Artist:
Steve Earle
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Air traffic controllers strike in 1981. Photo at Detroit Labor Day parade: Jim West. Click for pop-up.
At Detroit LaborFest 1999, in a benefit concert for the locked-out Detroit newspaper workers, Steve Earle talked about this song and the 1981 PATCO strike:
Some of the people that invited me here, just when they were talking about, I guess somebody that hadn't heard one of my records got to listening to one of my records, or maybe it was somebody that had heard the record.
But they picked out a lyric in this song and it was suggested to me very carefully that maybe I should change the lyric or not sing one line of one of my songs.
And just for the record I don't do that. Ever.
That's because this is what I do. And it's really important to me. That's called censorship. And there's a reason for not doing that, there's a really good reason.
I have to put up with a lot of stuff from a lot of people. You're going to hear some stuff from me from time to time, you come out and see my shows that you don't agree with me about, and I got to listen to a lot of crap from people that I don't agree with. And they have every right to say it.
So I'm not going to change the lyric in any song.
But I will offer an explanation in this arena, and that is, it's in the song called "Christmas in Washington." And the last verse, the line "Our unions have been broken."
And I'll tell you where that came from. My brother was an air traffic controller.
And believe me, that union was broken. And it's not the only union that's been broken.
And there is a systematic move on to break every union.
Right now the labor market is such that there's been a reprieve. Make no mistake that that's what it is. And when the air comes out of this economy, it's going to be the same thing as it was in the 80s all over again. And unions will have their backs to the wall once again. It's not over. It'll come around, and it will come around again.
But there are always going to be unions, 'cause they're always going to need us. Make no mistake about that.
Steve Earle, Detroit LaborFest 1999. Benefit concert for striking Detroit Newspaper Workers. Photo: George Waldman.
But I did want to explain that. And now I'm going to sing the song the way I wrote it. Thank you very much.
And you're the only people in the world that I would have even bothered to explain it to. Make no mistake about that.
This song, what it's about, it's really a mid-life crisis song. It's about, when I was a kid the Vietnam war was going on and some people were going and some people were not going. And everybody was suffering for it, one way or another.
And that's when I started learning to sing and write songs. And I was very idealistic, and I knew exactly what I believed in, and I thought I knew why.
And then I got older and started having kids. And I started to moderate. 'Cause I had to make a living, and I had to feed those kids. It's sort of an immediate thing, you know.
And then I went through a period of my life that I ended up almost dead, and by some miracle I managed to survive that. And that makes you look at things different.
And what I figured out was that I was right in the first place.
Recorded by Ellis Boal.
Steve Earle is a member of AFM Local 257.
Studio version available on Steve Earle's 1997 El Corazon CD. Buy it.
Woody Guthrie photo: Robin Carson, 1943. Courtesy Woody Guthrie Archives.
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