Aging gracefully in the entertainment industry is a precarious tightrope walk, wherein a star must lean away from lifeless, by-the-numbers retreads of old successes without falling into fake affectations of youthfulness.  The most high-profile success in recent memory was the geriatric Johnny Cash, who embraced his Christian faith more openly and restricted his booming voice to a gravelly murmur in his American I-VI recordings.  Topping charts with a mournful cover of Nine-Inch Nails’ “Hurt” in 2003, spurring an Oscarbait biopic in 2005, and becoming the second biggest artist of 2006 with 5 million records sold, Cash proved that age, wisdom, and maturity are still bestselling features in music.

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Now, 70-year old pop icon Tom Jones is lifting liberally from Cash’s playbook with his new album Praise and Blame.  Consisting of traditional gospel songs and covers of spiritual songs by artists such as Bob Dylan, P&B features stripped-down folk like Susan Werner’s “Did Trouble Me” and raw, stomp-rock blues like John Lee Hooker’s “Burning Hell.”  The production style, eschewing overdubs and allowing Jones to hit flat notes in all the right places, reflects a desire for authenticity that the Welsh singer hasn’t indulged before in his multi-decade career. 

But apparently, this new creative direction is a “sick joke.”  A leaked email from Island Records’ vice president David Sharpe reads, “We did not invest a fortune in an established artist for him to deliver 12 tracks from the common book of prayer.”  (more…)

Nobody has enjoyed a late career renaissance like Johnny Cash. The series of collaborations he made with Slayer producer Rick Rubin reignited critical interest in his work at a time when Cash believed he was destined to become a touring nostalgia act. The first of these, American Recordings is a fantastic album- raw, dark, stark, stripped down to the Man in Black’s baritone voice and primitive guitar playing. Cash had never sounded young, and he’d always been good with death, but I was shocked by the simplicity of the first lines, the frank, naked, blasé expression of brutality: 

Delia, O Delia
Delia all my life
If I hadn’t have shot poor Delia
I’d have had her for my wife  

Whenever I play American Recordings I find this opening as startling as when I first heard it well over a decade ago. Cash could get close to the darkness without screeching or posing. He was already there. He just started singing in that rumbling baritone and you believed. It’s so powerful that you forget he could also be funny- and indeed, the last track on American Recordings was a joke song, The Man Who Couldn’t Cry.  

Later I discovered that Delia was an old song, that Cash was covering himself. The American series always relied less on Cash’s abilities as a songwriter and more on his skills as an interpreter, even if he was reinterpreting an earlier version of Johnny Cash. Some of the songs covered were selected by Cash, others by Rubin. It was easy to tell which was which: Cash’s sensibilities were steeped in the broad country, gospel and folk tradition, while Rubin favored a narrower palate of heavy metal and alt rock. The miraculous thing was that it worked, most of the time. Cash could invest the adolescent self-loathing of Trent Reznor’s Hurt with the same authority and sincerity as an ancient standard like That Lucky Old Sun, a mournful lament for the difficult life of a working man. The songs on these records sat comfortably alongside each other because Cash’s experience, persona and interpretive gift enabled him to uncover the shared themes of God, pain, redemption, love, violence and longing in the unlikeliest bedfellows.  (more…)

It’s hard to put into words what my father means to me. He’s old school. So writing some emotional, eloquent, diatribe to his greatness would likely embarrass him more than it would pay tribute. There is an art form to the minimalist compliment among men that I’m still trying to master. My favorite scene in “It’s A Wonderful Life” is when George Bailey sits at the table with his father and can’t put into words how he feels about his old man, “You want a shock, Pop? I think you’re a great guy.”

Part of what I love about my father is how he is a vessel that carries the good things from the past into the future. His generation may have brought some bad things along with them too, but we don’t mourn or fear the passing of bad things. It’s the good things that I fear are leaving us, and our society no longer produces men like Lincoln, Johnny Cash or even my dad. That’s what a father is, a vessel that ushers greatness into the next generation. Dads bring great things from the old school to the new school. (more…)

Last night, I dreamed of Johnny Cash.  He was sitting at the edge of my bed with a guitar, strumming and humming no tune in particular.  Then he stopped, looked at me and said, “You got to play, son.”  I woke with a start.

I remember when Cash died in September, 2003.  It was strange that it hit me so hard.  He had, after all, been ill for quite some time.  I remember him being diagnosed with Shy-Drager Syndrome, a mysterious, degenerative nervous ailment.  That turned out to have been a misdiagnosis, though he was still plagued with diabetes, and bouts of pneumonia which hospitalized him for long stretches.  And, of course, the massive drug and alcohol abuse which characterized his early life had taken their toll as Johnny slid from middle into old age.

In the spring of 2003, his wife of over three decades, June Carter Cash (who wrote his most famous song, Ring Of Fire about their tempestuous romance) passed from the earth, leaving Johnny without his best friend and closest companion.  It is a cliched truism that, when one lifelong partner dies, the other often follows in rapid succession.  When two hearts beat together for so long, they can no longer beat independently, and so it proved for Mr. and Mrs. Cash.

I was raised in rural Colorado, with naught but country music to grace my ears through my early youth.  I detested it so, the sad sameness of it all, the poverty of its vision.  Country musicians made music seem so small.  Then I heard Johnny. (more…)

Johnny Cash was punk rock. The birth of rock came when Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison and Cash toured small towns and set the youth on fire. Parents were outraged. The long dippity-doo hair atop gyrating men “dancing like the negroes”  before frothing young girls set mainstream culture against this rebellious little movement. It was our first smell of anarchy and it scared the establishment.

Johnny Ramone

The rebellious spirit of rock is dead. No better evidenced than by its formal endorsement of President Obama. Never before has rock been so central to the inauguration of a president. Bono is an ambassador in sunglasses who still knows how to pull a string and get an audience of thousands to put their fist in the air. (more…)