JOHNNY CASH: THE BIOGRAPHY

BY MICHAEL STREISSGUTH  HB $49.95

Johnny Cash fans may already be familiar with Michael Streissguth’s previous book, the superb Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison. This time round, Streissguth’s tackled his subject head-on, the whole sprawling canvas of Cash’s messy life. Born in Arkansas in post-Depression America, Cash and his family did it tough. Streissguth’s portrait of J.R.’s childhood, which included the tragic accidental death of his elder brother Jack, in 1944, is a moving tribute to the pain he carried with him throughout his life.

Streissguth carves up Cash’s life into distinct chapters, each coalescing around a pivotal moment in the singer’s musical career. There’s his stint in the air force, his musical beginnings that eventually leads Cash to Memphis. There, in 1955, at Sam Phillips’ Sun Studios, Cash cuts a series of ground-breaking sides with fellow musicians Luther Perkins and Marshall Grant, including tracks like ‘Hey Porter’ and ‘Folsom Prison Blues’. These immortal sessions, coming hot on the heels of those made by Elvis Presley at Sun Studios, ushered in the first great chapter of Cash’s career. In 1956, he recorded ‘I Walk the Line’, his “paean to fidelity” to first wife Vivian, written at a time when his wandering eye had already settled on June Carter. For a few years, Cash’s music held sway over the nation’s country music charts

But as Cash found fame in the early 1960s, his increasing reliance on drugs and alcohol threatened to undermine everything he’d strived for. Constantly on the road, he was an absent husband and father. His reliance on pills lead to erratic stage performances. His new label, Columbia, was signing up a new roster of artists - Dylan, Janis Joplin, Santana, and Simon & Garfunkel — and Cash’s music was beginning to look decidedly out-of-step with his times. In what turned out to be a stoke of luck for Cash, Columbia jettisoned his long-term producer Don Law, replacing him with Bob Dylan’s producer Bob Johnston, who now found himself in charge of the label’s country music arm. It was Johnston who green-lighted Cash’s long-held ambition to record a live album of a prison concert. The resulting Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, released in 1967, entered music history. Its status as a runaway cross-over success that appealed to rock and country fans alike cemented Cash as country music’s most marketable brand into the 1970s.

Much of Steissguth’s book charts the long downhill slide of Cash’s career throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Now married to June Carter, Cash embarked on a series of religious recordings that alienated many fans. His prime-time television series was pulled, his sales fell away. Unlike a commonly held myth that Cash straightened himself out around the time of the Folsom recording, Streissguth makes it clear that Cash never really weaned himself off drugs. He carried a darkness in him that affected all who came into contact with him, but most especially his wife and children. By the early 1990s, Cash was a wash-out, without a label, and playing to dwindling audiences, forever on the road to make ends meet.

Enter Rick Rubin and the remarkable series of albums knows as American Recordings. Streissguth’s account of the final years makes for intense reading. Plagued by ill-health, in constant pain, Cash dragged himself to the studio each day. His voice worn and cracked, sometimes barely more than a whisper, he recorded hundreds of songs, as if he knew this would be his final will and testament. With Rubin’s stripped down no-frills production, Cash’s baritone seems to carry with it all the pain of his own personal and family history. In his hands, songs like ‘Hurt’ and ‘The Man Comes Around’ are both apocalyptic and harbingers of death. In 2003, his beloved June Carter died, and, several months later, Cash would join her. Streissguth has given us a balanced, honest portrait of a flawed man whose legacy will outlast us all.

HEROES OF BLUES, JAZZ & COUNTRY

BY ROBERT CRUMB HB $35.00

Illustrator Robert Crumb is best known for his pioneering underground comics of the 1960s, for his legendary ‘Keep on Trucking’ T-shirt logo, and for album covers such as Big Brother & the Holding Co.’s Cheap Thrills. While he’s clearly a man with issues (and anyone who saw Terry Zwigoff’s extraordinary documentary on Crumb couldn’t help but concur), he is also a long-term lover of the roots of American music. This book reproduces his remarkable series of trading cards made in the 1980s — ‘Heroes of the Blues’, ‘Early Jazz Greats’ and Pioneers of Country Music’. The series comprises several hundred Crumb ‘portraits’ of early American musicians, accompanied by brief biographies. Crumb embraces the well-known and obscure — Skip James, Furry Lewis, and the Carter Family rub shoulders with Barbecue Bob and the Leake County Revelers. The book comes with a 21 track CD of music selected and compiled by Crumb.

ROCKWIZ: THE ULTIMATE ROCK TRIVIA CHALLENGE

ED. BY BRIAN NANKERVIS  PB $29.95

You’ve seen the SBS series, you’ve seen the contestants fluff their answers, you’ve gone crazy dredging the memory banks for those million-dollar-riffs. Now pit yourself against the book, minus all those distractions, all that yelling and shouting. The book follows the format of the shows, with ten rounds of questions, including photographs of contestants and guest celebrities, AND, thank god, a complete set of answers at the back of the book. The accompanying bonus CD includes 70 million-dollar riffs to test yourself against. Somehow it’s not quite the same without Julia Zemiro blasting from the set; still, on balance, her absence does improve thinking capacity. A runaway success for SBS, with the usual array of spin-off CDs and DVDs. Anyone for Iron Chef?

THE TAO OF WILLIE: A GUIDE TO THE HAPPINESS IN YOUR HEART

BY WILLIE NELSON WITH TURK PIPKIN  HB $29.95

This is a strange little book, part story-telling, part autobiography, part hokey philosophy. Reading it is a bit like sitting round the camp-fire with Willie, listening to him spin his own brand of home-truths. He’s an engaging raconteur, but be prepared for a mish-mash reflecting Willie’s part-hippie, part-outlaw, part-zen-like-master stance on life. If you love Willie, you’ll no doubt lap it up; for the rest of us, Graeme Thomson’s new biography Willie Nelson: the Outlaw might make for a better introduction to the man and his music.

All books available at the Greville Street Bookstore, 145 Greville St, Prahran, Vic. 3181 Phone: 03 9510 3531. (grevbook@bigpond.net.au)