I’ve been prepping for the release of Cash on Cash: Interviews & Encounters with Johnny Cash, which I edited for Chicago Review Press. The release date is next Tuesday - September 20th. It was my Pandemic Project. I had been booked to tour Australia and California as bassist in The Mammals for most of Spring 2020, but, like so many, I was forced to hunker down. After a pretty serious dark spell, I sent a proposal to Chicago Review Press, and was thrilled to get my first nonfiction contract.
The chapters I curated for Cash on Cash include interviews, articles, and transcripts of conversations, some never before published. The materials range from the late 50s to just before Cash passed in 2003. Excavating all of that was more fun than I thought it’d be. I especially enjoyed visiting the Country Music Hall of Fame archive in Nashville last summer, a warren of climate controlled, dimly lit, soundproofed rooms, old library smells rising from boxes of paper periodicals and files of microfilm. All of it – especially the olfactory stuff – transported me, and pivoted me towards a world I’d not fully realized I’d retreated so far from. The analog world. I’ve subsequently invested more time therein, about which more soon.
In addition to compiling the materials for Cash on Cash, I wrote an in-depth introduction and talked to some of the writers who interviewed Cash (including his daughter, my friend Rosanne Cash, and my wife, Holly George-Warren, who conducted one of the last Cash interviews in 2003). I used these writers’ recollections in my chapter intros.
I found some enlightening stuff. He was much, much more than The Man in Black.
I’ll soon be boarding a plane to Nashville for Americanafest (September 14th through the 18th). My first time at this fest, which looks to be pretty great. I’ll be moderating the panel Johnny Cash: An Arkansan Icon Endures, and playing bass for my friend Shawn Amos at his showcases.
In October, I embark on my first ever legit book tour. I will try to write about that here.
My first review for Cash on Cash recently went live. It’s from Library Journal and it’s good. “An intriguing and often insightful collection.” Click HERE.
Want a copy? Click here to find your closest indie bookseller and/or here for amazon.
But what of that analog world of which I wrote above?
One of the hooks of Cash on Cash is that it contains material you cannot find on the internet. Holding those archived documents in my hands, lifting them from boxes and inhaling them - magazines, newspapers, out-of-print books – returned me to a world beyond the servers, the algorithms, the search engines, the social media platforms, the “web presences.”
Oddly, a couple friends bristled when I shared my realization that so much is not yet digitized, not yet uploaded to the World Wide Web.
“It’s out there,” one insisted. “It’s just hard to find. But somebody’s digitized it.”
I’m sorry, but that is not so.
Most of my friends are secular, but I’ve come to realize a few have filled their God-shaped hole with reverence for their beloved internet. It brings them so much. Mentioning its shortcomings is mildly blasphemous. But I’m here to tell you, or to remind you: there’s mountains of stuff out there that almighty Google cannot unearth. Only human hands can do it.
Stepping back into that non-digitized realm was like stumbling from my well-worn path onto a vast, instantly familiar landscape, like walking the neighborhood of my youth. It’s been here all along, moldering beyond the glow of my devices. Decaying, yes, but still very much alive.
Perhaps that’s one reason people shrink from the analog world, and the memories enshrined therein. Unlike digital, which seems impervious to rot (it definitely is not), the analog world is organic, and in varying stages of decomposition. If there’s one thing most modern day humans avoid, it’s decay.
To clarify: “analog world” is the world of media you can hold in your hands – magazines, maps, books, letters, postcards, cassettes, vinyl. Of course all those things still exist, but my time among them is far, far less than it once was. Whereas, when I measure time spent on my phone and the device on which I’m typing, I have a little anxiety attack.
I once spent untold hours in the analog world, especially in my teens and twenties. I mark my entry into the digital world at 1997, when Holly was pregnant with our son, Jack. A quarter century ago. I was to be a stay-at-home dad for his first few years.
Holly had possessed an AOL account since the mid-90s. She and several of our friends loved email, and they figured I’d love it, too. I’d been an avid pen pal. Holly and I courted through letters and mixtapes, and several deep friendships flowered through correspondence. I did a lot of epistolary writing. (More than I realized.) And my pen pals gave as good as they got, bless them.
Taking care of an infant would make these communiques more challenging. With email and AOL chat, I could keep in touch with far-flung friends so much easier, and it would be immediate. What a thrill.
