Steve Earle is a fave of mine.
His song on John Walker Lindh is great.
And if you really wanna go further in balladry about characters that are unsympatico, get the, "Illinois, " album by acoustic folkie Sufjan Stevens w/ the song about John Wayne Gacy! I had a brilliant Trotskyist friend in Oakland who was a waiter, who blew lotsa $ at the Lusty Lady ("Pornography is Permanent Revolution!" he would say) and City Lights buying the latest translations of Castoriadis, Deleuze, Kristeva, Adorno, Negri, so much into the sleaze trash aesthetic he drove all the way to Chicago once to see an exhibition of the paintings of John Wayne Gacy.
Time to turn up the volume on the VCR playing, "Badlands, " w/ Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek, then crank up the CD player w/ the album by Steve Albini' band, "Big Black, " w/ all the songs http://www.vh1.com/artists/az/big_black_rock_/bio.jhtml , "which openly dealt with such topics as mutilation, murder, rape, child molestation, arson, immolation, racism, and misogyny, established them as a group that acknowledged no taboos; and while they didn't seem to be advocating the anti-social or criminal behavior they sang about, there was also a level of familiarity with their subject matter which made more than a few listeners blanch."
Yee-Haw! "Embrace Your Inner Demon!"
(Insert Ironic Emoticon)
P.S. And no, heh, frank scott, this doesn't mean I was ever a Nazi, or would ever be one, jeesh.Though I knew punk rockers at UCSC who like Sid Vicious wannabe's would play around w/ the Nazi imagery. "Epater les hippie liberal." One who was Jewish. Another who I got to know much better later on. Blew her head off w/ a rifle in front of her girlfriend. R.I.P. Allison Raleigh, 1961-1985.
-- Michael Pugliese