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158 pages

English

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In 1992, Johnny Cash was battered and bruised. In constant pain through heart problems, broken bones and the aftermath of a second bout of drug addiction, his career wasn’t in much better shape than his body. One of his last singles for CBS, before they dumped him in 1986 after nearly 30 years, had been ‘Chicken In Black’ – in the video he appeared as a superhero fowl, dressed in cape, yellow shirt and tights. At the age of 60, all the signs were that Cash was ready for the museum. In fact, he was building one. Already an exhibit in the Country Music Hall of Fame, when he wasn’t playing small, shabby venues like Roadie’s Roadhouse, Mississauga, Ontario or Butlins Southcoast World in Bognor Regis, he was preparing to open the Cash Country theme park in Branson, Missouri.

Cut to a little under two years later. December 1993. Cash is playing the Viper Room on Sunset Boulevard in front of 150 of the hippest people in America. He is introduced by Johnny Depp; the audience includes Sean Penn, Juliette Lewis and assorted Red Hot Chili Peppers. They cheer him to the rafters for the full ninety minutes. His big bass baritone gets a whole song to itself on Zooropa, the new U2 album, while he has just completed recording his landmark American Recordings, made with Midas-like hip-hop and metal producer Rick Rubin. He won a Grammy for that record and a fistful more for his five other American Recordings albums. He played an unforgettable Glastonbury set in 1994 and was feted by one and all, from Nick Cave and Bono to Trent Reznor and Joe Strummer. From thereon until his death in 2003 (and beyond), Cash was, once again, the epitome of hip. Big Daddy cool.

What happened?

The Resurrection Of Johnny Cash tells the story of perhaps the most remarkable turnaround in musical history. As well as acknowledging Cash’s drug, drink and religious travails in the fifties and sixties, the book digs much deeper, focusing on a lesser known but no less remarkable period of his life: the inglorious fall post-1970 and the almost biblical rebirth in his later years. Homing in on the ten-year period between 1986 and 1995 The Resurrection Of Johnny Cash features dozens of exclusive new interviews, including conversations with Rosanne Cash, Will Oldham, U2’s Adam Clayton and Nick Lowe. It tells in detail the story of Cash’s sometimes humiliating fall from grace and his unprecedented revival; his struggle with a cruel variety of illnesses; his ongoing battles with addiction; his search to find direction in his career; the reaffirmation of his core traits as both an artist and a man; and his hugely influential legacy.

Sujets

Musique

Culture musicale

Music

Business Aspects

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Publié par	Jawbone Press
Date de parution	01 avril 2011
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781906002930
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

The Resurrection of Johnny Cash
Hurt, Redemption, And American Recordings
Graeme Thomson
A Jawbone Book
First Edition 2011
Published in the UK and the USA by Jawbone Press
2a Union Court,
20–22 Union Road,
London SW4 6JP,
England
www.jawbonepress.com
ISBN 978-1-906002-93-0
Editor: John Morrish
Volume copyright © 2011 Outline Press Ltd. Text copyright © 2011 Graeme Thomson. All rights reserved. No part of this book covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or copied in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles or reviews where the source should be made clear. For more information contact the publishers.
The photographs used in this book came from the following sources. Jacket: Michael Linssen/Redferns/Getty Images. Sun Records: Colin Escott/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images. Folsom Prison: Hulton Archive/Getty Images. Spring Fever: CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images. Highwaymen: Ebet Roberts/Getty Images. Dylan concert: Ebet Roberts/Getty Images. One Bad Pig (2): One Bad Pig. Hendersonville 1994: Beth Gwinn/Redferns/Getty Images. SXSW: Catherine McGann/Getty Images. Unchained sessions (2): Kevin Estrada/Retna. Hammerstein Ballroom: Richard Corkery/New York Daily News/Getty Images. Los Angeles 2002 (2): Martyn Atkins. Hendersonville 2002: John Chiasson/Getty Images.

Contents
Prologue: The Man Turns Around
Chapter 1: The Sound Of Johnny Cash
Chapter 2: Coming Down
Chapter 3: Sin And Redemption
Chapter 4: I’m Leavin’ Now
Chapter 5: Against The Wind
Chapter 6: Still In Town
Chapter 7: Outside Looking In
Photographs
Chapter 8: American Recordings
Chapter 9: Selling A Man, Selling A Myth
Chapter 10: You Remembered Me
Chapter 11: I Won’t Back Down
Chapter 12: Drive On
Chapter 13: Oh, Bury Me Not
Endnotes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
About The Author

