Johnny Cash, survivor

Co-author says new biography reveals the man behind the Man in Black

Rob Patterson

Special to the American-Statesman

Published: Nov. 27, 1997

Long before Johnny Cash made his "American Recordings" album with uber-hipster producer Rick Rubin, and music critics who'd heard little more than Cash's hits started declaring him to be cool, writer Patrick Carr knew that Cash was as hip a human and an artist as there is, and always had been.

"There's cool, and then there's merchandising," said Carr, a contributing editor with Country Music magazine. "And then there's the merchandising of cool. And then there's someone who is just totally, utterly, naturally cool like Cash -- who just is that way."

So the perception that Rubin revived a moribund artist is not entirely correct, even if Cash's recordings with the producer who helped launch the Beastie Boys did bring the legendary country singer to a new audience. During the late '80s and early '90s, when Cash's music was flying beneath the commercial radar, he still made records "with some really good stuff in there," Carr said. "It's not alternative-sounding material, it's not stuff that would generally fly in the college market today, but it was really good Johnny Cash music."

By now, Carr has been proselytizing for Cash for a good quarter century, and the payoff for such devotion is his co-authoring of "Cash: The Autobiography" (Harper San Francisco), where the musical icon takes an uncommonly honest and eveN humble look at himself and his life.

Carr first met Cash in 1972, when he was "a fly on the wall" at a recording session at The House of Cash, and wrote about it for the Village Voice. "One impression that I had was that Cash had that thingpeople talk about: magnetism, an aura, a vibe, an energy, all that stuff. I remember noticing that Cash kind of vibrated, and not in the biochemical way. He gave off an energy which was apparent. Cash is one of those guys who, even if you didn't know who he was, if he walked into a room, you would know that somebody had arrived."

Since then, he's interviewed Cash "every two or three years." When Carr began thinking in recent years about doing a book on the legendary country singer, he discovered that "we were running along separate and parallel tracks." "He'd been considering doing another autobiography, and I'd decided that it was time for a serious Johnny Cash biography. I wrote to him and suggested that I wanted to do such a thing,and asked him what his attitude would be: would he cooperate, would he talk to me, would he stay neutral, or would he actively oppose it? So he called me and suggested that we do this."

Carr believes that the public perception of Cash does sometimes miss some things he's discovered about the Man in Black. "I think if there's one component missing from his image, it's his down-to-earth humor. I don't think that comes across in his image and his music. You would never guess he's a very funny man, very quick-witted. He's always laughing about one thing or another.

"So one of the surprises to me when I first got to know him was that he had a sense of humor, and a sense of irony. And he had a pretty good grasp on how things worked, how politics worked, and things in general. "In those years he was pretty outspoken about being Christian. If you remember the early '70s, there were some pretty serious stereotypes running around in those days. So somebody who was a Christian, when viewed from the point of a young, urban, middle-class atheist, wasn't supposed to be articulate, intelligent, individualistic, smart, funny -- so he was a real eye-opener. He was one of the first people to start shooting holes in that stereotypical thinking for me."

Carr believes he and Cash did succeed in showing something about the man behind the image. "What he wanted to do with this book was go into himself more deeply than 'Man In Black' did, tell the truth about himself, tell the truth on himself, and reveal his inner self as well as his public life. He was very revelatory. I think he described himself very well. He was very honest."

With even the National Enquirer now speculating on Cash's recently announced battle with Shy-Drager syndrome, which has effects similar to Parkinson's disease, Carr declines to comment on the singer's condition, other than saying that he believes Cash will do all he can to overcome the affliction. After all, there's something else he's learned about his co-author over the years: "Johnny Cash is a survivor."