Springsteen Gets Mugged; Johnny Cash Returns to Prophesy Again
Tribute albums are embarrassing things. If an album deserves tribute, its exceptional quality isn't mechanically reproducible. Worse, people who cringe over an unfamiliar version of a favorite song implicitly confess to how much they care about something like Floyd or Zeppelin. Tributes are a good idea on paper that ends up shameful.
Especially this Bic-salute to the Boss. They couldn't do something cool like getting the Murder City Devils to do "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out," or conscripting the Go to tear through "Adam Raised a Cain." No. Instead, the label responsible for Mudhoney scraped a barrel of B-list rockers and Johnny Cash and cobbled together a sequenced reinterpretation of Nebraska. While Nebraska is total Greil Marcus-core, it's also a monumental and arresting record, but I get the feeling the people at Sub Pop had Ranters & Crowd Pleasers or Mystery Train next to the night-table bong and searched out kindred spirits.
Springsteen made Nebraska on a four-track in 1981, at the height of his powers, with just his voice, an acoustic guitar and occasionally a harmonica or solo electric. Apparently, it's set?or overdue?for a hipster revival, and so out comes Ani DiFranco to do "Used Cars." I wanted to condescend to "Ani," as my most wretched ex-girlfriends invariably refer to her, but she's one of the few presented here who showcase how powerful this material is. She sings the song in the breathy, distorted style currently fashionable, but she's on the verge of collapse by the final, "Well, mister the day my number comes in/I ain't never gonna ride in no used car again," nose running, spitting words out accidentally, after the protagonist promised the family not to break down. Unfortunately, she's preceded by Dar Williams and Deana Carter, who offer subdued and traditional versions of "Highway Patrolman" and "State Trooper," to satisfy the pedestrian feminist in cat's-eye glasses browsing the Sub Pop website from the computer lab.
Hank Williams III does "Atlantic City," a hoedown so absolutely awful that out of charity I assume it's meant to laugh at anyone who'd look for salvation in a rock song. Los Lobos ruin "Johnny 99" as an aging-cholo rocker that's best left to be punked in the yard. Chrissie Hynde and Adam Seymour take the title track passably, which is the story of Hynde's career. Aimee Mann and Michael Penn offer an inoffensive "Reason to Believe" featuring their cloying style of mixing their almost-whispered vocals to obscene prominence, a la the brainless Magnolia soundtrack. Luckily for them they're working with strong material.
Not that the record is completely stillborn. Ben Harper takes "My Father's House." I've never heard a note Ben Harper's written, figuring his critical acclaim was due to white critics who love black artists who return to white music that was stolen from black people. In fact, his Cat Stevens-esque voice perfectly demonstrates how vulnerability is inescapable. Son Volt, who aren't even as good as fucking Wilco, turn in a great "Open All Night," wisely resisting the temptation to turn Nebraska's only electric song into a full-blown Roseland banger. And the incomparable Johnny Cash gives "I'm on Fire" (one of the three non-Nebraska "bonus tracks" included on the album) new significance as the phlegm in his cauldron of a throat bubbles, "I got a bad desire."
It could have been a lot worse. An earlier edition of the record had Billy Bragg playing "Mansion on the Hill." Sub Pop replaced the yobbo with Crooked Fingers. CF's Steve Reich-inflected take on the song is far superior to the poser proletarian's labored, juke-joint earnestness.
If I were the A&R on this, I'd have assigned "Reason to Believe" to Ted Leo, "Johnny 99" to U2 and "Atlantic City" to Sub Pop's own Beachwood Sparks. But it serves me right for caring.
Spencer Ackerman
In the liner notes to his new album, Johnny Cash writes: "The song is the thing that matters. Before I can record, I have to hear it, sing it, and know that I can make it feel like my own, or it won't work." That's a plain-spoken statement, and its directness conceals the import of the words "my own." Because when Johnny Cash makes a song his own, it stays his own.
Over the last three albums produced by Rick Rubin, every one of Cash's takes on the work of his fellow artists is unforgettable. Many times his choices of source material have been quite daring: Beck, Spain, Soundgarden, Danzig. On American III: Solitary Man, there's Neil Diamond's "Solitary Man," U2's "One" and Nick Cave's "The Mercy Seat," among others. But more important than Cash's travels beyond the boundaries of the country music he has helped define for decades is the unity of purpose that carries him these distances. His scope of artistic vision is staggering. He comprehends it all, transforms it all, and it all sounds like his own. There is now neither punk nor country, jazz nor rock, folk nor pop?it's all one in Johnny Cash.
