Johnny Cash

It doesn't seem all that sad to me. The old boy was 71 when he died early this morning. He's lived a life full of success and good works, a man admired, despite his shortcomings, by many music fans. Sure, it's rotten luck that he died just as he was breaking through to a new generation of fans (I had 15-year-olds saddened by the loss today), but the man's already hung on well past the prime and time of all those other Sun Records cats, flashes-in-the-pan like Jerry Lee Lewis and that Elvis chap. What wierded me out more today was hearing that John Ritter dropped dead of a heart condition that no one even knew about. That to me is truly creepy. One minute you're happily working on the set of your new hit show, the next minute, you're worm food. Poor guy.

But Ritter will always be Jack Tripper, a harmless but otherwise forgettable character. Cash will always be the Man in Black, a Walking Contradiction. He was as religious a man as one might find, and sang heartfelt songs about Peace in the Valley, but he has also gone through years and years of drug abuse. He bowed to no man in love of his country, and presumably all the good old-fashioned ideals it was founded on, yet he would routinely play prisons and sing songs to the prisoners that suggested that putting people in prison was not the smartest idea. I have a copy of his performance at San Quentin Prison in California, and he sings a song to riotous cheers that condemns San Quentine and, implicitly, the entire penal system as designed in hell and belonging back there. Then, he sings it again. When Eminem grows the cojones to try anything like that, lemme know.

I'd go on, but folk with a more extensive appreciation of the man's recordings have already sounded off (here's one example). I've only really discovered him recently, based on the strenght of two LP's I bought. He is to me, as he is I suspect to many others, the Miles Davis of country music: the one guy from a genre you don't like that you can listen to and enjoy.

My problem with country isn't that it's redneck music. Credence Clearwater Revival were the biggest rednecks that ever walked the earth, and I can listen to them all day. Same with Lewis, Elvis, or any of those guys. Nor am I hung up on the insistent Christianity and patriotism of the genre. I am Christian and patriotic myself. No, my problem is that what gets called country music, especially the Nashville scene, is boring, gutless, garish redneck music, all sparkle and sequins and hoots (I'm not touching the "pop-country" guys who dress like Nirvana or Britney but still play banjos. Everybody but the teenagers seems to agree they're poseurs).

It's just not my scene, the songs, like the people, are too duded-up. I sat through some Country Music Awards show and saw with my own eyes, some pompadoured dingbat in a tourquoise suit make fun of the newer garage-rock bands, in a snide little song with appropriately wussy riffs called "The Next Big Thing." Had I the power, I would have lept through the screen and strangled him with his guitar strap, and not a jury in the world would have convicted me (provided I managed to get the trial staged in one of those counties on the coast that voted for Gore; in Nashville they'd probably lynch me before I finish the job). Fortunately, I was distracted by my mother proclaiming in her most serious voice that country music was the only form of rock n' roll left. I rolled my eyes so hard I could see the back of my skull and left the room (I later pressed on her some of my Vines and Jon Spencer Blues Explosion CD's; she never listened to them).

The point is, Johnny Cash was above such petty antics. For him, country music was about laying down the roots of white rural music, with it's fiddlin' and hummin, it's frontier fear and bravado, and never about getting "Yee-haws!" at the Grand ol' Opry. He was an artist in the best sense of the world, rendering creation that reflected experience; as genuinely concerned with prisoner's rights as he was with praising God and America. None of it was phony; none of it was show-biz. You can argue in the post-grunge world that being "not show-biz" is every bit as big a ploy as being "show-biz", but Cash didn't come from the post-grunge world. He came from the time where dressing in black all day was frowned upon. That middle finger he took out in a newspapers after he won his Grammy, aimed right at Nashville, wasn't a media splash to sell records. It was Johnny Cash saying "Fuck you," as loud as he possibly could.

So fare well, Johnny. Here's hopin' you got enough points to escape that ring of fire that seemed to worry you so much.