Steve Earle & The Dukes
May 4th, 2003
Gruene Hall
New Braunfels, Texas
lineage: ?? > CDR trade > EAC [secure mode] > wav > Trader's Little Helper > flac [level 8, sector boundaries aligned]
sound quality: A-
Disc 1 [61:37]
1. Amerika v. 6.0 (The Best We Can Do)
2. What's A Simple Man To Do?
3. Ashes To Ashes
4. Conspiracy Theory *
5. My Old Friend The Blues
6. Someday
7. Taneytown
8. The Rain Came Down
9. Harlan Man
10. Mystery Train Part II
11. Copperhead Road Intro
12. Copperhead Road
13. Guitar Town
14. I Remember You *
15. Billy Austin
Disc 2 [76:52]
16. The Truth
17. Some Dreams
18. Hurtin' Me, Hurtin' You
19. Go Amanda
20. John Walker's Blues
21. Jerusalem
22. Transcendental Blues
23. N.Y.C.
24. The Unrepentant
25. Francine (Gibbons/Cordray/Perron)
26. Hard-Core Troubadour
27. The Galway Girl
28. Christmas In Washington Intro
29. Christmas In Washington
30. Time Has Come Today (Chambers/Chambers)
31. Get Together (Valenti)
32. (What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love And Understanding? (Lowe)
*w/ Garrison Starr
from http://jack.mauveweb.co.uk/artists/earle/20030504.html
A slightly longer setlist than the European dates - I Remember You makes a return with Garrison Starr singing the female part, and both Hard-Core Troubadour and Francine appear in the first encore. It's also a great performance, one of the best of the Jerusalem shows so far.
The Christmas In Washington intro is a wonderfully heart-felt listing of some of Steve's personal heros, and it's reproduced in full here. It makes this page slightly lengthy, but to quote the man himself, fuck it. It's worth it.
"... This song ain't about Christmas and it ain't about Washington, what it's about is heros. It's about my heros, 'cos I wrote the motherfucker. It's not about all my heros, 'cos I couldn't fit them all in here. If I had, this song would have been longer than our last election.
There's a lot of people that could be in here. I heard a few weeks ago that Joan Baez sang this song at a rally in San Francisco, and I almost passed out because Joan Baez is one of my heroes. The reason she's one of my heroes is because she sang Joe Hill at Woodstock, dedicated to her husband who was in prison for no other reason than they couldn't shut him up and they couldn't make him kill anybody. So she gave him a voice in front of 400,000 people.
Andy Kaufman could have been in this song, and he's one of my heroes because he said that what we did back there in the sixties was unprecendented in history, because for the first time a people rose up against their own army and said, "We don't want it" and the army stopped.
And Governor George Ryan is one of my heroes, and he could have been in this song because in his last hours as governor of Illinois he decided that the right thing to do was to commute the sentences of everybody on death row in Illinois. I sat at the same dinner table as him twice during the year, and everybody was wondering if he was going to do it - I knew he was going to fucking do it. Not 'cos he told me, because you could just tell. And then when it was all over, all the second guessing, I heard a very famous person say that Governor Ryan was selfish, and that he commuted those sentences just to buy his own conscience off. Well, I submit to you that if we all checked in with our conscience this would be a much better world that we lived in.
Patrick Leahy, senator for Vermont, he could be in this song. I've almost moved to Vermont just so I could vote for him, but I couldn't get past the mud season thing... He's my hero because when the Attorney General of the United States suggested before a senate committe that anyone who questioned anything that the government did in the name of Homeland Security was aiding and abetting terrorison, Patrick Leahy said "Well, Attorney General Ashcroft has the same first amendment rights as the rest of us".
We need heroes right now. And we sure could use Woody right now. So maybe you could close your eyes and if you sing good enough, you never can tell."