Eutrusca
27-11-2005, 14:58
COMMENTARY: Although I'm not a Country & Western fan, I always admired Johnny Cash, who always struck me as "real." Both saint and sinner, his music was earthy, sometimes gritty, and almost always wry and humorous.
Johnny Cash's Journey
Through the Other Side of Virtue (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/27/opinion/27sun3.html?th&emc=th)
By NICHOLAS KULISH
Published: November 27, 2005
Johnny Cash wasn't nearly as handsome as Elvis. His singing voice, while deep and rich, had a tendency to wander off-key. He was the first to admit that he knew very few guitar chords. If performers could be weighed and measured like prizefighters, Cash might have left the oddsmakers in stitches.
Yet there is a power and honesty to his music that few recording artists can match. In his most affecting songs, the gravelly, toxic rumble you hear is Johnny Cash locking horns with his dark side. It's one man's fight for his own soul, a timeless struggle to a rockabilly beat.
Just over two years after Cash's death at age 71, the American music legend has returned for an encore in "Walk the Line," a film named for one of his signature songs. While the movie revolves mainly around his tangled, forbidden courtship with his eventual second wife, June Carter, it opens at Folsom Prison in California. Inside the penitentiary's walls in 1968 Johnny Cash recorded the live album that for many fans defines the macabre Man in Black, his band's railroad rhythm churning behind him as he sings, "I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die."
High on amphetamines, this self-proclaimed pioneer of hotel vandalism once took an ax and chopped a brand-new door through the wall of his room. In another drug-induced fit he smashed all the footlights at a Grand Ole Opry show at Ryman Auditorium with his microphone stand. In the second of his two autobiographies, "Cash," he wrote that he dwelt on "the literal meaning of 'hell-bent. ' "
If all Johnny Cash brought to the stage were his demons, we wouldn't need to remember him. Marilyn Manson, the shock rocker, proved far more grotesque than a man in a black suit singing a few country murder ballads. Cash's drug addiction and light brushes with the law pale beside the rapper 50 Cent's drug deals and bullet scars.
It is the angel on Johnny Cash's other shoulder that gives his music its depth and profundity. That same murderer in "Folsom Prison Blues" is penitent, singing: "Well, I know I had it coming. I know I can't be free." Cash himself summed it up that he was "trying, despite my many faults and my continuing attraction to all seven deadly sins, to treat my fellow man as Christ would." Johnny Cash merges our seemingly contradictory American traditions of outlaws prone to wild gunplay and pious Christians singing hymns, without stopping to explain how you can be both at once.
He left the fold at Sun Records because the impresario Sam Phillips wouldn't let him record gospel music. He went a big step further than that, eventually recording an audio version of the New Testament. This was a man who could comfortably recall playing host to the Rev. Billy Graham and killing a crocodile named One Eyed Jack on the same page of his autobiography.
As the crocodile's name suggests, Cash brought real humor to his stage show, something the movie touches on but can't sustain in the classic trajectory of a drug-addiction tale.
Cash had a huge hit with the Shel Silverstein-penned "Boy Named Sue," about the roughest, toughest brawler ever to have a woman's name. The movie shows him singing "Cocaine Blues" to the rowdy crowd of inmates at Folsom, but not the jocular "Dirty Old Egg-Sucking Dog" or "Flushed From the Bathroom of Your Heart," which were part of the original concert.
What the movie does capture well - especially through the powerful performance of its star, Joaquin Phoenix - is how Cash's empathy for those prisoners grew from his own deep wells of guilt. His concert at Folsom was no simple publicity stunt. Cash and his band had been playing shows at prisons for more than a decade before they recorded the hit album at Folsom and followed it up with one from San Quentin Prison. Johnny Cash was a deeply flawed Christian man who could look at criminals and see a part of himself in them.
In a world increasingly reduced to good and evil, to us versus them, Johnny Cash was a man unafraid to admit that he was both. We've somehow lost sight of the truth that there can be no redemption without sin. It's this kind of reductive thinking that makes it easy to reduce swaths of the country to color codes and political parties; to lock millions away in jails and prisons, then toss the keys without guilt.
Johnny Cash sang that he wore black "for the poor and beaten down, livin' on the hopeless, hungry side of town." With hundreds of thousands displaced by Hurricane Katrina, layoff announcements dangling over the heads of 98,000 American auto workers, and 2.1 million men and women in prisons and jails across the country, we still need him.
Cash's life was an American story that can never be repeated, one that began in the Depression-era cotton fields of Arkansas and continued through an auto assembly line in Michigan to occupied Germany with the United States Air Force. He then joined legends of rock 'n' roll like Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis at Sun and on the road. He stayed with us until the end, touring as long as he could and recording almost until his death. "The way we did it was honest," he wrote. "We played it and sang it the way we felt it, and there's a whole lot to be said for that."
