Would Cash have paid the Government’s price?
| Posted in Feature
In the late sixties Johnny Cash, although an established country music star with his own TV show and a string of chart topping albums, risked his entire career (and that of his long suffering wife, June Carter), by playing what turned out to be two extraordinary and influential gigs at Folsom and San Quentin, two of the toughest prisons in America.
It wasn’t the first time he’d put his finger up at the establishment and caused apoplexy in the boardrooms of the ultra conservative record companies in Nashville, the centre of the world for country music at the time.
He’d always been a rebel, pill popping and womanising, but uncompromising in his lifelong quest for the truth, both in his music and his faith. You only have to listen to the American Recordings series; three albums he made with Def Jam producer Rick Rubin, in the twilight of his career in the late nineties, to understand the man. Mostly they’re just guitar and voice, but the sheer raw power of the pared down production can leave you overwhelmed. It’s emotional.
While our own musical careers may never reach these levels, what we all have in common in music is a spirit of rebellion, a desire to be outside the norm, not to join in with ‘civilians’. When I was a teenager, I didn’t grow my hair long and dream about guitars all day because I wanted to be an accountant.
It’s this spirit we need now, to join together and get a law that basically says, ‘sorry, you can’t play your guitar any more unless the government says you can’, changed and changed now. The 2003 Licensing act, which at the moment restricts musical performances to licensed premises only, would make two guys turning up at their local pub, getting their guitars out and knocking out a few numbers illegal.
Why? What’s it all about? The cynic in me immediately cries, ‘restriction of our hard won freedoms’, ‘big brother is in your back garden’, and all the other clichés that I usually trot out. However, I’m probably awarding the civil servants and government grey suits that dream up this tosh in the name of protecting us from middle aged, pony-tailed guitar strummers who may cause a mini riot with a lame version of Hotel California, a tad too much credit.
Generally, these laws are about maximising revenue. “Haven’t got a music license? Ooh, too bad, that’ll be a hefty fine then.”
What’s this got to do with Johnny Cash? Well, if he was still alive and wanted to do a gig in a prison, he’d better have made sure they were licensed for musical performances or he might just have ended up in the audience.
Tags: Guitar, Musical Instruments, vocal microphones
Legend!!!
David Bell