Talking Vernacular Blues

876. GLENN FREY, "Smuggler's Blues"
Produced by Barry Beckett, Allan Blazek, & Glenn Frey; written by Glenn Frey & Jack Tempchin
MCA 53546 1985 Billboard: # 12

877. JOHNNY CASH, "Singing In Viet Nam Talking Blues"
Written by Johnny Cash
Columbia 45393 1971 Did not make pop charts

Oh Lord, he's talking Miami Vice again.

But seriously folks . . .

There's a traditional form in twentieth-century folk music called the "talking blues." The talking blues is not a "protest song" per se. It's more like a broadside, a song of indeterminate length in which words about recent events are more accompanied than set to music. The point of talking blues is to pass along information to the listeners, be it about the sinking of the Titanic, a strike at a shoe factory, or a day trip to Bear Mountain. Diehard folkies would probably suggest that there can't be such a thing as a pop talking blues, because the presumed slickness of pop would have to distract by definition from the self-conscious information drop of the words. Nevertheless, when Chuck D famously referred to rap "the CNN of black America," he as good as suggested that in the closing decades of the twentieth century, the talking blues had migrated into pop, into the undeniably polished tracks of contemporary hiphop.

But what about white Americans? One could argue that they don't need a muscial CNN because they already have the 24-hour news version, but no American above the age of eight would seriously suggest that what comes out of the mainstream news organizations is what we seriously need to know. Certainly in the pre-internet, not-yet-really-cable-ready 1980s, it wasn't. This is why, to complete their instruction about Reagan-era diplomacy in the Western hemisphere, many mainstream Americans needed . . . Miami Vice. The series was not just "anti-authority," as so many pieces of post-Vietnam American culture were. Episode after episode of the show, right down to the series finale, were premised in the idea that, no matter what the President might say, the War on Drugs would always suffer because its true success would undermine the supposed cause of fighting anti-communism.

In no case was this more true than in the episode entitled "Smuggler's Blues." Glenn Frey, who also appeared as an actor in the episode playing a shady pilot, even wrote this song for it, and its verses punctuated the narrative transitions from location to location. The song isn't exactly a summary of the episode's actual plot, but it does borrows amply from it, right down to the punchline "It's the politics of contraband," which is uttered near the end of the episode by Don Johnson as the frequently sockless Sonny Crockett.

As in most talking blues, the music here is instantly forgettable. The words are the point, and even they contain no self-conscious flourishes that might draw attention away from the data they wish to impart. We are taken through a drug deal from start to finish but we are asked to see it in organizational terms. For a Reagan-era pop troubadour, drugs are not just recreation or a scourge on society. They're part of our foreign policy strategy for winning the Cold War. As Jackson Browne almost acknowledged when he rewrote "Cocaine" at a Christic Institute concert a few years later, this was the politically self-aware drug song that that more-respected singer-songwriter wished he had written.

Johnny Cash's "Singing in Viet Nam Talking Blues" is a more respected song than Frey's and a more obvious heir of the classic talking blues tradition so I won't belabor my analysis of it. But I would point out that Cash almost does the opposite in this song of what Frey would do in his song fourteen years later. Frey took something considered personal and recreational and connected to global politics, whereas Cash takes the most pressing geopolitical issue of his time and takes it down to the level of the personal. From the opening scene at the breakfast table, this is a song about a married couple who go on a trip. The purposefully understated, even labored folksiness of it is meant to disarm the listener. It reduces our trip through the war zone to a human level, which in turn makes the rain of shells even scarier. This is not the world of either Barry Sadler's or John Wayne's Green Berets. This is a scary environment in which the politics of the war seem ultimately irrelevant.

By the end Cash could shout, as almost no other country singer of his time could or would shout, for the "boys" to be brought home "IN PEACE!" and no one could mistake him for being pro-communist. Like Frey, he wasn't just preaching to a left-leaning proudly folkie choir. He was using the musical vernacular of his time, and spreading the news to a mediated crowd.

