Salon | Sharps and Flats: Paint it black

T A B L E__T A L K

Which of today's musicians have a real chance of being remembered 100 years from now? Sound off in the Music section of Table Talk.

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R E C E N T L Y

Various Artists
Closed on Account of Rabies
Mouth Almighty/Mercury
(12/04/97)

Stephane Grappelli, 1908-1997
By Stacey Kors
(12/03/97)

Erykah Badu
Live
Kedar/Universal
(12/02/97)

Chumbawamba
Tubthumpers
Revolution Records
(12/01/97)

Simon & Garfunkel
Old Friends
Columbia/Legacy
(11/26/97)

Paul Simon
Songs from 'The Capeman'
Warner Bros.
(11/26/97)

BROWSE THE
MUSIC ARCHIVES

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V O W E L L

Sound Salvation
By Sarah Vowell
The presidential suite
(11/14/97)

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B O O K S

The Rolling Stone Book of Women in Rock
Essays on women's role in rock history, and on artists ranging from Tammy Wynette to Courtney Love
(11/18/97)

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Paint it black

A PRAYER FOR

HIS HOLY HIPNESS,

JOHNNY CASH

BY DAVID BOWMAN | Only a few of us know about Jackson Pollock's lost years in the late '50s/early '60s, the painter's "amphetamines days" where every morning he'd down handfuls of those little white Benzedrine tablets scored with crosses. Then blaze all day. The artist driving the back roads of the rural South with Elvis Presley and Roy Orbison and Carl Perkins in the car -- all those boys howling at the sun and the moon. By midnight, Pollock would always be alone, holed up in some Days Inn motel room. Maybe he'd take a power saw to the furniture, just for kicks. Other nights he'd paint the whole room aquamarine blue. Then wait for the paint to dry reading the Gideon Bible. Under the influence of the epistles of Paul, Jackson Pollock began painting his motel rooms black. Everything black. The walls, the desk, the bed. A decade later he'd joke that he was the original Man Who Paints in Black, five years before Mark Rothko. Now, even later then that, ex-wild man Jackson Pollock has been lying in Baptist Hospital in Nashville with double pneumonia, fighting for his life.

I lie. Jackson Pollock is long dead, of course. The man I write of is Johnny Cash, aka The Man in Black. I figure you've all heard stories of Cash's wild days, the ones that started in the Elvis Presley 1950s, when Cash also made records at Sun Studios. And ended in 1967, when Cash crawled into Nicajack Cave in Tennessee wanting to die. (Or maybe ended a little later, after Cash was addicted to painkillers after performing for troops in Vietnam. Or ended even later in the '70s, after Cash became Billy Graham's right-hand man.) Whenever Cash's wild days ended, I wanted your first image of Cash to be that of an iconoclastic artist. I know that many of us picture Johnny Cash as just an entertainer who does "Mom and Dad's music." I know the rest of us now see Cash as one of America's most poignant artists -- a righteous singer-songwriter with the persona of some Old Testament prophet.

Just before Halloween, that old prophet had been performing in Flint, Mich., singing chestnuts like his 1956 hit "Folsom Prison Blues" -- with it's Mickey Spillane line, "I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die." The Man in Black also performed a good sampling of his recent acoustic "heavy metal" (or maybe "heavy prairie") songs about Jesus and tattoos and shooting any unfaithful bitch who betrays you, and how Judas Iscariot was spotted carrying John Wilkes Booth. In the middle of the performance, Cash dropped his pick, then stumbled as he reached for it. Reportedly, the audience laughed, thinking he was doing slap-slick. But then Cash stood at the mike and announced that he had Parkinson's disease.

The next morning, he was in New York City, intending to hawk his new HarperCollins autobiography, "Cash," on a talk show. But just before the cameras rolled, Cash found he could no longer talk. It was no frog in his throat. It's like the nerves in his vocal chords just went dead. His family rushed him off the set, pulled the plug on the book tour and flew the singer in a private plane back to Nashville, where he was put on a ventilator in Baptist Hospital, just down the hallway from Waylon Jennings (not the first time this has happened), who was recuperating from a stroke.

It doesn't seem that anyone in Nashville is going gentle into any goddamn good night.

As we wait hoping that J.R. Cash will recover (he was born with only initials for a name), let's take stock of his life from his lively just-published autobiography. "Cash" is his second memoir, and it's written in the same stream-of-consciousness style as his first, "The Man in Black" (1975). In both books, we jump from explanations of why Cash dresses in black (back in 1954, when he formed Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two with Luther Perkins and Marshall Grant, show-biz etiquette dictated that they wear matching clothes. And black was the only color common to their wardrobes ... "Anyway, black is better for church," writes Cash) to chapters dealing with "I clearly remember the first mood-altering drug to enter my body." His new book also tells us how Bob Dylan wrote him letters in the early '60s, a correspondence that Cash stores in a safe-deposit vault. We find out that Cash was the first American to learn that Josef Stalin has died (Cash was in the Army transcribing Russian Morse code). The new book also assures us that Cash has never done time in prison, an assumption thousands of fans still harbor. Cash admits to spending a night or two in jail, but he doesn't go into the charges -- which, for the record, include smuggling narcotics across the Mexican border, getting busted in Mississippi for being under the influence of bennies and picking flowers in the middle of the night ("Come along wild flower child, don't you know that it's 2 a.m.?" Cash once sang of the event). And my favorite: burning down a national forest in California. Johnny Cash has done all this, but he's never been in the pen except as a performer.

Fellow singer Merle Haggard has described being a con in San Quentin and seeing a Cash Christmas show in '58. Haggard told me that Cash followed a striptease number (as impossible as that sounds). Whether or not it was a combination of naked women and Johnny Cash, or just Cash alone, Haggard was so moved that he vowed to go straight.

N E X T+P A G E +| Demonstrating the immortality of hip