Listening to him reveals the paradox of all great art, the apparent contradiction that humility is the better part of genius. There is a reverence here for fine songwriting, no matter what its pedigree, and it is that respect for the tradition that turns to gold all that Cash touches. I have intentionally avoided calling his covers "covers" for this very reason. It implies the imposition of an artist's vision onto someone else's work. Cash doesn't cover a song; he cores it out and liberates a depth within it unknown even to its author.
Cash gives voice to the hidden fears of an advanced society, a nation complacent, confident, glorying in self. He speaks in his prophet's intonation of poverty and contentment with little, old age and solitude, hard work and self-discipline, sacrifice and heartbreak and hard-earned hope, weakness and sticking to principle. And God.
Popular music according to Johnny Cash is not written by the cultural winners but the losers. It's for the damned and condemned, the poor, the weary, the hillbillies. Should you ever find yourself on the wrong side of that line, it is the authoritative austerity of his voice you will most want to hear.
As to his actual physical voice, it has taken on even more character, like Sinatra's in his later years or Willie Nelson's now. He doesn't hit the heights of "Spiritual" or "Unchained"; the moments that veer closest to dramatic crescendo come on "That Lucky Old Sun," "One" and "I See a Darkness," but they are muted, as if Cash is feeling their sentiments more profoundly than he can express. Not surprising for a man of his age and experience. You'd think at 68, having fully attained national-treasure status, Cash would be brooding on the past, but as he attests in the liner notes, "This album has been a long time coming, and I feel another in there somewhere. I wouldn't trade my future for anyone's I know." In a heart as large as his there's no room for nostalgia.
Jeff Hanson
Billy Childish is one of the champs of independent music, having racked up several dozen LPs in the past 20 years, all in the same garage/punk/reverb vein, and never thinking once about tempering his own personal psych-out for mass consumption. With Childish's LPs there are varying degrees of proficiency, even in a category as naturally raucous as his, but never once is there the inkling that he will temper his mania. Incredibly prolific, Childish has produced a wellspring of work not only on his own, but as the frontman of several potent rock outfits as well as a kind of svengali behind acts like Holly Golightly. The bottom line on all Childish recordings is a kind of raw "authenticity" that marks the Brit journeyman as one of the only true purveyors of the punk esthetic to survive the millennial jounce.
One of the aggregations Childish fronts is Thee Headcoats, and on this two-disc collection the Brit label Damaged Goods has compiled an assload of raw Headcoats material covering a decade's worth of carnage. I have no idea if the sidemen who join Billy in Thee Headcoats?Johnny Johnson on bass and guitar, Bruce Brand on drums and Ollie Dolot on bass?are the same ones who double in the Milkshakes, his other aggregation, and I wouldn't dare ask. No liner notes?you're supposed to know who Billy Childish is. That's "indie" for you; but in this case it's okay, because listening to these two discs it becomes clear that it doesn't really matter who Billy Childish is. No long explanations are needed as to the origins of these 50 songs. Anyone with a modicum of rock 'n' roll aptitude can recognize the sources behind these ribald explosions of pants-pissing glory: the Who, the Kinks, the Yardbirds, the Dowliners Sect, the Shadows of Knight, Link Wray. But it's Billy's raucous delivery and complete disregard for the standards of respectable behavior that make these nuggets?most of them less than three minutes in length?such an inspiring tour-de-force of raw rock 'n' roll glory.
Disc one is phrased somewhat as a documentary, featuring spoken-word bits by Billy between tracks, all voiced in his thick Cockney, about what motivated him to embark on his rock 'n' roll pilgrimage. Like Malcolm McLaren's, Billy's feigned precociousness can be amusing, but the difference is, with Billy, it's not just a publicity-garnering device, it's real. The gimmick of wearing "headcoats"? hats with Sherlock Holmesian flaps?is amusing, especially since they carry this identity into songs like "My Dear Watson," "Headcoats On" and "Headcoat Lane." But the intense, reverb-heavy carnage of tracks like "I'm a Confused Man," "Thief," and three songs about hating dad?"The Gun in My Father's Hand," "The Day I Beat My Father Up" and "I'm Hurting"?prove that underneath the headcoats there're some genuine psychic scars as well. Listen to these lyrics for a tell-tale glimpse into what drives Childish to such self-loathing: "My daddy was a drunk/Coz he hurt so bad/And he crushed my love/Which is all I had/Now I hurt so bad/Coz I'm still a little kid/So I drown my heart/Just like he did." Childish sounds like he's ripping the strings off his guitar, and screaming his lungs out in anguish, and you know it cuts deep. Above all, Childish sounds angry, frightening. Not the type you'd want to go up to after a gig and say, "Mr. Childish, I really enjoyed your show." He doesn't do this for glory, after all. He does it because rock 'n' roll is, as Hank Rollins once remarked, "poor man's therapy."
Joe S. Harrington