are in many ways extraordinary, both sonically and lyrically, and are very pointed in their comments in responding to the above events.
Steve had written these songs by the time of his Guitar Town reunion concert in February 2002 so he is actually responding to the above events, rather than the subsequent March 2003 Iraq invasion.
This was something of a possibility at the time, so the themes do remain relevant, and may continue to do so.
The rest of the album, including the closer ‘Jerusalem,’ sounds very much like songs that might have been left off the previous album, ‘Transcendental Blues’.
Steve is very political though not a revolutionary. In many ways he is part of the American ‘awkward squad’; he very much believes in the ideals of the Founding Fathers, but thinks that ‘they ain’t lookin’ out for you like they used to’, as he says on ‘Shut Up and Die like An Aviator’.
What I think Steve’s musical journey across his albums shows is a move away from straight country influences, mixed in with rock, to a wider focus on all the contributing styles of white American, and Texan, popular music, particularly bluegrass, and ‘traditional’ music.
However, across the albums, my point above seems more true than not. Apart from on ‘The Mountain’, which has a special place in Steve’s musical canon, hard rock has never been forsaken.

‘Jerusalem’ is the other album that has this ‘special place’; it is very much a response to political and social events, which is unusual, even given Steve’s political views.
Musically the palette is fairly unrelenting hard rock to begin with, which addresses those concerns, before there are some ‘other tracks’ exploring a variety of musical styles.
The album’s opener, ‘Ashes to Ashes’, is clearly about the Al Quaeda attack on the World Trade Centre (“Then one day they say the sky gave way, And death rained down it made a terrible sound. There was fire everywhere and nothin’ was spared…..
There God stood and he saw it was good, He said ‘ashes to ashes and dust to dust’”).
The response of the politicians goes like this, (“They drew a line in the sand and made their last stand, They said ‘God made us in his image, and it’s in God that we trust’, When asked about the men who had died by their hand, They said ‘ashes to ashes and dust to dust”.)
Steve’s Biblical imagery in this song links the Twin Towers to the ephemeral works of humankind (“It’s always best to keep it in mind, That every tower ever built tumbles, No matter how strong no matter how tall…..When we’ve done all we can but it slipped through our hands, It’s ashes to ashes dust to dust”).
You have to imagine yourself listening to the buzzsaw guitar and the martial slap of the drums as you hum these words to yourself, as I am. There is no doubt that it is a powerful opener, and sets the scene for the way that he then looks at the American condition.
There seems a desire to hatch a different Steve Earle sound, still the highly-strung guitars, but the drums are separated out, as they clunk away monotonously as part of the overall feeling of menace that he is trying to generate.
Again a drum heavy and nervy guitar song, bashing out the message (“Look at ya, Yeah, take a look in the mirror now tell me what you see, Another satisfied customer in the front of the line for the American dream”)
Amerika v. 6.0 (The Best We Can Do) is an odd title, reminiscent of a version of computer software (“Four score and a hundred and fifty years ago our forefathers made us equal as long as we can pay, Yeah well maybe that wasn’t exactly what they was thinkin’ version 6 point o of the American way”), focuses on Americans themselves, what they have become, before their wake up call, of what they like to call Ground Zero (“Nowadays letters to the editor and cheatin’ on our taxes is the best that we can do”).
Mixing up the Gettysburg address, the writing of the Constitution itself, and how it has become transmuted in ‘version 6’ of the modern capitalist American Way. Steve is a believer in the American Way, but not the one it has become – in many ways he is a socialist ‘Mr Smith Goes to Washington’; while believing in all the Founding Fathers he also thinks that alternative American believers need to be heard too.
John Reed, Emma Goldman, Abbie Hoffman, Bobby Seale, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King
(“….those who defended those same principles by insisting on asking the hardest questions in our darkest hours”) as he says in the sleevenotes).
‘Conspiracy Theory’ starts off with the snare drum mixed up high, Steve singing over it, and a female chorus adding to the tone of regret for paths not taken.
The guitar is muted, and does not really get going, along with a synthesiser, until the end of the third verse.
It is the song that is important, the martial drumbeat allowing no sense of counterpoint to the message. The album is getting rather claustrophobic by now, in it’s sonic spectacle.
Steve’s perspective on war in Iraq is coloured by his memories of Vietnam (“Half a million soldiers fly across the water, One in ten are never comin’ back again, Fifty thousand sons who never grew to fathers, Don’t you ever wonder who they might have been”).
But people are asked not to question their leaders; they are soothed by the spectacle of the American Dream (“Hush, now, don’t you believe it, Cover your head and close your eyes, Now take it or leave it, Go back to bed now don’t you cry”).
By this point I just want to get out, but ‘John Walker’s Blues’ provides no let up in this sonic descent into the hell of individual daily lives, and the choices they come to make.
In many ways it is the central song in this quartet of songs; how can Americans so lose the faith of their ancestors that they look for it elsewhere, and find it in a similar, and related religion, that carries all the dry dust of American deserts with it, but from a vastly different cultural place.
Again the drumbeat leads the song along (“I’m just an American boy – raised on MTV, And I’ve seen all those kids in the soda pop ads, But none of ‘em looked like me”).
How could a man fight for the other side? And Steve’s answer is that a belief system has to provide coherence to its users, and if that, “first thing I heard that made sense was the word, Of Muhammad peace be upon him”, then that is part of the American Way too, diversity and difference in the great Melting Pot of American culture.
John Walker, after all, does not have no faith, he is in the predicament he is in precisely because the older Christian faith of America has been so debased, and made meaningless, by capitalism.)
He is still a ‘Person of The Book’, and there is something about its purity and link to a past tradition that Steve gets at, as he declaims “A shadu la ilaha illa Allah, There is no God but God”.
It is a real relief to get to the next song, where indeed he does sing about girls again, ‘The Kind’, acoustic guitar to the fore, the drums of yore confined more to accompaniment.

