It's there in so many ways. The wide smile, curling up slightly from
the thin lips. The black hair. The deep, dark eyes that hint of mischief.
The affinity for black clothing. The songs.
She knows how much is a gift and how much is hard work. Take her as she
is.
Hi, I'm Rosanne Cash!
For more than 30 years, the best-known child of Johnny Cash has been
writing and singing songs. She's good at it. She's had some monster hits
— remember Seven Year Ache? Some say her new album, Black
Cadillac, is her best ever. But as talented as she is, she also is
raising a family; so she only occasionally hits the road. One of those
rare trips brought her to Palm Beach March 8, to a benefit at the Mar-a-Lago
Club for the Caron Foundation, a nationwide network of substance-abuse
centers.
While her producer, co-writer, and husband, John Leventhal, goes
through the sound check, Rosanne takes time to talk — to reflect on the
last three tumultuous years and on what's to come.
She knows she has good genes: Daddy was a legend and her mom wasn't so
bad either. But lives aren't built just on heredity: She wants to be
recognized for her own abilities.
First of all, she can sing. And not with Daddy's twang. She's a skilled
musician and possibly even more talented as a songwriter. She's a little
bit Tennessee but a lot more L.A. and New York. She's a little bit country
but a lot more pop and rock. She's proud. She's confused. Angry.
Delighted. Defiant. A little upset about her life in the last three years
when so many dear to her have died, but also optimistic about its course.
Last summer she saw Walk the Line, which became one of the
year's biggest hits and won Reese Witherspoon an Oscar for her portrayal
of stepmother June Carter Cash.
"People come up to me and say, 'Oh the movie was so wonderful, you
must have loved it,' " Rosanne says of well-meaning fans. "And
I'm thinking, did you actually take in what the subject matter was?
"It's very intense and it's not like it was a movie about all the
positive things in my childhood. It's a screen version of the breakup of
my parents' marriage. What kid wants to see that?"
Her mother, she says, deserves a lot more credit than the movie gives
her. Vivian Liberto Cash was married to Johnny for 13 years and bore four
daughters. She divorced him because of his drug problems. She married Dick
Distin, a California cop, and they stayed married for 35 years, enjoying
life "off the line" in Ventura, Calif. She died of complications
from surgery for lung cancer last May on Rosanne's birthday.
"She was so tough. She was incredible," Rosanne said.
"She ordered the universe around her. She had her circle of friends.
Like on her birthday, she would receive 60 birthday cards, just on a
regular birthday, all from close friends. I'm serious.
"She was president of a garden club, she was involved in her
church, she went dancing, she did crafts. She just did everything.
"When she died, my husband said, 'That's an example of a life well
lived.' She involved herself in everything, and loved to give parties. But
she was very, very private."
Nevertheless, before she died, her mother finished a book gleaned from
love letters she and Johnny wrote each other while he was in the Air
Force, mostly in Germany, between 1950 and '54. It's due out next
Valentine's Day.
Bookend deaths, punctuated by Johnny's in September 2003. Add those of
an aunt, a stepsister and godmother in the same period, and no one was
surprised when Rosanne's new album took a sobering look at life and death.
But Black Cadillac, released in January, is anything but morbid.
The hurt is there, but so is optimism.
"It was really a concise, structured period of time. The first
song I wrote a month before June died, and the last song I wrote a month
after my mother died," she said. "The rest were written and
recorded in that two-year period. It was very compelling, but I didn't
have an idea starting out that I was going to do an album about death and
loss. I mean, who would choose to do that?
"But I was dealing with an overwhelming amount of feeling, and as
a songwriter my instincts were to take it to music. So it was very useful
to me to have a sense of poetry and discipline and a rhyme scheme and
melodies to put to all of this. I'm a very structured person anyway, and
to make sense of it in that way was really helpful."
She could have written a book, too. Actually one has been in the works
for four years.
"It's way overdue," she said. "I started it long before
all this happened, but it's coming along. Plus, my editor lives across the
street from me. He takes me to dinner occasionally."
Digging deep
But more than anything, Rosanne is a songwriter.
She believes in the power of a good rhyme. "It removes it from
being a diary," she says. "A song requires work and structure
and it's married to a melody.
"Also, the music is very transcendent. I didn't want to write a
diary or a memoir. If I'd wanted to do that, I would have done it all in
prose."
In the studio, she liked what she heard. "When I was hearing
playback, "I'd go 'Oh, I've got to release this out into the world.'
"I'm 50 years old. My friend (filmmaker) Ethan Russell says you've
got more things to say and less time to say it. Stop hedging your
bets."
So what does she have to say?
She talks about her father in Black Cadillac (the type of car
her father drove):
It was a black Cadillac
that drove you away
now everybody's talking
but they don't have much to say
It was a black sky of rain
none of it fell
now one of us gets to go to heaven
one has to stay here in hell.
