Bad Is Good

At the tail-end of last year I read Johnny Cash's autobiography, which was good food for my soul - equal parts moving, hilarious (unintended irony abounds here) and provocative (inasmuch as reading about suicidal speed binges and Minnnie Pearl can be provocative). A part of Cash's life that never made it into Walk The Line is the ostrich attack he boldly (while stoned) provoked in the Eighties, which almost killed him. The bird clawed into his abdomen, which provided Cash the opportunity to feed a lethal dose of Valium directly into the oozing wound a little while later. Again, this scene never made it into the movie...and that's particularly interesting to me. If I was the director of Walk The Line, the movie would have opened with this scene. But I suppose the literal confounds the mythopoetic compulsion. And (apparently) people need to view Cash as a man who never relapsed (often), who didn't suffer from eternally poor judgment (see ostrich attack), and who had a kind of hillbilly genius (he didn't. That would be Carl Perkins). I like the music of Johnny Cash, and I probably like it even more now that I know what an insane, conflicted fuckup he was. Being that fucked up isn't interesting, per se. But being that fucked up and also being a working singer-songwriter, father, husband, and recalcitrant Christian - is 63% interesting. Spanning the Rilkean contradictions of his conflicted personality was this faux image, "Cash"/The Man In Black, and that unifying lie is what paid his rent. It's also the lie that Walk The Line depicts. Also, June didn't redeem Johnny near as much as Rick Rubin did. And that door swung both ways...