Prologue: The Man Turns Around
The British leg of Johnny Cash’s 1993 European tour was all wrapped up in a single day. On February 3 he appeared at Butlin’s Southcoast World in Bognor Regis, a resort town about 50 miles south west of London. The booking possessed all the giddy glamour one might reasonably expect when an ageing country singer without a record deal turns up at a dowdy, down-at-heel seaside holiday camp in late winter. Everything about the occasion seemed a trifle careworn and out-of-season, and that included Cash, who trotted with brisk, perfunctory efficiency through his afternoon set and evening performance to a crowd primarily comprised of elderly diehards – many decked out in the faux-Wild West regalia of rhinestone, spurs, and Stetsons – and slightly bewildered families.
Anybody looking for a symbolic summation of the hard road Cash had travelled in the previous two decades needn’t have looked too far. The message could hardly have been spelt out more clearly had it adorned one of the gaudy flashing signs that advertised the Autosplash ride, mini-supermarket, and fairground stalls. Cash had gone from raising hell within the towering walls of San Quentin to grinding through the gears at the last outpost on the cabaret circuit; he had morphed from twitching, genre-busting maverick into a family entertainer at the kind of resort where the tide was always out.
This was several years before the All Tomorrow’s Parties music festival began the process of reinventing Butlin’s as a post-ironic destination for alternative music fans. In February 1993 there was no hint of such winking revisionism; everything was what it seemed. Southcoast World’s forthcoming attractions included such past-their-prime acts as soul veteran Edwin Starr and some bastard variation of The Village People, as well as zero-credibility British comics Timmy Mallet, Little & Large, and The Krankies. Cash was not keeping the kind of company that spoke of a career travelling in an upwardly trajectory. There was no convoy of breathless tastemakers and hip hacks rushing to catch a glimpse of his reflected glory or crown him King Patriarch of Generation X. This was a different time. Q magazine – which specialised in displaying a humorous irreverence to rock’s sacred cows – sent a writer, but only to capture the sheer incongruity of it all, to mark what seemed to be a significant and symbolic point in the decline of an icon from another time.
“There was a certain air of resignation about him, and the show was pretty much going through the motions,” recalls journalist Mick Houghton, who interviewed Cash at Butlin’s. “The first show in the afternoon was dire, actually, although the second one had more energy about it. To me it was a bit ‘how the mighty have fallen’. I felt a tinge of sadness, there was something forlorn and shabby about it all. When you see these places in daylight it all looks incredibly tacky, the rides seemed a bit rusty – and somehow I felt the same about Johnny Cash.”
As an American, Cash would not necessarily have recognised the cultural significance of playing somewhere like Bognor Regis. It was just another show on the schedule, one of the hundred-plus dates he still played each year that kept his career rolling along ever since the record sales had dried up. The charmless specifics of the booking at Southcoast World – the damp, grey sea air hanging like a shroud; Cash’s nagging cold; the teen disco called Hollywoods – were in the end less important in themselves than the way in which they seemed to encapsulate where he had landed towards the tail end of his career.
In the early 90s, Cash was a bruised legend whose future lay some distance behind him. He was in continual pain through a bewildering and cruel variety of illnesses, broken bones, and the aftershock of a second, punishing bout of drug addiction, and his career wasn’t in much better shape than his body; he had been dropped in 1986 by Columbia, his record company of nearly 30 years. It’s tempting to conclude that Cash had simply floundered in the slipstream of the colossal changes which had swept through Nashville in the 80s, when the advent and escalation of country music radio and the thirst for younger, sleeker exponents of the art form had transformed the industry.
That was part of the story, certainly, but wasn’t Cash supposed to be bigger than that? Alone among country’s big cats, wasn’t he in possession of the kind of pan-generational, multi-platform appeal that enabled him to survive the changing seasons of the recording industry? Seemingly not. In truth Cash had been heading further off course since the mid 70s, partly under his own steam and partly pulled by riptides beyond his control.
Now, mere days away from his 61st birthday, all the signs indicated that he was ready for a future of benign and unchallenging semi-retirement; he was already the youngest member of the Country Music Hall of Fame. When he wasn’t playing insalubrious venues like Southcoast World, or Roadie’s Roadhouse, Mississauga, or an Amusement Park at Sandusky, Ohio, he was preparing to open the Cash Country entertainment complex in Branson, Missouri. The small town in the Ozarks had become a kind of benevolent home for creatively spent country singers like Roy Clark, Boxcar Willie, and Mel Tillis, troupers who had enjoyed their day in the spotlight but knew when it was time to settle for sentiment and nostalgia. Cash had enjoyed a fine run, better than most, but his days as a creatively vibrant artist seemed well and truly over.
Cut to a little under a year later.
On December 7 1993, Johnny Cash played a solo acoustic gig – his first ever – at the Viper Room nightclub on Sunset Boulevard. He was introduced on stage by Johnny Depp. The select audience of 150 included some of the hippest people in America, among them Sean Penn, Juliette Lewis, Henry Rollins, and assorted Red Hot Chili Peppers. They listened to Cash sing his life for over an hour in something close to awe, hurried back home, and raved about it to anyone within earshot.
He had recently performed ‘The Wanderer’ on U2’s latest album, Zooropa , released in July. By the end of 1993 it had sold three million copies, at a conservative estimate at least 200 times as many units as Cash’s last album, The Mystery Of Life . His big bass baritone had taken hold of the song and inhabited it utterly, so much so that it sounded like it could only ever have been sung by one man.
Most significantly, at the time of the Viper Room gig Cash had almost completed work on his landmark American Recordings album, made with Rick Rubin, the inscrutable, Midas-like hip hop and metal producer who had founded the Def Jam and Def American record labels. It would be released in April 1994, fanfared with a wave of MTV coverage and further ‘tastemaker’ shows at South By Southwest and the Glastonbury festival, each about as far from Southcoast World as it was possible to travel, culturally speaking, without falling off the edge of the planet.
The net result was that Cash was suddenly aligned with a new, young, cutting-edge demographic. From thereon until his death in 2003, and beyond into the ever-unfolding present, he became one of those rare artists who travel into old age without sacrificing an ounce of credibility or relevance. He was as critically acclaimed as he had ever been and twice as hip. He was, once again, Big Daddy Cool.
What happened?
The short, simple answer is Rick Rubin. The longer, more complex explanation lies between the covers of this book. It is the story of perhaps the most remarkable turnaround in music history. Cash’s success with American Recordings wasn’t as contrived or as premeditated as a comeback; it was, rather, both a return to something precious and deeply felt, and at the same time an entire reimagining of the cr