Johnny, Warren and Joe

Some of my thoughts tonight, originally posted on the EN World messageboards...

(first post)
I'm listening to Don't Take Your Guns to Town right now. What an amazing song. The more I think about this, the worse I feel. Three of my musical idols (Cash, Zevon, and Strummer) dead in a year's time. Those three artists were pretty much my entire musical upbringing.

I used to write a music column for my school paper. This was back in the early 90s, when bubblegum punk was just arriving as the flavor du jour. I'd get these tapes from 16 year olds who put on a Johnny Rotten sneer and thought that they were rebels. Forget about raw talent, which was usually lacking. Not one of them had the intellect, the attitude, the sheer cojones of what I remembered as the real rebels of my youth. And at the time, all three of them were walking the Earth and waiting for some kid to discover them.

And now all three are gone. Some kid will never discover these storytellers, these poets of the downtrodden and the lost. They'll know about rebellion; cash-strapped record execs and MTV's cynical programmers know that leather, tattoos and bad grammar will always sell. But I'm afraid no teenager will know what it is that they're rebelling against.

(Second post)
It just kills me every time I open up my new Rolling Stone and, without fail, there's a picture of Eminem flipping the bird (Don't believe me? There's one right in the latest issue). Johnny Cash was doing that 30 years ago, back when it was cool. When Eminem does it, it just looks like a guy who lived with his mom well into his twenties who's trying way too hard to look cool.

That was the great thing about Johnny Cash - he never came off as just an act. The black clothes, the downbeat lyrics, the attitude, it all could have been so gimmicky. When he talked about wearing black to show his sympathy for the poor and working-class people that listened to him, it didn't come off as overly earnest, either. He was a genuine artist who seemed to lack any shred of artifice. There aren't too many like him left. Neil Young's one. Springsteen's another. And crap, they're getting on in years too. Ugh.

(End of posts)

Thank you Johnny. The world's a much emptier place for your passing.