[OT] Sad: the man in black is dead... (merged)

[OT] Original man in black dies at 71

Johnny Cash passed on today. He will be sorely missed. I loved the guys music and grew up with it.

"I fell into a burning ring of fire..."
(moderators, move this if you want)

Aaron.
 

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My father was 46 when I was born in 1968. We never had a lot in common. We sometimes had a tense relationship because of that generation gap. However one thing we always had in common was our love for Johnny Cash.

On the night that my father died a few years ago I was the only one with him. I sang to him including all the lyrics I could remember to some of his favorite Johnny Cash songs. It made him smile and laugh even in his misery.

I will always have my memories of course but it seems like a little of the link that I had with my father has passed on with Johnny.
 

JoeBlank said:
When I read Cash had been released from the hospital over the weekend, with no details of his condition, I had a bad feeling. Suspected he had gone home to die. His wife passed not too long ago, and I think he lost the will to keep going.

Ritter is a shock. I was finally starting to respect the guy, after Slingblade and some of his more recent stuff.
Cash was the Man. Everyone from PJ Harvey and Nick Cave to just about any country act worth talking about was influenced by him.

Ritter is a real shocker. One his best turns was in the short-lived show Hooperman, where he played a cop. One of those shows that just didn't find an audience.
 


I'm listening to Don't Take Your Guns to Town right now. What an amazing song. The more I think about this, the worse I feel. Three of my musical idols (Cash, Zevon, and Strummer) dead in a year's time. Those three artists were pretty much my entire musical upbringing.

I used to write a music column for my school paper. This was back in the early 90s, when bubblegum punk was just arriving as the flavor du jour. I'd get these tapes from 16 year olds who put on a Johnny Rotten sneer and thought that they were rebels. Forget about raw talent, which was usually lacking. Not one of them had the intellect, the attitude, the sheer cojones of what I remembered as the real rebels of my youth. And at the time, all three of them were walking the Earth and waiting for some kid to discover them.

And now all three are gone. Some kid will never discover these storytellers, these poets of the downtrodden and the lost. They'll know about rebellion; cash-strapped record execs and MTV's cynical programmers know that leather, tattoos and bad grammar will always sell. But I'm afraid no teenager will know what it is that they're rebelling against.
 

Tarrasque Wrangler said:
And now all three are gone. Some kid will never discover these storytellers, these poets of the downtrodden and the lost. They'll know about rebellion; cash-strapped record execs and MTV's cynical programmers know that leather, tattoos and bad grammar will always sell. But I'm afraid no teenager will know what it is that they're rebelling against.

Yep. Here, just take this sex drugs and rock'n roll pill. It'll put you back to sleep. As long as you have your PS2 and your surround sound you're welcome to rebell in politically correct ways. That way you don't have to worry about what happens in the real world.

What's funny is that even Johnny Cash recognized talent beyond the genre of the music. I think he had a more open mind about some modern artists than I do at less than half his age.

Oh well. I didn't discover the Doors until after Jim Morrison was dead. I didn't discover Led Zeppelin until after John Bonham was dead. I didn't discover Stevie Ray Vaughan until well after he was dead. There is hope that the kids of today will discover them despite the music industry's almost manic need to cover up or despoil anything that isn't current or happening now.

Tradition is the illusion of permanence.
 

Tarrasque Wrangler said:
I used to write a music column for my school paper. This was back in the early 90s, when bubblegum punk was just arriving as the flavor du jour. I'd get these tapes from 16 year olds who put on a Johnny Rotten sneer and thought that they were rebels. Forget about raw talent, which was usually lacking. Not one of them had the intellect, the attitude, the sheer cojones of what I remembered as the real rebels of my youth. And at the time, all three of them were walking the Earth and waiting for some kid to discover them.

And now all three are gone. Some kid will never discover these storytellers, these poets of the downtrodden and the lost. They'll know about rebellion; cash-strapped record execs and MTV's cynical programmers know that leather, tattoos and bad grammar will always sell. But I'm afraid no teenager will know what it is that they're rebelling against.

My favorite was the 15 year old in the store I used to work at in the mall a few years ago. I noticed the Dead Kennedys patch on his backpack and asked him if he'd ever heard any of Jello Biafra's spoken word stuff and his response was "Who's that?"

:rolleyes:

It's all about looking a genre now...And it's just sad.
 

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