Johnny Cash: Still so gone

The summer of 2003 was a rough one for music fans. Sun Records founder Sam Phillips died on July 30. Six weeks later, on Sept. 7, Warren Zevon died. And five days after that, on Sept. 12, Johnny Cash died, four months after the death of his wife, June Carter Cash. Nothing puts today's music into a sobering perspective quite like reconsideration of the great ones, especially the great ones who are gone.

In his memory, on the fifth anniversary of his death, here's a music tribute featuring Cash and his daughter, Rosanne. Below, I've posted the obit I wrote for The Star five years ago.

He was a deep, complex man who lived an epic life, one that defied simple labels and easy depiction.

Johnny Cash wasn’t just a guy who dressed in black and sang in prisons. He wasn’t just a country music superstar who once got barred from the Grand Ole Opry or a pious Christian who abused drugs or a devout father who, his daughter Rosanne once said, could get “so wired you would almost break into tears to be in the same room as him.”

He was all of those and much more: a visionary, a rebel, a survivor, a champion of the poor and a man of such renown that when he died Friday in Nashville, Tenn., at age 71, he was as famous and emblematic as any American figure born in the 20th century, Muhammad Ali included.

He also was inherently modest for a guy who had won 10 Grammy Awards and sold 50 million records. "I was (always) very aware that I was part of nature, that I sprang from the soil," he wrote in Cash, his second autobiography. "And as long as I followed the natural order of things, I’d be OK."

Though the order in Cash’s life was constantly broken by fits of chaos and suffering, the greatness he came by did come naturally, but only because he would learn so many hard lessons about love, God and tragedy. The first and most indelible of those came before he was a teenager.

'Country’ to the core

John R. Cash was born Feb. 26, 1932, in Kingsland, Ark. When he was 3, his father, Ray, and his mother, Carrie, moved their brood of seven children to Dyess, a Mississippi Delta town blessed with fertile soil and dotted with trailers, shacks and rickety homes.

His father raised corn, alfalfa and cotton, which introduced Cash to the rigors and rewards that come with living off the land. He never let go of that connection.

“When music people talk about being ‘country,’” he wrote in Cash, “they don’t mean they know or even care about the land and the life it sustains and regulates. They’re talking more about choices — a way to look, a group to belong to.”

Cash’s first hero in life was his older brother, Jack, a Bible-toting font of goodness and light who aspired to be a preacher. “He was my best friend,” Johnny Cash wrote, “my big buddy, my mentor and my protector.”

In May 1944, Jack, 14, was cutting fence posts with a table saw when he slipped and the blade sliced him open from his ribs to his groin. He died several days later, propelling his kid brother into a state of grief from which he never fully returned.

“Jack has stayed with me,” Johnny Cash wrote. “He’s been there in the songs we sang at his funeral ... and those songs have sustained me and renewed me my whole life.”

Even more important, Jack became the standard of morality by which his brother lived throughout his life: “The most important question in many of the conundrums and crises of my life has been ‘Which is Jack’s way? Which direction would he have taken?’ ”

Cash would pose those questions to himself regularly as he grew from an impoverished grief-stricken youth to a humble celebrity with high ideals and a wide streak of self-destruction.

‘Big things are at stake’

After serving as a cryptanalyst in Germany for the Air Force in the early 1950s, Cash married Vivian Liberto and settled down in Memphis, Tenn., where he tried to sell appliances.

He also had fallen in love with singing by then, encouraged by everyone who had heard his cavernous, bass-baritone voice. In 1954, his brother Ray introduced Cash to his colleague, Marshall Grant, who liked to play music on the side with a guitarist named Luther Perkins.

Grant and Perkins eventually became the band that joined Cash when he went to Sun Studios and introduced himself to Sam Phillips, first as a gospel singer. When Phillips told him to come back later because no one would be interested in gospel music, Cash came back with “Hey Porter.”

Phillips loved the song so much he signed Cash and his band right away to Sun Records. So began one of the greatest careers in American music. Even at that point, Cash was in a position unlike the others hanging out at Sun, legends such as Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis.

“He’s already 24 years old, married with children,” country music writer David Cantwell said Friday. “And you can hear it in his music. He’s not writing songs for teenagers. He had to get up every morning and go to work, and that comes across in his music — the sense that big things are at stake here.”

Cash left Sun for Columbia Records in 1959, and he continued to defy categories and labels, not as a means of reinventing himself, but because he was so in tune with the human condition that he would not let himself be defined. He also was perpetually conflicted, too restive to settle into a role that would lead to cliche and self-parody.

