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Magic and Loss
Posted: September
19, 2003
By
Kevin Forest Moreau, Editor-in-Chief
"I really don't think I know anyone that's more rock and roll than
Johnny Cash. He always fought for the little man." -- Dave Matthews, in
TIME magazine
Asking Dave Matthews' opinion on Johnny Cash (or rock and roll, for
that matter) seems a little like asking John Ashcroft to discuss the
merits of Jenna Jameson's (ahem!) body of work. But The Man Who Would Be
Sting does have a point, one that's been reiterated many times in the days
following Johnny Cash's death. Johnny Cash did embody the essence of rock
and roll -- its rebellious streak, its precarious balancing act between
the sinful and the sublime -- and he did it better than just about any
actual rock performer, living or dead. Sure, there are plenty of icons who
represent a particular facet of rock and roll's complex makeup. Keith
Richards has the survivor-of-wretched-excess thing down pat; John Lennon
holds the patent on rock's love jones; and Andrew W.K. is the walking
embodiment of every high school parking lot circa 1985.
But Cash was all that (well, except for W.K.) and more. He was a
maverick Christian whose struggles with sobriety carried more weight than
Steven Tyler or Joe Perry could ever know. Cash wasn't some spoiled rock
star with too much time on his hands, conditioned to believe that the
world was his for the taking: He was a sinner in an unending wrestling
match with the demons within, grappling for redemption, salvation,
identity. When he solemnly intoned, in his bedrock baritone, that "Because
you're mine / I walk the line," he wasn't just pledging fealty to his love,
or to his God, but to himself. It was this ongoing struggle against "The
Beast in Me" that gave him his unquestioned authority as a spokesman for
the Everyman. And it's that very tug-of-war, between Elvis' swiveling hips
and Al Green's questing soul, that rock and roll, at its highest point,
embodies so perfectly.
Warren Zevon, who died mere days before Cash, couldn't have been more
different from the Man in Black. But like Cash, Zevon made a career out of
confronting his mortality and his mistakes -- and, like Cash, doing so in
his own fashion. Zevon, best known for the jukebox staple "Werewolves of
London," was that rare performer who could indulge in that most California
of clichés -- celebrity rehab -- and then wryly sing about sharing
household chores with Liza Minnelli and Elizabeth Taylor in "Detox
Mansion."
But he was no mere winking hipster, poking gentle fun at the ridiculous
conventions of life in which he was often a participant. Zevon, the
writer, was more attuned than most to the poignancy of loss, whether it
was wrenching heartbreak or the looming specter of death. Long before he
was diagnosed with terminal cancer and recorded his swan song,
The Wind, Zevon knew intuitively that life and joy are inextricably
linked in their fleetingness, and that it's that very impermanence that
makes each so precious. "Life'll Kill Ya," indeed.
There's an extra tinge of the bittersweet in the fact that both of
these singular voices were lost at the same time that many of us were
walking in the shadow of the second anniversary of the September 11th
terrorist attacks. And that even more of us, it seems, were not. For so
many of us, the lessons of that day seem to have faded into the
background. It's worth noting that those lessons were all over the work of
both artists. Many of us look upon September 11th, 2001, as (to quote Anna
Quindlen) "the last innocent morning in American life." But Johnny Cash
and Warren Zevon told us, if only we would listen, that every
morning, every day, is a study in loss, an opportunity to "Get Right with
God."
Too many of us -- myself included -- are estranged from people we once
loved, or fall out of touch with people who matter to us, always safe in
the delusion that "there's always time" to reconnect, to mend fences, to
reach out. To become better people. There isn't. If we're to take anything
away from the deaths of these two iconoclasts and the fading memory of
September 11th, it should be this: To live every day, as the cliché goes,
as if it were your last. To make sure your emotional affairs are in order.
To, as Zevon said on Late Night With David Letterman, "enjoy every
sandwich."


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Magic & Loss
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