She talks about her parents' courtship in I Was
Watching You:
Headlights on a Texas road
Hank Williams on the radio
a church wedding, they spent all they had
now the deal is done to become mom and dad
And I was watching you
from above
long before life
there was love
Baby, I'll be watching you
from above
long after life
there is love.
And in God Is In The Roses, Rosanne, who was raised Catholic and
has explored Buddhism, talks about spirituality:
God is in the roses
the petals and the thorns
storms out on the oceans
the souls who will be born
and every drop of rain that falls
falls for those who mourn
God is in the roses
And the thorns
She's still searching for answers to the biggest questions.
"In my best moments I believe that maybe even we're the ones
who are asleep and the dead are the ones who've woken up. It's nice to
turn that on its ear and ponder that for a while.
"Most of the time I believe in the survival of the soul. Energy
doesn't die, it just transfers. That's a basic law of physics. I have my
moments of deep, dark doubt — that's on the record, too. I mean, it's
human, isn't it? Can you trust people who say they never doubt?"
Demons on Earth
Rosanne believes her role is not to judge but to observe. She saw her
father and other family members and friends battle drugs and booze. They
wrecked her first marriage to country singer Rodney Crowell. That's what
brought Cash to Palm Beach. The Caron Foundation has helped people she
knows.
"I'm so grateful that I don't have that illness, but there are
several people in my family that do or did," Cash said, "and my
heart just breaks for them. Even if they're clean and sober, they struggle
with it for the rest of their lives. The illness is there, and it's just
heartbreaking.
"I have a friend, a really good friend, who just got out of Caron,
a musician. He told me a few days ago he'd played a show and it was the
first time he'd played music on stage straight in more years than he could
remember. He got tears in his eyes. The music was front and center again.
For a musician to be separated from his music by drugs, that's as hard as
being separated from a loved one.
"We all did it in the '80s. Luckily some of us got through it and
woke up and went, 'No.' Some didn't. Imagine what it would like be like if
(Jimi) Hendrix or Janis (Joplin) were still around. Businessmen, scholars,
truck drivers, no one's immune.
"It seems like artists and musicians have more than their fair
share of problems, but I have a theory about that. I think it's because
you're used to going to these deep psychological places to work creatively
and sometimes you don't know how to come back out. So you use substances
to get down there and to come back out and then it just doesn't work
anymore."
Getting it right
But the inward visits do work for Cash. In 1995 she married John
Leventhal, a gifted musician, songwriter and producer who had worked with
Crowell on several projects. She and her three daughters said goodbye to
Nashville and settled into New York's Chelsea neighborhood where they
added a son.
Leventhal added stability, logic and practicality to her life.
"Jewish men make very good husbands," she said. "He's a
very good provider. All that structure that I need.... And I've brought
him a sense of the mystical and some freedom.
"I have a friend who's an astrologer who looked at both our
charts. He looked at me and sighed and said, 'The two of you would make
one really great person.' We complete each other."
As an 18-year-old, Rosanne left L.A. to sing back-up for Johnny, living
at Cash Mountain near Nashville when she wasn't on the road.
"I never loved the road. I never really did," she said.
"I only liked it in limited doses in the summer for a few weeks. Now
when I do go out, I take my little boy. That's fun. He's 7, but that's
also why I don't go. We keep it to like one day or two. I never really
toured because of my children... 250 dates a year... never. My dad did.
Not me. The road is hard. It's brutal."
(From April to mid-October, she has a whopping nine shows scheduled,
including a May 27 date at the Florida Folk Festival in White Springs.)
When Rosanne decided to leave the nest, her mother expressed her
reservations, but she didn't try to discourage her. Now she finds herself
dishing out the same advice.
"One of my children runs an independent record label. She's a real
type A personality, so it's just perfect for her, but she calls me every
day saying, 'They're making me crazy!' So I say, 'Quit!'
"Then I have one who's a songwriter, but she called me up and
said, 'Mom, how can I be a musician and not have a public life?' It
touched me so much, but I said, 'I don't know, baby.'
"It's a crazy business."
Rosanne hopes her girls will listen and understand that she's been
there. She also hopes the songs on Black Cadillac will help others
to listen and understand what she's been through in the last three years.
"First there's a sense of liberation because they're not
suffering, and you're remembering good things," she said. "With
my dad, everybody said it takes a year, it takes a year, that after the
first anniversary, some things start to lift a bit.
"But with three (June, Johnny and Vivian), I bounce off the shock
of each of them at different times. I want to go to the phone and call my
mom, and the next day I'm thinking about June's china, how much she loved
her china, and the next day I'm thinking Dad should hear this song.
"It's those moments that kind of knock you over.
"I didn't lose Johnny Cash; nobody did. I lost my father. But I
look at my life as one of appreciation. I think the greatest spiritual
practice is counting your blessings and then just letting go, no
expectations."
