There’s an interview with Steve Earle in the Belfast Telegraph. The interview is by Robert Chalmers, who opines (in an article that mentions Bob Dylan five times) that Earle is “America’s greatest living songwriter.” Here is part of the interview dealing with Earle’s song John Walker’s Blues.

It was early one morning, in the lobby of a Stockholm hotel, Steve Earle recalls, that he told Elvis Costello how he was planning to spend the next 24 hours. “Costello listened to me,” Earle says, “and told me I was fucking crazy. He has known me a long time; I believe he was genuinely concerned for my safety.” Also present at this meeting was Bobby Muller - the President of Veterans of America, and co-founder of the Nobel prize-winning charity International Campaign To Ban Landmines, in whose support both musicians had been performing the previous evening.

“I regard Bobby,” Earle says, “as the most brilliant activist of modern times.”

“And what did he say?”

“He told me I was fucking crazy too.” (Readers of a sensitive disposition should note that this will not be the last occurence of an expletive in Earle’s conversation.)

Earle had told them that he was planning to write a song from the perspective of John Walker Lindh, an American detainee at Guantanamo Bay. A 20-year-old Muslim, Lindh had been filmed duct-taped to a stretcher: half-naked, malnourished and trembling. This degrading footage was repeatedly screened by Fox News and CNN. The finished song refers to the United States as “the land of the infidel” and has a hauntingly beautiful chorus in Arabic, which translates: “There is no god but Allah.”

“John Walker’s Blues” was released in 2002, at the height of America’s vertiginous optimism over the War On Terror.

“They told you it was crazy,” I suggest. “But you wrote it anyway.”

“I couldn’t not write it. I’d almost died from drugs, 10 years earlier. Literally. I believe I was spared for a reason.”

[...]

After he left Costello and Muller in Stockholm, Earle tells me, he travelled to Malmo.

“I checked into a hotel, turned on my laptop and put in ‘islam.com’,” he says. “I was looking for a chorus. I found it as a sound file: ‘A shadu la ilaha illa Allah’. Then I sat up all night and wrote a song designed to piss some very important people off. But the main reason I did it was to humanise a young man that everybody seemed determined to vilify. As I was writing it, I can remember thinking: ‘well, they’ll both be safely up in the air by now. Costello’s flying back to Dublin. Muller’s on a plane to the States.’ All I could think of was them going: ‘He has really fucking done it this time.’”

His song for Lindh (currently incarcerated in Florence, Colorado, with a release date of May 2019) was not greeted with universal approval.

“When it came out, I got this call from my mother. She was freaking out, because she was watching CNN and they said: ‘Let’s hope that Steve Earle has good bodyguards.’”

Leaving everything else aside: Can you think of any instance in Bob Dylan’s career where he talked up his own great courage in writing a particular song, designed “to piss some very important people off”?

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