The Shaky Thunder of Redemption

13. JOHNNY CASH, "Hurt"
Produced by Rick Rubin; written by Trent Reznor

Universal International 779982 2003 Did not make pop charts

In the early twentieth century, it was not unusual for multiple artists or bands to record the same song at the same time. No one in or out of the music industry thought "Night and Day" "belonged" to Fred Astaire even though Cole Porter wrote it to exactly fit his range, any more than Frank Sinatra or Sarah Vaughn hesitated to record "Send in the Clowns" in the 1970s even though Stephen Sondheim wrote that song to be the perfect eleventh hour number for Glynis Johns in A Little Night Music. In the heyday of Tin Pan Alley and Broadway, musicians more readily understood, not only that you need not have written a song to perform it with conviction, but also that just because a song has been recorded brilliantly doesn't mean that all the marrow has been sucked from it.

These days, we call such recordings "cover songs," and they are sometimes seen as the refuge of the aesthetically desperate. One notable exception to this perceived rule was Rick Rubin's multi-album collaboration with Johnny Cash at the end of his career. Like most country performers, Cash had filled out his albums with covers all through the 1960s and 1970s, but that was the usual looking across from the Country chart to Pop, Rock, and Easy Listening and seeing what recent songs could be reworked in a slightly different generic vein. The songs Rubin brough to Cash in the 90s and early 00s constiuted more of an act of musicological recovery, reconsidering midchart rock songs of years before and stripping them down to their basics. The closest analogy to the Rubin-Cash project were Frank Sinatra's best records for Capitol in the 1950s and Ella Fitzgerald's "Songbook" albums for Verve from the same period. Both series recovered many fugitive songs from what might have seemed at the time like the disposable pop of the pre-World War II period. To the extent that we now talk (sometimes it seems obsessively) about the "Great American Songbook" of the 1920s and 1930s, that catalog was to a great degree sketched in outline by those Sinatra and Fitzgerald albums. No song is ever an instant "classic," not even in its original performance; it is made so over time, often by repeated reinterpretation. For some listeners, what Cash and Rubin proved with these records was that a heavy metal artist like Danzig, for example, was much more than just a haircut.

Especially now that we can listen to many of the tracks that Rubin and Cash rejected, it seems obvious that these sessions were the musicological equivalent of panning for gold. For every track that worked, at least five failed, sometimes for reasons that were almost impossible to fathom. But "Hurt" was the biggest nugget they unearthed, even if you can divorce it in your mind from Mark Romanek's sublime video for the track.

As Trent Reznor originally recorded it, "Hurt" is a song about addiction, and it sounds appropriately stoned. Reznor sings dreamily to his substance of choice, almost certainly heroin, calling it "my sweetest friend." Oblivion and even suicide seem like the only reasonable options for the singer to take, and we drift with him in a beautifully alienated, semi-industrial aural landscape. In this version of the song, self-indulgence>>>self-pity>>>self-immolation seems like a natural, almost easy progression.

Obviously, Johnny Cash himself knew a thing or two about addiction, but in his version, the song isn't just about that. The keyboard doesn't drift in his version either, the way it does in Reznor's. Usually, when geezers cover young rockers, they make the music softer, but this is a cover designed to give you the mother of all Excedrin headaches. The piano pounds. It thunders. It's more than the jackhammer feel of a hangover. It's the sound of the coming storm.

Is it the sound of judgment? For it seems unmistakable that Cash is singing about something much bigger than mere addiction. In his version, this is a song about sin, something that 90 days in Betty Ford or Promises can't really fix for you. And even without the clips from Cash's film The Gospel Road that Romanek interpolated in the video, we could probably guess that for Cash his "sweetest friend" is not the smack but the Savior. Reznor spoke of his "crown of thorns" ironically, as if the reference to the Christian New Testament was just another trick of the self-dramatizing addict. For Cash, though, it seems as if that image is the key to the whole song. So many of the songs that Cash tried to cover on these albums, from the time-honored "The Drunkard's Prayer" to Tom Petty's "Southern Accents" to Kris Kristofferson's "Lord Help Me, Jesus" come down to the same plea of the sinner--and often the substance abuser--begging for Jesus to give him a hand up from the barroom floor. But it is in the wholly godless Reznor's work that Cash finds what may be his greatest dramatization of the fallen Christian's desperate will for redemption.

Because in the end that's what separates Cash's cover from Reznor's original: the older singer's will. No matter what eventually happened to Reznor after he recorded his track, during it he sounds as if he's quite happy to nod off at the keyboard. For Cash, however, this is self-examination and not just self-pity. Bent and bowed, he is pulling himself up, and the earth around him is shaking with his effort. He might not succeed before the song ends--or he dies--but Jesus Christ you want him to.