I could continue to write letters, of course. But once Jack arrived, I rarely did so. I squirreled away most of the evidence of my analog world. In the ensuing decades, my perception of what was in the boxes changed.
I’ve wondered when this moment would arrive. What catalyst would move me to revisit the analog world of my past, the hard evidence of connections? Evidently, poring over old magazines and newspapers for Cash on Cash did the trick.
I could easily say, “I didn’t have time to assess the boxes because I’ve spent a big chunk of the last couple decades raising a kid and carving out a life.” But that’s a lame excuse. I’ve made plenty of time to do a lot of dumb shit, like surf the internet, post crap on social media, nurture dead-end relationships, and doomscroll. No, what kept me from opening the boxes was a couple types of fear. Fear that mice had gotten in and destroyed stuff. Fear that I’d be overwhelmed with ghosts, as I’ve lost so many loved ones whose handwriting and images were enclosed therein.
A few weeks ago, after being unable to get it off my mind, as if under a spell, I said fuck it. I unearthed the boxes from a couple closets. My heart pounded as I peeled back the brittle packing tape. and then… boom, I was in a time warp, for good and for ill.
Thankfully, there was no discernible rodent damage. The contents were remarkably preserved.
I sat for a couple hours and read travel diaries, magazine clippings, notes from disgruntled and/or delighted friends, letters from besotted and/or enraged lovers, a fraught note from a former teacher who’d had a longtime affair with a teenage student, a man other teens and I (and adults) had protected. (For the record, I deeply regret covering for him. More on that in another post.)
I only had the stamina for a few of those letters. A significant amount offer proof of certain things I’d either begun to doubt or remembered inaccurately. In some instances, my recollections have been colored by strong-willed people who are better served by their own renditions, which, it turns out, are objectively false.
I gingerly opened the bulging envelopes of many glossy photos, pored over the mementoes I’d carried in my pockets – train and plane tickets, talismans, trinkets, doodles, charms. My hands were busy.
I just scratched the surface. I left dozens of cassettes unplayed, and set aside hundreds of (mostly not very good) lyrics I’d scrawled while residing at numerous addresses. My fitful attempts to make an accurate record of what I was feeling. Had I really expended so much effort? I had. Did I consciously stow it away as proof to my future self of how I’d spent my time?
Of course I lost my moorings a bit. Wracked and gutted and grieving anew, as when one dreams of a dead beloved, then awakens to “reality” and a lacerating pain you thought you’d “gotten over.” I cried several times. But I survived.
I reached out to several people to let them know I’d come across letters they’d written me thirty-something years ago. Sweet letters. Irritated letters. Extremely lusty letters. Hilarious letters. (Sometimes all the aforementioned in one.) These people were glad to hear from me, but not one was eager to re-read what I’d found. Most had no memory of the missives they’d posted in those days when time was more elastic, and attention spans ran deep and broad. But I know if I did send a scan, and they pulled themselves away from their screens to read it, they would remember, and like me, down the rabbit hole they would go, for good and for ill.
I understand the reluctance. It’s what I’d been experiencing all these years, toting these boxes (now ensconced in much better storage crates from Lowe’s) from address to address. Unlike the digital world, the analog world, once accessed, will work its way into you via your fingers, palms, nose, and dilated pupils. Those sensory pathways go mighty deep. Although we use our eyes more than ever, sight is the “youngest” sense, the last to come back online when you rise from unconsciousness.
You don’t awaken to the analog world, you drift into it, as in slumber, as in dreams. The fingerprints, tear stains, handwriting, bar napkin art, entreaties, curses, and pledges reside in decaying fibers. Paradoxically, that is their power. The materials may flake at the edges, but the human evidence they contain is nevertheless stronger than anything you will see on a screen. You cannot simply scroll away. Scans could be sent through fiberoptic cables or instantly beamed via WiFi to the other side of the world, but the magic is in the sensory overload of the dying, but still living, object in my hands. The weight of it.
My analog past has risen into my current, extremely digitized world, and this re-entry has changed me. Not in a cataclysmic way, but significantly. I’m in the process of reframing several relationships, dispensing with some inaccurate notions. I am reassessing my younger self, and thanking him for saving so much. I’m trying to let myself believe how deeply I was loved by people I will never see again. I find it’s easier to do that when I’m not looking at a glowing screen.
So off I go.
RBW
September 4th, 2022