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Walk The Line considered
The Guardian, January 2006

“WALK The Line”, James Mangold’s cinematic telling of the early life of Johnny Cash, takes its title from one of its subject’s best-known songs. “I Walk The Line”, released in 1956, was Cash’s third single, intended as a pledge of fidelity to his first wife, Vivian Liberto. It is an exemplar of Cash’s artistic essence (minimal boom-chicka-boom arrangement, suggestive of a rolling train, gently growled vocal, like a wolf making friends), and a gorgeously economical devotional: “Because you’re mine,” Cash reassures the uncertain object of his affections, “I walk the line.”
  Doubtless Cash’s intentions were honourable when he wrote the song, but as “Walk The Line” demonstrates, he spent the period of his life chronicled by the film – his childhood in Arkansas cottonfields, via his service in the US Air Force, to his ascent to superstardom in the 1950s and 60s – doing everything but fulfilling its promise. “Walk The Line”, based substantially on Cash’s frank autobiographies, “Man In Black” and “Cash”, depicts him as drunk, drug-addled, faithless and tormented, saved from himself only by his anguished, suppressed and eventually requited love for the singer June Carter.
  Joaquin Phoenix does superbly as Cash, capturing the singer’s swagger, and bringing an understated but unmistakeable edge to the scenes dealing with Cash’s guilt over the loss of his own older brother. Reese Witherspoon is a radiant June Carter. However, “Walk The Line” ends in 1968, when Cash had married Carter, after proposing onstage, and is preparing for his legendary concert at California’s Folsom Prison – inspiration for his second single, 1955’s “Folsom Prison Blues”, it of the untrumpably nihilistic couplet “I shot a man in Reno/Just to watch him die”.
  Cash’s story up to that point is worth telling. This period helped define the musical and spiritual parameters within which both country and rock have subsequently operated. However, it’s hard not to think that there might have been an argument for starting with the twilight of his life – which ended in 2003, Cash succumbing to various illnesses at 71, four months after June Carter died following heart surgery. Johnny Cash, possibly uniquely in the annals of popular music, saved his best till last.

WHEN contemplating the monumental accomplishment of Cash’s last ten years of life – four albums (“American Recordings”, “Unchained”, “Solitary Man”, “The Man Comes Around”) and a posthumous box set of extra material (“Unearthed”) – it is terrifying to reflect that, had it been left to Cash, none of this astonishing music would have been made. By the mid-1980s, Cash was a washed-up nostalgia turn, bashing out “I Walk The Line” 300 nights a year to people largely uninterested in anything he might have written in the intervening three decades. As a recording artist, Cash had given up, and the record industry had given up on Cash: CBS dropped him in 1986. He wrote in “Cash”, “I got tired of hearing about demographics, the ‘new country fan’, the ‘new market profile’ and all the other trends supposedly working against me. . . the last record I gave CBS was called ‘Chicken In Black’, and it was intentionally atrocious.” Cash seemed resigned to dotage on the cabaret circuit.
  His unlikely resurrection began with an invitation from U2 to sing “The Wanderer”, the weird, beautiful Louvin Brothers-meet-Kraftwerk shuffle that closed U2’s 1993 album “Zooropa”. Though Cash had always straddled country and rock, he was a country singer first – country music is songs of experience, as opposed to rock’s essential innocence, which is why country singers sound better as they get older, and rock singers get shrill and ridiculous. Cash had been a commercial and critical irrelevance for years, but he’d never sung anything better than he did “The Wanderer”, his voice as solemn and portentous as a church bell.
  At around the same time, Def American label boss Rick Rubin – whose reputation was rooted in hip hop and metal, with production credits including Run DMC, Public Enemy, The Beastie Boys, Red Hot Chili Peppers and The Cult – went to see Cash hack out his hits at a dinner theatre. Rubin effected an introduction and informed Cash that he wanted to sign him and produce him. Cash’s faith in his own potential had ebbed so far that his response, as he recalled in an interview for the liner notes of “Unearthed”, was “What for?”
  Rubin’s idea was simple, and brilliant. He wanted to make records which emphasised Cash’s voice – a voice which had echoed from Sun studios in 1950s Memphis across the history of modern popular music. He wanted the voice to sing old songs and new songs, and he wanted to goad Cash into writing. Over the next decade, Cash and Rubin recorded hundreds of songs, most of them set to crystalline acoustic guitars, Cash’s voice mixed so far forward it felt like it was whispering even when it roared. Granted that at this point in Cash’s life, that unmistakable drawl could have lent mournful gravitas to “Hi Ho Silver Lining”, but he and Rubin deployed it astutely, tipping a hat to country standards (Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”, Geoff Mack’s “I’ve Been Everywhere”, the traditionals “Sam Hall” and “Streets Of Laredo”) and plumbing undiscovered depths in songs by an audaciously diverse range of rock artists, including Nick Cave (“The Mercy Seat”), Neil Diamond (“Solitary Man”), Soundgarden (“Rusty Cage”), U2 (“One”), Depeche Mode (“Personal Jesus”) and The Eagles (“Desperado”, a version so wrenchingly affecting that it makes up for everything else The Eagles did). Rubin had cast Cash as the supreme oracle of American music, the all-seeing eye at the top of the pyramid, and the old man rose to the challenge, even as his health deserted him.
  The sessions also jolted Cash’s long-dormant songwriting muse awake. The instincts that had characterised his best work in the 50s and 60s were fizzing again. The bleak, compellingly reductive view of death that had informed “Folsom Prison Blues” was exhumed for the murder ballad “Delia’s Gone”. The playful wit that had sparked “Five Feet High & Rising” twinkled on “Tear-Stained Letter”. The title track of “The Man Comes Around” was a glorious hallucination of apocalypse phrased in language lifted from the books of Job and Revelations, a desperate bid by Cash to prepare for his imminent introduction to his maker. “I spent more time on this song than any I ever wrote,” Cash admitted in the album’s liner notes, claiming that he discarded three dozen pages of lyrics in the editing process. For all that it is played on acoustic guitars, and sung by a man largely confined to a wheelchair, “The Man Comes Around” is a shockingly powerful piece of music.
  Most rock music is freighted with a certain idiot refusal to acknowledge such tiresome realities as time, and ageing and death – which is, of course, a major part of its appeal. The achievement of the last years of Cash was to be honest enough with himself and secure enough in his faith to match the Reaper’s stare, to sing and write like he knew the clock was ticking. It’s all there in Mark Romanek’s magnificent video for Cash’s version of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt”. Filmed in Cash’s home, and in the abandoned, ruined House of Cash museum in Nashville, it shows the greying, dying icon, parked amid the detritus of his extraordinary life, wondering “What have I become?” while an adoring, careworn June Carter looks on.
  The clip is cut with archive footage of Cash taken from the years chronicled by “Walk The Line”, and the contrast is all but unbearable: even when he was exisiting on a diet of speed and alcohol, Cash was the coolest-looking man who ever lived, as well as the coolest-sounding. These are certainly things worth celebrating, but anyone prompted by this fine film to investigate the man’s music should start at the other end of his life, then urge James Mangold to chivvy Phoenix and Witherspoon into makeup, and get working on a sequel.
 

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