From the Gallows Pole to the Mercy Seat

Johnny Cash went out with a bang, having put out four of the best and best-received albums of his career in the last decade of his life with the Rick Rubin-produced American series, which he was still working on right up until his death in 2003.

Capitalizing on Cash's new wave of popularity (which began with his appearance on U2's Zooropa but mostly stems from his cover of the Nine Inch Nails song "Hurt," which became an MTV staple) is Michael Streissguth's new Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison: The Making of a Masterpiece.

The book is mostly about the recording of Cash's 1968 Folsom Prison concert, which first broke him through to a pop audience. While it's hard to avoid the suspicion that the book's main purpose is to prime Barnes & Noble passers-by for the coming Cash biopic, Streissguth gives himself an odd double task in the meantime: to debunk some of the mythology around Cash and the Folsom show, while at the same time touting it as one of the century's seminal musical events. After all, if the show's reputation is undeserved, why would anyone buy the book?

In the liner notes to Folsom Prison, Cash brags that "I have been behind bars a few times Each time, I felt the same feeling of kinship with my fellow prisoners." Streissguth dwells on the well-known fact that Cash drew mostly on Hollywood prison melodramas and a little Christian empathy (and on other people's songs) for his rough-and-rowdy ways songs, rather than on the day or two he spent inside drying out.

However much kinship Cash felt with his fellow prisoners, they related to him as a performer, not a peer. Streissguth details the TV-style audience prep and post-production manipulation which the studio employed to create a sound of maximum rowdiness.

After taking the piss out of Folsom Streissguth, of course, claims that it is an underappreciated album, and even as he cuts against Cash's cred, he can't help but rave about what a man of the (violent and imprisoned) people our hero is.

Worse still is his half-assed claim that Cash's "sociopolitical" album was a greater accomplishment than those of Lennon and Dylan, accusing the two giants of "self-indulgence" and preoccupation with "abstract realms of personal experience," thus implicitly claiming that Cash's record is more real.

This is stupid. You can hear on Folsom how much Cash is getting off on having the prisoners think he's hardcore like them, singing about unrepentant murders ("I shot that bad bitch down") and goading the prison guards ("mean bastards, aren't they?")

The truth is that Folsom is actually an overrated album, relying on its mythos of violence as much as any gangster rap album. While Folsom became the Straight Out Of Compton of its day, Cash's prison follow-up, 1969's Johnny Cash At San Quentin, is a far better album (The Chronic?), wild enough to supersede any question of legitimacy or nagging knowledge of studio tricks.

"I think prison songs are popular," Streissguth quotes Cash as saying early in his career, "because most of us are living in one little kind of prison or another."

It would take another 30 years, though, and the nearness of death as Cash's health gave way for him to fully invest his prison metaphor with the heft it deserved. In the space between the gag humor of Folsom's gallows humor "25 Minutes to Go" and American III's powerful death row ballad "The Mercy Seat," Cash found the weight that was lacking from his earlier efforts.

The problem with writing about Cash is that it's difficult to explain that he wasn't an outlaw, but that he wasn't a fraud either, and Streissguth's blowjob with teeth just tries to have it both ways at once. Cash was in the spirit of Harry Smith, Hunter Thompson, Bob Dylan and a handful of other bullshit artists who to steal a line from Bono (who'd love to be on this list but isn't) were even better than the real thing.

JOhnny cash at folson prison: the making of a masterpiece

By Michael Streissguth

Da Capo Press

191 pages, $24

A Fine Whine

How sheep shit got cute.

D'ont let the studly pin-up fool youMichael Wex wasn't born to be bad. He was born to kvetch.

Having heard Wex lecture, I didn't need an entire book to know that the title was true. He is a shrewd linguist, sociologist, historian, playwright and skilled native Yiddish speakerand a heck of a whiner.

Wex is a beloved fixture at KlezKanada, a summer program devoted to Yiddish music, theater, and language. And there, in the backwoods outside of Montreal, I have heard Wex complain about everything from the quality of the cholent (a long-simmering beef and bean stew), to the cruel distance of his trailer from the bathroom (not unrelated grievances).

Even those with no prior exposure to Yiddish can follow Wex's clean and clear prose as it weaves through explanations of the roots of particular words and of whole expressions. Wex greatly appreciates just how layeredhow masterfully evolvedmany Yiddish expressions are.

A favorite example of mine is the phrase "nisht geshtoygn un nisht gefloygn," it didn't climb up and it didn't fly. As Wex explains, the origin of this phrasewhose import is "yeah, right"is a reference to the Christian notion of Jesus climbing onto the cross and later winging his resurrected way into heaven. The author explains:

"Each individual word of nisht geshtoygn un nisht gefloygn would be comprehensible to a German-speaker, but it's unlikely that the German would ever guess what it really refers to, even if he or she caught the meaning of 'bullshit.' And that's the point: Yiddish started out as German for blasphemers, as a German in which you could deny Christ without getting yourself killed any more often than necessary."

Such complexities to Yiddish turns-of-phrase and wordings, though not always related to religion, are the substance of this book: are part of what Wex means by kvetching. He writes: "If the Stones' '(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction' had been written in Yiddish, it would have been called '(I Love to Keep Telling You That I Can't Get No) Satisfaction (Because Telling You That I'm Not Satisfied Is All That Can Satisfy Me).'"

To illustrate what he's driving at, he gives the example of a joke involving a man complaining just to be a nuisance, and explains:

"He knowsthat in a world where indifference is the best that can be expected, the principle of aftselakhis (very literally, 'in order to provoke anger'), the impulse to do things only because someone else doesn't want you to, is sometimes essential to the world's moral balance. And the old man understands how aftselakhis works: alone in the history of the world, Yiddish-speaking Jews long ago broke the satisfaction barrier and figured out how to express contentment by means of complaint: kvetching becomes a way of exercising some small measure of control over an otherwise hostile environment."

This placement of Complaint at the center of the whole language is something that many, if not most, Yiddishists and Yiddish-speakers would disagree with. But for Wex, it is the ideal springboard for a scholarly discussion of the language, and also for his own idiosyncratic sense of humor, which successfully walks the precarious line between witty and grating.

Lots of New Yorkers sprinkle their schmoozing with some Yiddish words; but, if they knew what they were actually saying, perhaps they might think twice. Many of the words that are used casually in English, in the original Yiddish would have been unsuitable in respectable conversation. In his chapter "'Bubkes Means a Lot of Nothing:' Yiddish and Nature," Wex explains how bubkes, a word meaning, literally, "sheep shit" became an acceptable alternate in English for "nothin'." He discusses why it's true that "Like so much of the Yiddish that has found its way into English, bubkes has been downgraded from vulgar to cute; but unless you were discussing barnyard waste, you'd try to avoid the word in polite Yiddish conversation."

All in all, it's a great read for those who know and love Yiddish, and those who just drop the occasional "schmuck" into conversation. Whine on, Wex, whine on you irresistible hunk.

Born to Kvetch

By Michael Wex

St. Martin's Press

320 pages, $24.95