The day after

In today’s Altercation, Roseanne Cash writes charmingly about how cool it was to go to school the day after Bob Dylan appeared on her dad’s TV show:

On June 8, 1969, I walked in to Holy Cross School in Ventura, California, and into my eighth-grade classroom with a new mandate of confidence and coolness. My dad’s television show, The Johnny Cash Show, had aired the night before and his guest had been Bob Dylan. My dad and Bob had sat at the edge of a small stage, wearing hip black suits, with only their two acoustic guitars, and had sung a duet of “Girl From the North Country.” The entire country, or at least my entire generation, was buzzing. It was a certifiable, seminal musical event. My new mandate was justified thusly: the English teacher who had told my entire class, right in front of me — only to pretend that he had forgotten that I was there — that none of my dad’s work was worth listening to, save perhaps “Folsom Prison Blues”; the boy who had said my dad couldn’t sing and could barely talk; the nuns who had made nasty comments about my dad’s profession and attendant personal catastrophes … they could all kiss my ass. They could at least back off. No one was cooler than my dad, well, no one but Bob Dylan. But even Bob Dylan thought no one was cooler than my dad. Everything was forgiven under the terms of my new mandate (at least until MUCH later): the long absences, the drugs, the overnight jail stay, the infidelity, the bizarre and dangerous behavior and the divorce. The stratospheric level of coolness witnessed the evening before on television healed and dissolved just about every problem I had in my 14-year-old life.

I was a sprout at the time, and the only thing I knew about Johnny Cash was that he was the guy who sang a song about a boy named after a girl — a song that was amusing the first two or three times I heard it, rather less the eighth and ninth time I heard it, and downright annoying the twentieth time I heard it. Commercial AM radio being what it was at the time, that song would continue to be played many more times, until each repetition began to feel like a personal insult. In those days, the playlists were so tight you could set your watch to them, and after a while even the disc jockeys let it be known they would consider a root canal without anesthesia preferable to cranking up “A Boy Named Sue” for one more go-round.

Well, the joke was on me, ’cause when I look at the list of musical guests on this DVD of the old Johnny Cash TV show, I realize that the hippest program television has ever seen was going on somewhere just over my head. Bob Dylan? Neil Young? Louis Armstrong? Stevie Wonder? Pete Seeger? Ray Charles? And meanwhile my folks were watching every lameass Rat Pack wannabe variety show? Jeez, did I have a deprived childhood or what?