“Johnny was always battling something — poverty, drug addiction, societal injustice and then his own infirmity,” said Bill Friskics-Warren, who spent time with Cash in September 2002 for No Depression, a magazine about alterative country music. “But there was always something very noble about his struggle. He personified the Bob Dylan maxim ‘To live outside the law you must be honest.’ He was always perceived as being honest.”

Cash became half of country music’s first couple when he married his frequent touring partner, June Carter, in 1968. Their marriage — and her stewardship of his many addictions — probably saved his life. It also prompted some of the best albums of his career.

Two of those were “At Folsom Prison” and “At San Quentin,” albums that revealed Cash’s sympathy for the downtrodden and his understanding that a criminal life is often the consequence of bad luck and rotten circumstance — and poverty.

“Those records were powerful because they displayed his reach and vision as an artist,” Friskics-Warren said Friday. “There were some of the humorous songs and gospel songs — which rock fans weren’t wild about — but covers of more contemporary material and the bad-ass rebellious stuff he did at Sun. Through it all, he managed to show the humanity of the people he was singing to. He knew that the humanity was there.”

‘We had a kinship’

One of the most notorious stories in the Cash canon happened on Christmas Day 1982 at his home in Jamaica. Three men armed with a pistol, a hatchet and a knife broke into the house, demanded money, terrorized everyone and threatened the life of Cash’s 12-year-old son, John Carter.

All three robbers were caught and, apparently, put to death. Cash’s reaction after the fact typified his transcendent perspective on good and evil.

“My only certainties,” he wrote in Cash, “are that I grieve for desperate young men and societies that produce and suffer so many of them, and I feel like I knew those boys. We had a kinship ... They were like me.”

“He could be so contradictory because he was so complex,” Friskics-Warren said. “Look, he was publicly against the Vietnam War but he was great friends with Billy Graham, who was Nixon’s personal evangelist. That’s why it’s disappointing how the pop media has portrayed him over the past few years — rather one-dimensionally as a proto-punk or the precursor to the gangsta rapper. He’s much deeper than that.”

“He put forth an image of being the man in black, very tall, strong and unbowed,” Cantwell said, “but there was a tender, sweet gentleman behind all that, a romantic who paid attention to details.”

At the time of his death, Cash was at the peak of a revival due exclusively to rap producer Rick Rubin, who conceived of the “American Recordings” series. That concept had Cash reinterpreting a variety of songs, including some by contemporary artists like Beck, Soundgarden and Nine Inch Nails.

The rebirth was welcomed, especially after the 1980s drought in which Cash played any county fair or hockey rink that would have him. In 1986, Columbia Records dropped Cash..

The mid-1990s revival was especially gratifying for a guy who figured he was being neglected and betrayed by the very music he had helped make an institution.

“Perhaps I’m just alienated, feeling the cold wind of exclusion blowing my way,” he wrote in Cash. “The ’country’ music establishment, including ’country’ radio and the ’Country’ Music Association, does after all seem to have decided that whatever ’country’ is, some of us aren’t.”

He was being diplomatic there. When his first “American Recordings” album was nominated for a contemporary folk Grammy in 1994, Cash and the label took out an ad in Billboard magazine that delivered a message to country music. The accompanying photograph showed an old photo of Cash thrusting a middle finger into the camera.

Cash’s fourth and last “American” album, “The Man Comes Around,” went gold, propelled no doubt by its seven nominations at the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards.

The Cash resurgence, some say, is good for him, though it seems confined to a novel chapter of his long career. The notion of Cash covering Nine Inch Nails seems hilarious, until you listen to his interpretation of “Hurt.” The video, too, is haunting: a gloomy piece of nostalgia; Johnny Cash starring in his own eulogy.

“More than anyone, he has done a thorough job of capturing the complexity of life in a body of work,” Cantwell said. “I worry that over the next few weeks, people will focus on the recent rock connection as the climax of the story. It wasn’t. He wasn’t just one thing. He was so many different things and there were so many climaxes: Sun Records ... the gospel music ... and his life with June. She was elemental to him. She saved his life.”

June Carter Cash died in May, a loss that no doubt compounded her husband’s ailments and softened his will to remain earthbound.

“Everyone I know/Goes away in the end,” he sings in “Hurt,” a song about drug addiction and another moment of dark candor from a complicated man who remained simple and honest until the end.

Comments

[onthemark]

God bless Johnny Cash

[SinCityDisciple]

R.I.P.

[josh]

five years and still music isn't the same....

[Tim Finn]

I can't count the times I've been at a show since he died and before it starts or between bands the PA plays a Johnny Cash song and the crowd goes a little crazy, no matter how young or old it is. It's not always a signature song, either. Sometimes just the sound of his voice sends people in to orbit. Other than the Beatles, I can't think of anyone whose appeal is so universal.