Johnny Cash Walks The Line...
This article originally appeared on Circus, March 1970
JOHNNY CASH the Misfit: Drug induced and being busted for possession of benzedrine at the Mexican border happened long after he had made a name for himself for 'I Walk The Line', 'Ring of Fire', and of course 'Folsom Prison Blues'. He considers 'I Walk The Line' his best song still. He's made a career out of being enigmatic, degenerate and well meaning. And talented. Because behind all of the myth there is that irresistible Cash voice that lets him get away with it all.
The voice has a tremor and slips its way into your heart without a bit of friction. His best album is Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, his most successful, Johnny Cash at San Quentin. The voice, with its fabulous low notes, its emotional twinge, its outlaw bravado, is, if nothing else, profoundly masculine.
At a Madison Square Garden concert recently he said, "You know, people always ask me about messages in my songs and what I really want to say. Mostly I don't like messages in songs, but if I ever did sing a song with a message, I'd say that the one I'm about to sing sums up pretty well what I think about a lot of things." The remark sounded unadorned and sudden. "Listen to the words, will you?" he begged the audience and proceeded to sing a song about how Christ was crucified. "Seems like all of our best men get stones thrown at them," he added; a remark which indicates, in light of his current success, either that he still thinks stones are being thrown at him, or, more likely, that he no longer considers himself among the best of men.
Although Cash is symbolic of a soulful older generation to many, particularly well bred college kids, he himself seems racked by the same kind of guilt. He sings of jails without having been a convict, of trains, of the American Indian, of problems which were actually before his time, but reminiscent of the early Guthrie enthralled Bob Dylan in his love for old America. But old America was cruel, liberated though it was from the crueler past, it placed a heavy burden on its sons; mythic manhood to be earned through suffering. To be born in 1932 with open eyes and listening ears and feelings was to be warped.
Johnny Cash is Allen Ginsberg, born in Arkansas to Protestant parents and growing up in poverty. He was denied the satisfaction of total poverty: "I never actually had to go hungry," he has said. "There were always rabbits to shoot. My daddy would give me a gun and two bullets and he'd expect me to come back with two rabbits. Even now when I go hunting, I only take two bullets." So Ginsberg is for peace, vegetarianism and gayhood, while Cash is unsure, a hunter, and married. It's an interesting comparison of the two cultures.
Going to a Cash concert in New York is like visiting America. "I had forgotten what America was like before I saw Johnny," said novelist Henry Edwards after seeing Cash. He reflects every contradiction and every charm of the country, showing the decay and the lingering life of a generation. He starts his show all dressed in black as the pot bellied cowboy who can still fight with the best of them. His acoustic guitar is drowned out by the electric Tennesese Three, but his voice croons far above them. During the concert a shirtless freak jumps on stage and shakes his fists at Cash in rage. Four cops drag the offender off brutally. "Oh come on, leave him alone," Cash persuaded. Anti-establishment in the most personal sense. Yet when he talks about the war in Vietnam, which he forcefully brings up, he says, "People are starting to ask questions about things more than they used to, and wherever we go we hear questions about Vietnam. A year ago, if anyone had showed a way to get out of there, I would have followed him, but at this point there's only one man who we can look to and that's President Nixon and I think we've got to stand behind him. You know," he went on, "we took our show to Vietnam, and people said to me, 'Well that makes you a hawk' and when I saw the injured boys being flown to the hospitals in helicopters I said 'Well I'm a dove — with claws'." The hawks in Madison Square Garden clearly outnumbered the doves as the "stand behind" section of the speech garnered five times as much applause as the qualifier which went: "But we still ought to write the President and remind him of the promise he made to get those boys back here" which came a minute later. The hippies in the audience squirmed and made nervous jokes about the cowboys. They wanted so much to say "but we're your people, Johnny," but he didn't want to hear it. Like a father who refuses to choose between two sons, Cash bridged the gap with platonic logic as he followed the remarks with two related songs. First, 'When Johnny Comes Marching Home', a war song, and then, incredibly, 'Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream', forever eliminating any sissy connotations to the message.
That Cash should feel honor bound to comment on the war is typical of his values. Perhaps the least likely individual to get involved in political action (it's awfully un-country), he is simply giving his brand of good old country patriotism. Most country singers, when they enter this vein, sing maudlin chauvinistic stars and stripes songs, usually eulogizing an army chaplain or a religious dying soldier. But then, Cash is the performer who finds his most receptive audiences in prisons. Disgusted by most of the country scene ("When I played San Quentin for the first time five years ago" he said, "Merle Haggard was sitting right in the front row."), he nonetheless claims it as his own with a contradictory sense not unlike the Hells Angels, the ultimate outlaws, when they beat up "communist" peace demonstrators, outraged at their unpatriotism.
Cash presents the image of the ultimate degenerate, a character out of a Bob Dylan 'Desolation Row' fantasy. Wasted, bitter, drunk, pill head, country and western singer. But by exposing his weak side, a side which is not unique among country singers, he gives tremendous credence to his emotional traditional down home side. What can one say when a man introduces his 72 year old father at his concert? How can his motives possibly be suspect when he has just sung a song about cocaine? Johnny Cash is really real.
What he is, is a mystery as perplexing as what America is. That he is charming, lovable, professional and alive is beyond question. He appeals to perhaps the widest audience of any American performer. He has been selling records consistently for 13 years, a record matched only by Elvis Presley, who never has distinguished himself as a writer and a thinker as Cash has. Moreover, his name has been linked with countless other musicians reaching such disparate stars as Joe Tex and Bob Dylan. And he married into America's greatest folk family, the Carters.
What kind of man is it that can have such depth in background and still put on one of the worst (and in its own way most vulgar) television shows ever brought to the screen? Well the years have taken their toll, that's all. Almost as if a pact of sorts had been signed, Cash took the role of the biggest record seller in the country. Simultaneously he aged, showed puffiness in his face and a kind of slickness which only comes from reputation. His voice is as good as ever, but his message is more obscure. That he considers 'I Walk The Line' his best song indicates that he competes not only against his super ego but against himself as well. I doubt if there was ever a more revealing Cash song than 'A Boy Named Sue' which was appropriately his biggest hit. That he could sing it and still bring his father to the concert shows where the struggle is. The microcosm in that song — the macrocosm in Vietnam while the reality dangles tantalizingly in front, ungraspable.
His new album is called Hello, I'm Johnny Cash, the line that gets ecstatic ovations from audiences all over the world. Although "Because you're mine I walk the line" might seem to sum him up quite well, as well as his concept of love: "and it burns burns burns in that ring of fire", a quote from the Beatles, superficially light years removed from him might be more appropriate: "Boy you're gonna carry that weight/Carry that weight a long time."
