So despite all this Johnny Cash died on Friday... the best I can say is that I will miss him and his utterly human stature in his later years. To me, Johnny was bigger than Elvis, bigger than Sinatra, Dylan, he was tantamount. Maybe John Wayne himself might have been the only person who was his equal. But there was such a dignity in the last years of his life, each album, each song, each verse showing a man exposed... a man who wanted to portray himself as the toughest guy on the planet, and with the set of his eyes, his postures, you might have believed him... Like a bird on a wire, like a drunk ina midnight choir, I have tried in my way to be free. These were Leonard Cohen's words of course, but a deep sincerity looms around them when Johnny sings them. So much apology, so much amendment, that I can't help but believe these last ten years were devoted to repentance, much in the same way the Jews flog themselves and beat their breast at the death of a loved one... like that baggage just had to be dropped... I realize how much life I have left to live through that man, that I haven't even begun to live, as if everything up until now was the dress rehearsal... that somehow to live you tend have to make mistakes and that somewhere there are heartaches innumerable, unfathomable. Not out of necessity, but part of the human condition. But Johnny wore it well, he turned it into something like integrity, admirable despite anything anyone could ever drudge up against him... God rest his soul, God grant him the entrance to the pearly gates of heaven... long live his spirit, here & ever after...
Posted by: Greg / 10:38 PM