I Dreamed of The Man in Black and The Bearded One Last Night…
—Written in Heaven for today’s Journey (cliff notes from Vanity Fair & more)
It is a wonderful, inexplicably strange thing how our dream worlds can sometimes guide our waking lives. I don’t remember any details from the intensely emotional dream I had last night, but I remember waking up this morning with the powerful images of Rick Rubin and the late Johnny Cash seared upon my brain.
You may recall my numerous references of late to religion and spirituality—such esoteric things have figured prominently in my thoughts the last few months. Why, you ask? There was the presidential election, of course, with its media-driven subtext of moral values (overblown, certainly, yet not entirely off base), and the subsequently tasteless post-electoral swagger of (some) evangelicals, who have yet to be given a crucial reality check (Just wait, my friends, for arrogance is a self-defeating posture). The book Jodi’s grandpa loaned me several days prior to the election, Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis, which approaches its subject matter in a logical, almost scientific way. An entirely different book that noiseboy gave me for Christmas: Gavin Baddeley’s Lucifer Rising, with its captivating subtitle: “sin, devil worship, & rock n’ roll”. My younger brother’s recent quest for meaning and substance in religion. A serious illness in the family. Finally, the news of the day with its apocalyptic overtones: events in the Middle East, natural disasters, Bush’s re-election.
So I’ve wanted to begin a series of posts on religion, et al, for some time now, to sort out these thoughts, to probe deeper than the surface of my preconceptions, to discover what I truly do and don’t believe. And this morning, it hit me, where better to begin this process of sort, probe, and discover than with Johnny Cash?
Three months ago, in the October edition of Vanity Fair, I read a profoundly moving account of Cash’s spiritual relationship with producer Rick Rubin entitled “American Communion.” This morning I dug my copy out and reread it in a new context. The bond this odd couple shared went far beyond the richness and timelessness of their musical collaboration. Truly, theirs was a love story, as surely as was Johnny’s relationship with his beloved wife June.
The two men first met in 1993, when Rubin convinced Cash to sign with his American Recordings label. His offer: “I would like you to go with me and sit in my living room with a guitar and two microphones and just sing to your heart’s content, everything you ever wanted to record.” After an artistically miserable decade, Cash was at the low point of his career, while Rubin was the hip beardsman with the Midas touch. Remarkably, Cash had never performed unaccompanied in his entire career (!) until the first American Recordings. A huge hit, the LP received rave reviews, MTV airplay, and a Grammy, reinvigorating Cash’s career and confidence.
Rubin would go on to produce four more studio albums for Cash. More importantly, the two men, both intellectually curious spiritual questers, became true confidants, “enveloped in something more intense than a friendship, a deep kindredness that greatly moved Cash’s family and friends, and frankly, kind of freaked them out... Until they got to know each other, neither man had ever found anyone else in the music industry as curious as he was about matters spiritual.”
At the end of the nineties, when Cash’s health began to go south, their spiritual discussions intensified. “Cash, though a devout Christian, didn’t dismiss Rubin’s patchwork spirituality as hooey. A fellow bibliophile and comparative-religion junkie, the antithesis of the stereotypical southern rustic with a suspicion of fancy book learnin’, he delighted in his producer’s pan-theological curiosity.”
“Out of their frequent discussions of religion developed an odd custom, certainly unprecedented in producer-artist relations: for the last few months of Cash’s life, he and Rubin took Holy Communion together every day, even if they weren’t physically in the same place, and even though Rubin, who was born Jewish and doesn’t profess allegiance to any one faith, is not technically eligible to receive the sacrament. At an appointed time, Rubin would call Cash and Cash would ‘officiate’, instructing Rubin to visualize the wafer and wine.”
And Rubin continues the practice to this day, though it’s a different, more solitary experience for him.
More to come.
N/P Johnny Cash – God
(All quoted material from the October 2004 issue of Vanity Fair.)
It is a wonderful, inexplicably strange thing how our dream worlds can sometimes guide our waking lives. I don’t remember any details from the intensely emotional dream I had last night, but I remember waking up this morning with the powerful images of Rick Rubin and the late Johnny Cash seared upon my brain.
You may recall my numerous references of late to religion and spirituality—such esoteric things have figured prominently in my thoughts the last few months. Why, you ask? There was the presidential election, of course, with its media-driven subtext of moral values (overblown, certainly, yet not entirely off base), and the subsequently tasteless post-electoral swagger of (some) evangelicals, who have yet to be given a crucial reality check (Just wait, my friends, for arrogance is a self-defeating posture). The book Jodi’s grandpa loaned me several days prior to the election, Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis, which approaches its subject matter in a logical, almost scientific way. An entirely different book that noiseboy gave me for Christmas: Gavin Baddeley’s Lucifer Rising, with its captivating subtitle: “sin, devil worship, & rock n’ roll”. My younger brother’s recent quest for meaning and substance in religion. A serious illness in the family. Finally, the news of the day with its apocalyptic overtones: events in the Middle East, natural disasters, Bush’s re-election.
So I’ve wanted to begin a series of posts on religion, et al, for some time now, to sort out these thoughts, to probe deeper than the surface of my preconceptions, to discover what I truly do and don’t believe. And this morning, it hit me, where better to begin this process of sort, probe, and discover than with Johnny Cash?
Three months ago, in the October edition of Vanity Fair, I read a profoundly moving account of Cash’s spiritual relationship with producer Rick Rubin entitled “American Communion.” This morning I dug my copy out and reread it in a new context. The bond this odd couple shared went far beyond the richness and timelessness of their musical collaboration. Truly, theirs was a love story, as surely as was Johnny’s relationship with his beloved wife June.
The two men first met in 1993, when Rubin convinced Cash to sign with his American Recordings label. His offer: “I would like you to go with me and sit in my living room with a guitar and two microphones and just sing to your heart’s content, everything you ever wanted to record.” After an artistically miserable decade, Cash was at the low point of his career, while Rubin was the hip beardsman with the Midas touch. Remarkably, Cash had never performed unaccompanied in his entire career (!) until the first American Recordings. A huge hit, the LP received rave reviews, MTV airplay, and a Grammy, reinvigorating Cash’s career and confidence.
Rubin would go on to produce four more studio albums for Cash. More importantly, the two men, both intellectually curious spiritual questers, became true confidants, “enveloped in something more intense than a friendship, a deep kindredness that greatly moved Cash’s family and friends, and frankly, kind of freaked them out... Until they got to know each other, neither man had ever found anyone else in the music industry as curious as he was about matters spiritual.”
At the end of the nineties, when Cash’s health began to go south, their spiritual discussions intensified. “Cash, though a devout Christian, didn’t dismiss Rubin’s patchwork spirituality as hooey. A fellow bibliophile and comparative-religion junkie, the antithesis of the stereotypical southern rustic with a suspicion of fancy book learnin’, he delighted in his producer’s pan-theological curiosity.”
“Out of their frequent discussions of religion developed an odd custom, certainly unprecedented in producer-artist relations: for the last few months of Cash’s life, he and Rubin took Holy Communion together every day, even if they weren’t physically in the same place, and even though Rubin, who was born Jewish and doesn’t profess allegiance to any one faith, is not technically eligible to receive the sacrament. At an appointed time, Rubin would call Cash and Cash would ‘officiate’, instructing Rubin to visualize the wafer and wine.”
And Rubin continues the practice to this day, though it’s a different, more solitary experience for him.
More to come.
N/P Johnny Cash – God
(All quoted material from the October 2004 issue of Vanity Fair.)
posted by Jonathan Wright at 8:13 PM EMAIL POST
