With country music's great outlaw (drug addict, pyromaniac and the

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Aug 24, 2003 | by Vicky Allan

Daddy's Girl

THERE ought to be a third seat at the table for the Man in Black. As it is, it seems his shadow is here, lurking by his daughter Rosanne Cash as we meet in a Kensington hotel, a long, weathered form stretched out over the white linen tablecloth. Rosanne wears his presence lightly and with grace, tolerates my questions about him, answers frankly and sharply with a wry humour even though she's here to talk about her music.

There's a line she likes to quote: "After the age of 30, it is unseemly to blame one's parents for one's life." With a father like the legendary Johnny Cash - country music's great outlaw, a some- time drug addict, pyromaniac and the man who divorced her mother when she was 11 years old - you might easily throw a lot of blame around. But Cash has her own rules of conduct. She doesn't do that. Besides, she really is her father's daughter. There is a lot of Johnny in her.

She orders a tap water. The Man in Black orders nothing. It's something she's been thinking about lately - how she fits into the chain of her family, how the generational wheel revolves, "the things from your own past that you never have an answer to, and the questions your own children will have."

In the last ten years, 71-year-old Johnny has been hospitalised more than 20 times, laid low with a series of diseases from diabetes to autonomic neuropathy and its associated bouts of pneumonia and bronchitis. Rosanne, 47 years old, began to look back, pull out memories then put them back on the shelf. She wrote a song, starting with an image from her childhood of her one-year-old self in a cot, a huge crucifix bearing down above her.

"When I wrote September When It Comes, obviously I had my father's mortality in mind. My sisters and I and my brother had just about gone crazy from running back and forth to the hospital and he was getting sick all the time and not knowing."

At the time, it hadn't even entered her head that her father might sing with her on the track, but her husband and producer John Leventhal suggested it. She was reluctant. "I said no because I always said no whenever anyone suggested that. And he brought it up several times and I said no for a couple of months. Then I realised he was right. But first I had to let go of 25 years of my stance - 'I'm not going to do this. I'm not going to use my dad.' I thought about it, and, John said, 'If there's ever a right time this is it.' And I read the lyrics to myself, and I said, 'Oh my God, he's right.'"

September When It Comes is one of her best songs, a melancholy reflection on the cycle of ageing. Her father's fractured, beaten voice rises across hers, as if bubbling up from the bottom of the barrel: "I cannot move a mountain. I can no longer run. I cannot be who I was then. In a way I never was." It seems right.

The song is, as Rosanne says, "a family portrait", and all the more poignant because the collaboration has been withheld this long, all the more when you know the aging Johnny was between hospital stays during the recording and that his daughter was holding back the tears.

Before he agreed to record it, her father wanted to see the lyrics.

"Isn't that cute?" she says. "Oh yeah, he's an artist first and foremost and not even for his child would he do something artistically or say something that wasn't right. Which I think is so beautiful. When he said that I just laughed. I kind of felt well, it's going to have to be really bad for him to say no. I thought it was sweet. It was very sweet."

In the end he said he liked the song in the context of the album. That's a compliment. See, he thinks Rules Of Travel (her latest album) is a hit. I said, 'Dad, people my age don't have hits.'"

Cash laughs. Her face crackles with something of her father's intensity. Much of her story is reminiscent of his. Johnny got divorced, remarried, took a lot of drugs, played to prison inmates and campaigned for the rights of Native American Indians, yet also won a string of grammies.

He once quipped, "The only person that would talk to me was the Lord. The only woman that would have me was Betty Ford." A generation on, Rosanne ploughed a similar furrow, married fellow country singer Rodney Crowell, took a lot of cocaine, got off the drugs in her 20s, divorced, had five children (one a step-daughter), campaigned against the war in Iraq and won a Grammy for best female country vocalist. Her life seems just as tumultuous. But then, as she says, lots of people get divorced. It's not an exceptional story. And, in showbusiness, a lot of people take drugs and end up in rehab.

"Divorce is terrible. I mean it sucks," she sighs. "But, you know, my life is not that much different - what happens to the heart is pretty much the same for everybody. You go through the same things. The same loss, the same grief, the same confusion."

This is a theme in her conversation; the common ground of the emotions. "I'm not so different from anyone else", she seems so often to be saying. The album cover of Rules Of Travel has a shot (taken by her friend Annie Liebovitz) of her windswept and gothic, coming out of the sea, holding nothing but a shell and a compass, behind her a deserted shipwreck.