‘What’s a Simple Man To Do’, with its Farfisa organ sound is the authentic soda pop sound, with an outlaw twist that John Walker can’t quite interact with.
And by this point in the album you realise that it is quite a mess thematically and stylistically – the extraordinary first 4 songs becomes ‘Steve Earle music’, and somehow suffer by comparison.
Because what follows, while very welcome, just can’t commit to the same claustrophobic intensity of what went before.
Which is probably not Steve’s fault, in that the album becomes a more truncated mishmash of musical styles in the same way that the previous ‘Transcendental Blues’ (more unashamedly) was.
‘The Truth’ mines the same minor chord landscape of ‘John Walker’s Blues’, but it is the lament of a long-term prisoner who is determined not to bow down before the system.
While it stands up on it’s own it lost the long term focus of the first 4 songs, and becomes one of a portfolio that go to make up an album
(‘a rocker, a ballad, a bluegrass one, a prison one, a fiddle and pipes Irish one).
However, the banjo that carries the weight of the song connects it to an older Appalachian murder ballad tradition.
Sin and redemption, of accepting your fate as part of a wider God’s plan – something that John Walker also cannot run away from in the way his actions, and their consequences, unfold.
‘Go Amanda’ begins with a phased guitar sound, then features an electric piano, but the song itself is rather slight, particularly lyrically. It makes a nice, tuneful, album filler.
‘I Remember You’ is Steve’s ‘duet with female’ song, in this case Emmylou Harris.
This is something of a 2nd period Steve tradition – one thinks of Lucinda Williams singing ‘You’re Still standing There’ on ‘I Feel Alright’; Siobhan Kennedy on ‘Poison Lovers’ on ‘El Corazon’; Iris DeMent on ‘I’m Still In Love With You’ on ‘The Mountain’; and sister Stacey singing on ‘When I Fall’ on ‘Transcendental Blues’.
The song itself mines the same sonic grooves as Harris’s ‘Red Dirt Girl’, the Daniel Lanois inflected production based on, again, Harris’s previous groundbreaking ‘Wrecking Ball’.
The voices intertwine, Harris’s high lonesome vocals, Steve’s deeper throatier tones – Cosmic American Music indeed, chiming around the bell ringing guitar sound.
‘Shadowland’ is a Road song, like ‘Taneytown’ on ‘El Corazon’. In some ways it is, again, Steve by numbers, (“Been down a thousand highways and they’re all the same, another empty place where I can hide my shame, and there’s a heartache waitin’ up around the bend, For a lonesome stranger in the shadowland”).
The album’s closer is ‘Jerusalem’ and it is a more metaphysical speculation on the ecumenicism of faith, based around the various ‘Peoples of The Book’ – Christians, Muslims, Jews – all come to meet in ‘Jerusalem’, both a metaphysical place central and holy to all, and the actual place (“And there’ll be no barricades then, There’ll be no wire or wall, And we can wash all this blood from our hands, And all this hatred from our souls”).
The song itself is a mid paced strut featuring electric guitar fills (“I woke up this morning and none of the news was good, Death machines were rumblin ’cross the ground, And the man on my TV told me it had always been this way, and there was nothin’ anyone could do or say”).
The martial snare drum punctuates the melody, and a harmonica harmonises with it (“But I believe there’ll come a day when the lion and the lamb, will lie down to peace in Jerusalem”).
Jerusalem is both a place and a state of mind; personally, Steve says, he does not remember a religion of hate as he grew up in Texas.
The sentiments themselves do add some closure to the album, tying in with the first 4 stunning song soundscapes, before they get leavened by a mixture of styles, a la Steve showing his musical ecumenicism.
‘Jerusalem’ then is a pretty non specific plea for peace, but given that he has tied this into particular aspects of the way in which America appears to have lost it’s soul to commercialism.
And that about wraps it up; an album of two halves, one rather groundbreaking in the way the intensity is created, the other more like Steve Earle music by numbers.
Time will tell as to its lasting, classic status, but you really need to hear it, just to hear an active voice, and a musical genius, at work.

by Neil MacAlpine