Johnny Cash's Journey
Through the Other Side of Virtue (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/27/opinion/27sun3.html?th&emc=th)
By NICHOLAS KULISH
Published: November 27, 2005
Johnny Cash wasn't nearly as handsome as Elvis. His singing voice, while deep and rich, had a tendency to wander off-key. He was the first to admit that he knew very few guitar chords. If performers could be weighed and measured like prizefighters, Cash might have left the oddsmakers in stitches.
Yet there is a power and honesty to his music that few recording artists can match. In his most affecting songs, the gravelly, toxic rumble you hear is Johnny Cash locking horns with his dark side. It's one man's fight for his own soul, a timeless struggle to a rockabilly beat.
Just over two years after Cash's death at age 71, the American music legend has returned for an encore in "Walk the Line," a film named for one of his signature songs. While the movie revolves mainly around his tangled, forbidden courtship with his eventual second wife, June Carter, it opens at Folsom Prison in California. Inside the penitentiary's walls in 1968 Johnny Cash recorded the live album that for many fans defines the macabre Man in Black, his band's railroad rhythm churning behind him as he sings, "I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die."
High on amphetamines, this self-proclaimed pioneer of hotel vandalism once took an ax and chopped a brand-new door through the wall of his room. In another drug-induced fit he smashed all the footlights at a Grand Ole Opry show at Ryman Auditorium with his microphone stand. In the second of his two autobiographies, "Cash," he wrote that he dwelt on "the literal meaning of 'hell-bent. ' "
If all Johnny Cash brought to the stage were his demons, we wouldn't need to remember him. Marilyn Manson, the shock rocker, proved far more grotesque than a man in a black suit singing a few country murder ballads. Cash's drug addiction and light brushes with the law pale beside the rapper 50 Cent's drug deals and bullet scars.
It is the angel on Johnny Cash's other shoulder that gives his music its depth and profundity. That same murderer in "Folsom Prison Blues" is penitent, singing: "Well, I know I had it coming. I know I can't be free." Cash himself summed it up that he was "trying, despite my many faults and my continuing attraction to all seven deadly sins, to treat my fellow man as Christ would." Johnny Cash merges our seemingly contradictory American traditions of outlaws prone to wild gunplay and pious Christians singing hymns, without stopping to explain how you can be both at once.
He left the fold at Sun Records because the impresario Sam Phillips wouldn't let him record gospel music. He went a big step further than that, eventually recording an audio version of the New Testament. This was a man who could comfortably recall playing host to the Rev. Billy Graham and killing a crocodile named One Eyed Jack on the same page of his autobiography.
As the crocodile's name suggests, Cash brought real humor to his stage show, something the movie touches on but can't sustain in the classic trajectory of a drug-addiction tale.
Cash had a huge hit with the Shel Silverstein-penned "Boy Named Sue," about the roughest, toughest brawler ever to have a woman's name. The movie shows him singing "Cocaine Blues" to the rowdy crowd of inmates at Folsom, but not the jocular "Dirty Old Egg-Sucking Dog" or "Flushed From the Bathroom of Your Heart," which were part of the original concert.
What the movie does capture well - especially through the powerful performance of its star, Joaquin Phoenix - is how Cash's empathy for those prisoners grew from his own deep wells of guilt. His concert at Folsom was no simple publicity stunt. Cash and his band had been playing shows at prisons for more than a decade before they recorded the hit album at Folsom and followed it up with one from San Quentin Prison. Johnny Cash was a deeply flawed Christian man who could look at criminals and see a part of himself in them.
In a world increasingly reduced to good and evil, to us versus them, Johnny Cash was a man unafraid to admit that he was both. We've somehow lost sight of the truth that there can be no redemption without sin. It's this kind of reductive thinking that makes it easy to reduce swaths of the country to color codes and political parties; to lock millions away in jails and prisons, then toss the keys without guilt.
Johnny Cash sang that he wore black "for the poor and beaten down, livin' on the hopeless, hungry side of town." With hundreds of thousands displaced by Hurricane Katrina, layoff announcements dangling over the heads of 98,000 American auto workers, and 2.1 million men and women in prisons and jails across the country, we still need him.
Cash's life was an American story that can never be repeated, one that began in the Depression-era cotton fields of Arkansas and continued through an auto assembly line in Michigan to occupied Germany with the United States Air Force. He then joined legends of rock 'n' roll like Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis at Sun and on the road. He stayed with us until the end, touring as long as he could and recording almost until his death. "The way we did it was honest," he wrote. "We played it and sang it the way we felt it, and there's a whole lot to be said for that."