Steve Earle and Ron Marz: Brothers in Defiance

            There are a few people who can only be happy when they’re outside the system. For whatever reason, they do their best work when they set their own rules and don’t have to worry about the demands of other people. A lot of people can just do their job, and even though they’re bothered by the constraints, they cope, and they do their work. This is how most people live their lives, because it’s a reasonable thing to do, at least for most, but there are a  few who can’t put themselves in a box, regardless of how big the box might be. Personally, I work best when I can do my own thing. I need goals and expectations, but if I can do it my way, it goes a lot better than when I have someone checking up on me a lot. I think that’s more common, but there are plenty of people who are resistant to the system itself and everything about it. One of my best friends, a guy named Mike is like this. Once he started setting the rules for himself, there was no way he was going back to letting someone else tell him when he could eat. Some people are just wired this way, they break the expectations of society, but because they do, they can excel more than they would have before.

One of the best examples of this, in my opinion, is Steve Earle. Earle was unwaveringly unique with his sound and his music, despite what his label wanted. He famously flipped a table over on an executive at a restaurant because they wanted him to change an album cover. After Earle was dropped from his first label after multiple conflicts and confrontations, he fell into a drug fueled depression. After finally coming out of rehab, he was picked up in 1995 and released an acoustic album that became one of his most acclaimed, “Train a Comin’” which was well received commercially, even though Earle complained about the song order being incorrect. Where most would be happy to just be given another shot, Earle was more concerned about his art than he was his health, in every way imaginable. Never afraid to voice his political stances, Earle released the album “Jerusalem” in 2002, which tackled the attacks of September 11^th, and the misrepresentations of Islam. Earle even wrote a song about the American Taliban, John Walker Lindh. “Death machines were rumblin’ across ground where Jesus stood” he sings in the title track of the album, as he comments on the irony of where the world truly lies. Earle thrives because he has the ability to break the rules. Many companies would have balked at his demands throughout his career, but because of his commitment to his craft, he managed to present music that, while somewhat controversial, was also very effective and thought provoking. Earle had the courage to put out an honest statement about how he felt, consequences be darned, and he did it in such a way that even those who disagreed with him could find some common ground. I don’t know that any of that would have been possible if he was concerned with what the guys behind the desks at the label thought. That’s the same confidence that allowed him to do an album with the Del McCoury band in 1999, a year before “O Brother Where Art Thou” made bluegrass more acceptable in the mainstream. The same thing that allowed him to do a tribute to a man he named his son after when many had forgotten Towns Van Zandt. When more popular musicians are concerned about auto tone or busy talking about all the celebrities they’ve slept with, Earle sits in his room and writes. While he’s not as far out of the system as a Tom Waits, he has very clearly defined himself a niche for his success.

Ron Marz is another example of someone who manages to defy the way things “should be” and create work that still resonates after a decade. Marz is probably most famous as the guy who ruined Green Lantern. At least that’s the image some people on the internet cling to. Well, that and that he hates women because he had a bad guy kill a superhero's girlfriend. What they fail to mention, though, is that Marz brought new life to the character and managed to completely refine and redefine everything in the Green Lanterns world, while still acknowledging the importance of what had come before. Marz did things that very few comic book writers would have been brave enough to do at the time, but he didn’t do them to be edgy or to shake things up: he did them(and still does them) because it made sense for the characters and it made the stories better. While most remember the violence associated with Marz’ work, what they forget is that, more often than not, from what I’ve read, it mostly occurs off panel, so the violence is actually a product of the audience’s imagination. Marz manages to engage the audience, to make them willing participants in the world he’s created, and take characters that had become stale or one note, and transform them into real and engaging people. There is an understated elegance in giving an artist a weapon that works off of imagination, and that’s exactly what Marz did with Kyle Rayner. Despite this, though, and despite great work for both major publishers, Marz decided to work for Top Cow and help them reshape their universe into a thriving and exciting world of depth. He defied the system by leaving the big companies, going to work for a publisher that was mainly known for having great artists but little content, and making it work. He has now made a book about a random team member of Cyber Force a must read. One of the primary points of emphasis in his books, to me, at least, is the idea that no matter how hard we try, we are all still human. It is, to me, an exploration of the human spirit fighting against the world and every other power, attempting to control the uncontrollable. That’s stuck with me, I think, because it is a universal truth: we never want to accept that we can’t control everything. And that’s important to note, because while we don’t want to become slaves to the system, we also have to realize that there’s only so much we can do. The point, though, is that no matter if we win or lose, we should be uncompromisingly individual. If we can’t be ourselves, no one else will.