Not quite 30 years ago, I moved into my first apartment, and the very first thing I did was hook up my stereo. As chance would have it, the first thing I put on the turntable was a Columbia Records promotional new artists sampler that I had bought at a used record store for a buck.
As I unpacked boxes, I listened to the screechy affectations of various punk and power-pop bands and singers, most of whom have thankfully passed into obscurity. Then, suddenly, I heard something different--the clean, crisp chords of an acoustic guitar backed sparsely by drums and bass and a deep, haunting female voice--plaintive yet also somehow smoldering with anger. I stopped what I was doing and picked up the album cover. The singer was someone named Rosanne Cash. She was two years older than me and the daughter of Johnny Cash, the country music superstar whose hit TV show I'd watched when I was a child. But the younger Cash didn't look like some Nashville belle in sequins. With her lush helmet of dark hair and intense, piercing stare, she looked like she would be more at home at
CBGB than the Grand Ole Opry. The song that had entranced me, "Baby Better Start Turning 'Em Down," had been written by her then-fiancee, Rodney Crowell. But when I got her LP "Seven Year Ache," Cash's own songs--in particular, that album's cover track--were even stronger stuff, as potent and bitter as cheap red wine, but just as beautiful, like stepping into a gutter and gazing up at the stars.
You act like you were just born tonight
Face down in a memory, but feeling all right.
So who does your past belong to today?
Baby you don't say nothing when you're feeling this way.
A big chunk of both our lifetimes later, I'm similarly captivated by Rosanne Cash's just-released memoir,
Composed, and learning about all the turmoil, angst and longing that helped shape her as an artist.
A disclaimer: If you're looking for a tell-all that dishes about her dad Johnny's drug-fueled excesses or his oft-tempestuous relationship with June Carter in the fashion of the 2005 biopic
Walk the Line, you're going to get bored with this book pretty quickly. And similarly, if you're used to simplistic, ghost-written music memoirs,
Composed is going to leave your head in a spin.
Cash wrote her own book and, as a prose stylist, she is a meandering, chaotic improvisational guitar solo of a writer, more interested in emotional truth and lucid description than a linear chronology of events.
But it's not that Cash couldn't have written a straightforward account of her fascinating career. In some ways, she's an archetypal baby boomer offspring of an iconic superstar, the sort who's always had to struggle to carve out her own identity and suffered the inevitable comparisons and put-downs. There's a painful but funny anecdote in the book about a concert appearance in Norway, after which she was approached by a Norwegian in a black cowboy hat who asked her, "Do you luff Johnny Cash?" (When she replied, haltingly, that she did, the man boomed, "No! I LUFF Johnny Cash!")
But the difference between Cash and other fortunate sons and daughters--Julian Lennon and Carole King's daughter Louise Goffin come to mind--is that she became a gigantic, trend-setting star in her own right. By blending country roots with rock sensibilities, Cash became a crossover success on the pop and country charts in the 1980s and early 1990s. At the same time, as this memoir recounts, her insistence upon carving out an artistic identity separate from her father--a stark contrast to, say, Hank Williams, Jr.--and her refusal to pander to audiences with sappy sentimentality or tawdry lust probably cost her millions of dollars in record sales. She recalls, for example, a painful meeting with a record label A&R executive who listened to her introspective, non-country-sounding 1990 record
Interiors, and told her, bluntly: "The radio won't play this."
One of the intriguing things about
Composed is that it gives the reader a real sense of how much an artist--even a successful one--has to humble herself or himself, over and over, to create something worthwhile. Cash, for example, taught herself to understand the mysteries of what makes for a great song by picking a few records--such as Bob Dylan's Desire--and listening to them over and over until she had transcendently absorbed what is difficult to describe in words. Similarly, as a lyricist, she wasn't above going back in her forties and re-learning how to write, with the help of how-to manuals by creativity guru
Natalie Goldberg. And for someone so famous, she admits to being astonishingly insecure about her gifts. (She once had a dream, for example, in which she was sitting on a couch at a party with Linda Ronstadt with an elderly man wedged between them. The man looked at Cash and sniffed, "We don't respect dilettantes," and then turned his back to her to talk to Ronstadt.)
The best parts of
Composed, surprisingly, are the disjointed, impressionistic sections about Cash's childhood and adolescence in Southern California. We get to see the future music superstar as a chubby, self-conscious, awkwardly shy child who struggles to deal with her parents' breakup and her father's fame and with the panoply of absurd phobias that distracted her from her inner pain. "If
Magritte had painted my childhood," she writes, "it would be a chaos of floating snakes, white Oxfords, dead chihuahuas, and pink hair rollers." For anybody who has painful memories of childhood--and really, who doesn't?--Cash's poetic description of that universal pain is as evocative as the voice I heard in my living room years ago.
FYI, you can now follow Rosanne Cash on
Twitter.
