Hey Jakey,

File this one under "posters I wish to hell I had designed." Wow. Simple, elegant. Retro, contemporary. Jealous, bitter.

So I snuck out of the house for a couple of hours last night and saw the new Johnny Cash movie, "Walk the Line." I was duly impressed. Joaquin Phoenix, a hottie in his own right, is nowhere near as handsome as a young Johnny Cash, and Reese Witherspoon is ten times cuter than a young June Carter, but the movie worked on many different levels. For the first act of the movie, we are led to believe that there is no way in hell that Joaquin can pull this off. That there's no way he can sound like Johnny Cash, but in one instant, all that is stripped away, and BOOM, you're scrambling thru your mental notes trying to remember if Joaquin was indeed lip-synching, or dammit, didn't I read somewhere that he wasn't? As the movie progressed, he even started kinda looking and moving like JC, and he sure as hell sounded like him.

Anyway, in honor of the mini-JC mania that is sweeping the nation right about now, here I present the column that I wrote the week that he died. For some reason, this was one of the few columns that I ever wrote that generated any kind of response from readers. Seems like more than a few people have fond memories growing up with the Man in Black.

Postcard from the Editor
Sept. 17, 2003

"Come along with me, misery loves company..."

I was fortunate enough not to have grown up with Barney. He didn’t love me, I didn’t love him. And I was already listening to Van Halen and AC/DC by the time Raffi burst onto the scene. Instead, I grew up with the gunfighter ballads of Marty Robbins, Tom T. Hall’s odes to pickup trucks, Roger Miller’s whacked-out lyrics about roller skating with buffalos. I learned to spell D-I-V-O-R-C-E with Tammy Wynette, and I cranked up the stereo and sang into a wooden spoon, “you ain't woman enough to take my man,” with Loretta. But most of all, before I learned to crawl, I walked the line with Johnny Cash.

My dad absolutely adored the Man in Black. There was an ornate mahogany console stereo the size of a modern-day SUV in the living room when I was growing up. At any given time, you could hear the high-fidelity strains of Cash’s booming basso voice pouring out of the speakers, loud enough to reach all the way to the garage, where I was probably helping my dad build a birdhouse, or handing him tools while he fixed up the old Ford truck.

His everyday language was peppered with snatches of Johnny Cash songs, and driving with him down the road, singing without benefit of a radio, you’d probably be treated to excerpts from at least five different songs before you got to where you were going. It made for a twisted childhood. My friends were clamoring for Shaun Cassidy and Bay City Roller LPs, but I was saving up for Johnny Cash's Christmas album. I coveted my dad’s Jim Reeves and Porter Wagoner albums. Dear God, I even looked forward to watching Hee Haw on TV every weekend, because I thought Buck Owens was kinda cute and that absolutely NO ONE could pick and grin like that Roy Clark.

In the words of Barbara Mandrell, I was country before country was cool. Well, okay, in my set, country was NEVER cool. I finally accepted that at some point in the 1980s. I struck off on my own during that decade, listening to punk and metal and whatever was fed to me on MTV, but never really forgetting that what I truly, secretly loved was murder ballads and songs about trains. College turned me on to yet another world of listening pleasure, music outside the realm of mainstream radio: Elvis Costello, the Replacements, Social Distortion. It was during this phase that it all started to come around full-circle. Some of these songs were actually reminiscent of the country that I had grown up listening to. Combined now with the punk sensibilities instilled in me later on in life, this new “alt.country” music really took off in the ‘90s. It was just a few songs at first, country-ish flavored tunes on a couple of different albums, then I discovered that there were actually bands that played this stuff all the time. The Jayhawks, Son Volt, 16 Horsepower, The Bottle Rockets, Blue Mountain. They sounded like they could be bastard children of George Jones and The Clash. Or the Sex Pistols and Johnny Cash.

Johnny Cash had been in poor health for a while, but the news of his death last Sunday still managed to sting. It was like hearing of the death of a favorite uncle. I haven’t talked to my dad about it yet, but I’m sure he probably shed a tear or two. I’ll always equate the sound of a Johnny Cash song with the whine of a power tool in my dad’s capable hands. The immortal lyric “My name is SUE, how do you DO!” will always evoke the memory of sitting on a block of ice, after a nasty, debilitating fall on my butt, asking my dad to sing me funny songs to chase away the humiliation and pain.

“I taught the weeping willow how to cry, cry, cry; and I showed the clouds how to cover up a clear blue sky” will never be a particularly sad lyric to me, because that’s what my dad was singing that day we caught all those fish. Johnny Cash was the sound of my growing up, and now he’s gone. “I don’t like it, but I guess things happen that way…”