A Friendly Rant From Captain
Spaulding
I WALK THE
(ASSEMBLY) LINE
I hate the new Johnny
Cash
commercial. I make no bones about that.
Commercials
usually only get a public reaction from me when I
like them; if I dislike them, I tend to leave the
room or find something else to do while they're
on. May God shower his blessings upon the man who
invented the mute button.
But the Nissan
commercial in which Johnny Cash walks along an
auto assembly line and sings the Laverne and
Shirley theme song is nothing short of
odious. It pulls all the wrong cultural
levers--an overhashed, forgettable decade; an
obnoxious sitcom unworthy of Nickelodeon, let
alone the Man in Black, that is best forgotten;
and a second-rate car company. And the levers are
pulled by one of our greatest pop culture icons,
Johnny Cash.
Were he merely one
of the Sun Records originals alongside Presley,
Perkins, Orbison, and Lewis, Johnny Cash's seat
in the Mount Olympus skybox would be earned. But
he is also a founding father of rockabilly and
hardcore country/folk; a pioneer who dabbled in
both substance abuse and religious conversion
long before either was fashionable in rock-n-roll
circles; he possesses a craggy bottom-of-the-well
baritone and several metric tons of personal gravitas;
and he made playing to and responding to the
sensitivities of convicts a part of his act back
when gangsta rappers were merely gleams in the
eyes of their felonious fathers. He has kept the
same band (comprised of the same musicians)
together since Kennedy was president. Plus, the
man has a back catalog of crackling, intense
songs rivaled by few and surpassed by none.
But while no one
would dare challenge the man's rectitude, his
standards for career integrity are not those of a
younger generation. His "sellouts", if
that's what you want to call them, are legion.
He, too, abandoned Sam Phillips and Sun Records
for the greener pastures of a major label (in his
case, Columbia), but it was no Svengali-like
manager who roped him into doing it. While he has
recorded with such estimable acts as Bob Dylan
and U2, he has also bestowed his cachet upon such
lesser mortals as Soundgarden and Danzig by
recording their songs (albeit without actually
singing with them). Although his television
variety show with wife June Carter Cash in the
sixties was before my time, I am told that it was
not exactly on a par with Carol Burnett
or Flip Wilson (or even Sonny and
Cher). He rerecorded all of his hits in the
eighties for Mercury Records to facilitate their
greatest hits package, although much better
versions of the songs already existed on Columbia
and Sun.
Some ostensible
career sidetracks have been more understandable,
if not more productive. He made a bad cowboy
movie in '70, The Gunfighters (the
skinny on his acting--better than Randy Travis or
Glen Campbell, not as good as Kris Kristofferson
or Dwight Yoakam). He keeps his hand in in the
acting world by making guest appearances on the
creaky Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. And
his stuff will pop up on commercials every now
and then--his classic "Eight Feet High and
Rising" is currently shilling for Andersen
Windows on America's airwaves.
It could even be
said that his whole persona rings false in the
eyes of some. To country's hard livers (in both
senses), calling a reformed substance abuser like
Cash in the bare-knuckle world of
tradcountry/rockabilly a sellout ex opere
operato has the burnin' ring of truth to it.
Penitence and punishment count for much in that
genre; surviving afterwards doesn't.
My gripe is with
Johnny's taste and choice of symbols. Selling out
is almost a given for anyone in the music
industry. A big part of being a modern musician
is choosing the formula by which one sells out.
The right formula means that you can sell out and
keep your integrity intact. Dylan, who in some
respects is Johnny Cash on a ten-years-younger
career arc, became the most celebrated sellout in
music history in 1965 when he plugged in at the
Newport Folk Festival, yet he is paradoxically
about the least corruptible man in the biz. It
can be argued that the Beatles sold out to make
it big, trading in their authentic youthful
smartass attitudes for mere cheekiness, their
leather jackets for collarless Pierre Cardin
suits, and their raucous rock-n-roll for the
polished pop of George Martin. And everyone from
the MC5 to the Sex Pistols to Nirvana had to sell
out somewhere along the way just by signing onto
some faceless megacorporation's bottom line.
The canny ones,
like the Pistols, gleefully celebrated that fact
instead of denying it ever took place.
Johnny Cash, at
least, usually sold out with class. But seizing
hold of a lame-o sitcom theme from twenty years
ago that panders to the lowest impulses of the
consumer--the impulse to celebrate a stupid
decade just because we were young when
it was going on--is a wrong move in more ways
than I can describe. Being just another engine to
prolong a tired ad campaign that had long run its
creative course worsens the matter.
And betraying the
symbols of one's image--of course Nissan's cars
are more American-made than Ford's, but in the
minds of American consumers Nissan is still a
Japanese car company and Cash is Mr. Red, White,
and Blue--is the coup de grace.
I'm undoubtedly
being too hard on Cash. As I said, his is the
sensibility of an earlier generation for whom any
work was good work and what was really important
was staying in the public eye in order to keep
your career options fresh. On occasion, when he
has taken a chance that seems out of the ordinary
for him it has succeeded tremendously; his album American
Recordings, which was produced by the
unlikely Rick Rubin of Beastie Boys fame, may be
the best album of the nineties. Cash is too
old-school and too much the populist to
understand the ironic distance of a Morrissey or
the hardline ideology of a Henry Rollins or a
Fugazi.
It's probably best
to just play along with his peccadillos.
Speculate on what TV shows would be appropriate
for his rustic good-hearted-folks mien: Dan
Ackroyd's Soul Man, perhaps, or Walker,
Texas Ranger. Touched By An Angel
is perhaps a tad too New Agey for him. Certainly,
Star Trek: Voyager, Ellen, or Buffy
the Vampire Slayer would be too far off the
beaten track for his persona. I can see him doing
ads for Pace Picante Sauce, Frito's, or
Wheaties--but Godiva Chocolates or Calvin
Klein perfume would not be his proper
bailiwick.
And here's to him
plugging in in the studio with the likes of Beck,
Cowboy Junkies, Steve Earle, or Elvis Costello.
David Bowie, Nine-Inch Nails, Queen Latifah, and
Garth Brooks would make no sense as his partners.
And wouldn't you love to see Hollywood emerge
from its creative coma long enough to pay us a
sly wink by giving the Man in Black a cameo when
Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith come together to
film Men in Black II?
Let's be
reasonable. Johnny Cash doing Laverne and
Shirley is not the end of the world. When he
shilled for Nissan, at least he wasn't skipping
down the assembly line singing, "Five, six,
seven, eight...schlemiel,
schlmozzle...hasenpfeffer, incorporated."
E-Mail Captain Spaulding.
Previous
Mountaintop Experiences with Captain
Spaulding:
Hooray
For Me #1-- One Margarita
Too Many?
Hooray
For Me #2-- Spitting at the
Generations
Hooray
For Me #3-- The One-Eyed
Spokesmodel
Hooray
For Me #4-- Semisardonic
Over Semisonic
Hooray
For Me #5-- Bury My Brain
at Wounded Knee
Hooray
For Me #6-- Tempest in a B-Cup
Hooray
For Me #7-- Princess Diana
Hooray
For Me #8-- Get Back, Honky Cat
Hooray
For Me #9-- Mother Teresa
