Steve Earle - Working Class Hero

While staring at the floor, they say he could come up with an entire album worth of protest songs. At the moment however, he had all of the McKenzie auditorium's audience hanging on every languid tone of his acoustic guitar.

He paused for a moment to allow a bead of sweat to hit the floor at which moment he stomped on the floor, inviting the banjo, dobra and mandolin players to chime in as hats were thrown off the heads of audience members and on to the shiny teak stage.

The next few songs were about unions, and the lack of media attention regarding the usefulness of them. Unbeknownst to Steve, they had tailed him for weeks, hanging out backstage, waiting for the moment to make their move.

The court had approved movement against the singer, classifying him as an outside agitator. The feds had been on to Steve ever since the stunt in Portland 5 years prior, where he stood up to the unions by refusing to leave the stage after being reportedly warned about playing the songs.

It was 11pm when he left the stage on that hot New Orleans night, when the moon shone above, threatening to set the entire bedraggled swamp on fire and in doing so revealing the hiding place of hundreds of corpses rocked to sleep by the lull of bloodlust that lay heavy in the air, a salty odor that reached back to before the french had settled there, to odors of voodo and sacrifice streched out along the hundred of yards of bayou that signalled the entrance to the salty city.