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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P A I N T+I T+B L A C K+ |+P A G E+2+O F +2

His power and his pain. It was as if Johnny Cash were James Dean crawling from the wreckage of that long-ago car crash. Have you seen recent pictures of the singer? It looks like he's carrying rocks in his mouth. The man must be in constant pain. The word is that in the '50s, some cracker dentist stitched a metal plate in Cash's mouth, and now the metal has fused with bone and tissue. It can't be removed. "But I can be in pain, go on stage and my pain disappears," Cash once reported. "Doctors have said it's because of adrenaline. As far as I'm concerned, it's a power that comes to you from God."

I don't doubt the sincerity of Cash's vision of power and glory, but I wonder if his "metal plate story" was just a dodge to cover the onset of Parkinson's? Although knowing the way life works, it would come as no surprise that Cash would be stricken with both afflictions. "Kid's stuff compared to what Job suffered," he'd say if he could read this.

If he could talk.

Reports out of Nashville indicate that Cash has something called "Shy-Drager Syndrome," a Parkinson's-related disease that among other things destroys the nervous system so the victim can't speak. This seems an unbearable tragedy for a singer. It might seem bitterly ironic that Cash's last statement may be a book, not an album, but becoming an author has always been important to the man. In 1965, he told Music Business magazine, "I'm going to disappear into a cabin in the woods and start writing a book. The first will be science fiction because I'm a bug on that. The second, if I ever have time to finish the first, will be all about what I've seen and learned about people -- and that's a lot." Cash never "bugged" out and wrote that sci-fi tale, although he did write a novel about St. Paul, "The Man in White," along with two memoirs of what he's seen and done. The man has seen a lot of sickness and pain.

We all know the mantra "die young and leave a good-looking corpse," but Mom and Pop never warned us that the majority of our cultural heroes would get old and sick and die off just before we did the same. Of course, most of our parents weren't hip. "Hip" was invented right after World War II, but didn't go national until Elvis did Ed Sullivan. So that now, at century's end, we find ourselves suddenly surrounded by all these hip -- and old -- men: Cash, Ray Charles, Dylan, Mick and Keith (one of the old goats posing shirtless on the cover of the new Rolling Stone). Another magazine, Time (or was it Newsweek?), informs us that we're all going to live into our late 70s, which is good news if we're looking forward to quality rocker time in some old folks home. Otherwise, we need to start preparing for our dark senior years with some role models.

Like Johnny Cash. He is demonstrating the mortality or immortality of hip. This isn't to say that the man is "out." Not by a long shot. Two days ago he went home from Baptist, not the first starch white hospital room the man has walked out of alive. I have to laugh when I read how in '88, just before he went under the knife for double bypass surgery, he took a drag off a cigarette. Goddammit, the man is terminally cool ...

But I want Cash to live forever. And keep making records. I want to turn this piece into an Annie Dillard-style essay convincing us all to pray for the recovery of Cash's health. But I have no idea how to write something like that.

I've never had the faith to pray.

What I can do is encourage you to track down and read Cash's liner notes for "American Recordings" -- a six-page, hand-written facsimile in which he rhapsodizes Zen-like about the guitars in his life. What they felt like. How his fingers moved over the frets. "It doesn't matter to me that I only know three or four chords," he writes. "With the left fingers on the frets, the heel of my right hand hugging the body of the guitar, letting just my right thumb lead and drive the rhythm, sometimes it's magic, and I just believe that when it all comes together, it's the right way for me to do it."

Read that, and then, if you can, picture the heels of your own hands touching, with the fingers on the right hand slipping between the fingers on the left hand. Then maybe you can say a small prayer for Johnny Cash. If you have trouble with that, maybe try to play a little Cash music on your sound system this week, and the vibes will somehow reach that old soldier over in Nashville, Tennessee.
SALON | Dec. 5, 1997

David Bowman is the author of the forthcoming novel "Bunny Modern" (Little, Brown, January 1998).