Flesh and blood 'Cash' is on the money

Johnny Cash: The Biography
By Michael Streissguth
Da Capo Press, 334 pp., $26

A lanky young man stands outside a record studio, guitar in hand. "I want you to hear me play," he drawls as the studio owner approaches. Within months, the young man's first single is climbing the charts, and one of American music's most improbable, dramatic, and iconic careers is born.

Things like that just don't happen in real life, but they did to Johnny Cash. It was 1954, and the record label owner was Sam Phillips, then launching a cultural revolution with his Sun Records roster of Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Charlie Rich, and Carl Perkins.

Michael Streissguth , author of two other books about Cash, has written an engaging, anecdote-chocked generalist biography of the country legend, who died in 2003 . He vividly shows how Cash's larger-than-life contradictions chart the fault lines in the American soul. He was a staunch traditionalist and a smarmy Las Vegas showman; a devout Christian and a drug addict; a bohemian rebel and a redneck; and a womanizer who deeply loved his second wife, June Carter.

Streissguth is wonderful at showing Cash's rise against the backdrop of the times that shaped him. Born to an abusive, sharecropping father, he saw his family rescued from abject poverty by a socialist experiment sponsored by Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.

Only in Cash's strangely charmed career would the fact that his band was lousy work to his advantage. His signature boom-chuck guitar slap was designed to cover his bass player's irregular playing; and his stark, muscular groove compensated for his lead guitarist's hunt-and-peck style.

Many of Cash's best career moves had altruistic motives. He jumped from Sun to the larger Columbia Records in 1958 , then confounded executives with a string of albums championing traditional folk music. Everyone thought he was destroying his commercial appeal, but it led to him being embraced by the '60s folk revival, cementing his appeal with young urban audiences.

His 1968 "Live at Folsom Prison" album made him the crossover darling of country, folk, and rock. But Cash conceived it as a Christian outreach, to highlight the plight of prisoners.

Inevitably, however, drug addiction dulled his daring instincts. His sincere but often clumsy Christian projects drove away secular fans, while his pill-popping escapades kept gospel fans at bay. His craving for mainstream acceptance ravaged his aura as a musical outlaw.

In his final years, his health destroyed, his career in tatters, Cash was able to repair his legend. Freed of the need to pander to anyone, he made the most visceral and authentic music of his career in a string of albums for Rick Rubin's American Recordings. His voice had finally become the grandly ruined thing his dark-eyed lyrics wanted it to be; and when he sang of hurt and hope, despair and mortality, no one could doubt he knew exactly what those things were. Truth mattered to Cash, perhaps more than anything else in his checkered career. In the end, truth was all he had left, and he wielded it like a hero's sword. What a perfect end to his troubled epic.