There’s so much wrong, and facile, about Jon Fasman’s Oct. 9th article in The Wall Street Journal—“It’s Finally Time to Give Johnny Cash His Due: Compared to Dylan and Springsteen, the country-music legend can seem deeply uncool”—that I’m uncharacteristically at a loss for words. Were Cash still alive, I’d imagine he’d scoff at the hagiography, not to mention all the mistakes.
Any reader familiar with Cash knows it’s trouble from the start, as Fasman cites the very bad biopic from last year, A Complete Unknown, and says that Timothee Chalamet (as Dylan) “is coiled, watchful, weaselly, and withholding. The audience can see what Cash can’t—that Dylan is figuring out how to use and surpass him.” Fasman writes that when Cash and Dylan first met— at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964—(Dylan, a teen, was influenced by Cash’s string of hits in the 1950s), Cash was the “bigger star.” That’s untrue: Dylan had already released the title song from his third record, The Times They Are a-Changin’, which led the media (lazily) to dub him the “Voice of a generation.” Dylan had already discarded “finger-pointing songs” by that summer, most pointedly with “My Back Pages” from his forthcoming release Another Side of Bob Dylan (although he continued to sing his “protest” songs at concerts, along with newer material). In 1965, he put out Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited, which catapulted him further; even though his records didn’t sell like The Beatles or Beach Boys, Cash was left in the dust.
Fasman also claims that Cash “went from the folk-rock scene back to country, a smaller sandbox.” Cash was never associated with “folk-rock” (that was the Byrds, Lovin’ Spoonful, Hollies, Beau Brummels, the Turtles, Buffalo Springfield, among many other groups); it was country where he had his greatest artistic success in the 1950s, with hits like “I Still Miss Someone,” “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town,” “Guess Things Happen That Way,” “I Walk the Line,” “Cry! Cry! Cry!,” “Ballad of a Teenage Queen” and “Folsom Prison Blues.” Country wasn’t a “smaller sandbox”: as the immense popularity of Hank Williams, George Jones, Patsy Cline, Tammy Wynette, The Louvin Brothers, Ray Price, etc. demonstrated. Cash was in the thick of that fertile period on radio and record stores, his songs complementing Elvis, Buddy Holly, Little Richard and Ricky Nelson, all of whom Dylan listened to.
As a teenager, I discovered country music, egged on by Dylan (John Wesley Harding, Nashville Skyline), the Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo and the Flying Burrito Brothers. I saw Dylan perform on Cash’s debut episode of his ABC variety show in 1969, and their duet of “Girl From The North Country” was thrilling—not The Beatles on Sullivan in ’64, although fairly close. But Cash lost me, forever, first with his stupid hit “A Boy Named Sue,” and then all that The Man In Black baloney. It wasn’t cool at all, as Fasman maintains (nor was Springsteen ever cool in the Dylan sense, even though his first three records grabbed me at the time). Later on in Cash’s career, when he was embraced by younger fans (who likely hadn’t even heard “Ring of Fire”) for covering Nine Inch Nails and Soundgarden, and then with his near-death song “When the Man Comes Around,” I couldn’t stomach the guy.
Fasman’s article was quickly met with derision on social media, even from the insufferably condescending John Podhoretz, who tweeted: “Johnny Cash was literally one of the coolest men in America, and EVERYBODY thought so for about 40 years. The author of this colossal embarrassment is the SENIOR CULTURE correspondent for the Economist, which is evidently as awful on culture as it is on the Middle East.”
A rebuke from Podhoretz (likely more a fan of show tunes than rock, pop or soul growing up), and about as cool as Paul Anka, is evidence of how silly Fasman’s half-baked Cash homage was. In fact, Cash wasn’t “literally” one of the coolest men in America, and the overheated “and EVERYBODY thought so for about 40 years” is dumb. Who’s “EVERYBODY,” John? It sure wasn’t you.
Fasman, at The Economist since 2003, is 50, and this paragraph from his WSJ drivel sums up his embarrassing tribute. He writes: “I’ll admit that I’m a late arrival to the Church of Cash. I grew up in the blandest possible northeastern suburb, listening to classical music at home and ‘90s punk at school. Country music was as foreign as qawwali, and a lot less cool.” Millions of people grew up in “bland northeastern suburbs,” including me, but weren’t late to the “Church of Cash.” Fasman’s a dork—no judgment passed—but you’d think he’d keep that quiet.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023