Nuggets from the Mad Life of Johnny Cash

This is the ninth installment in a series about a book I'm reading called Stories Done, which is a great collection of tales of excess from counter-culture leaders.

Why aren't there more great rock-bio movies being made? Walk the Line, Ray, and The Doors offer proof of how great and rich with content they can be. A movie-industry friend of mine tells me it's often difficult to get the rights from protective family estates.

Anyway, Mikal Gilmore's chapter on Johnny Cash shows, if nothing else, that Walk the Line only touched the surface of great stories about the Man in Black. Here are some other doozies:

-- Johnny Cash was born without a name. "His parents simply called him JR. Years later, they decided J stood for John; they never did figure out what R stood for."

-- His sources of rebellion included, but were not limited to: the death of his brother, the heartlessness of his father, and the confinement he felt in his hometown.

-- As Cash sat writing "Folsom Prison Blues," the line "I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die" was what came to mind when he tried to think of "the worst reason a person could have for killing another person." He later said that line came to him quite easily.

-- He got thrown out of a hotel in Australia when he and Sammy Davis Jr. staged a fast-draw gun duel in the lobby. They fired off blanks and sent other hotel guests running.

-- He was the first U.S. citizen ever successfully sued by the government for setting fire to a national forest. He paid $125,000 in damages. Cash had been driving a camper through the forest. He knew it was leaking oil, and it caught the sun-hot grass on fire, causing three mountains to torch and driving nearly all 53 of the protected wild condors from the area. He laughed off the incident at trial while high on amphetamines.

-- The Ku Klux Klan picketed some of his shows because his first wife had a dark skin tone. They branded him "a degenerate who had mongrel children."

-- In 1967, he crawled into Nickajack Cave on the Tennessee River and lay down to die. But when an unexpected feeling came over him, telling him he wouldn't die there, he crawled back out and swore off drugs and madness. He soon thereafter married June Carter, and the story ends happily from there.

Eating the Dinosaur: Nirvana's Guilt Rock

This is the second part in a series about Chuck Klosterman's new book Eating the Dinosaur.

Kurt Cobain (and possibly bassist Krist Novoselic) "could not reconcile the dissonance between mass success and artistic merit" when their band, Nirvana, was releasing its follow-up to the mega-smash Nevermind album.

Klosterman tries to get inside Cobain's head to wonder why In Utero had to be "conventionally 'bad' in order for it to be exceptionally good" and "why did that fraction of badness only matter if people knew that the badness was intentional."

The author compares Cobain to David Koresh, whose Branch Davidian cult was being raided by the feds at the same time as In Utero's recording sessions were beginning, in February 1993. They both had shoulder-length hair, played guitar, had bad childhoods, often complained of stomach problems, were obsessed with guns, and had troubling taste in women.

Klosterman's comparison oddly ends there, without making any sweeping assumptions, but it appears this book could indeed be a hodgepodge of pop-culture musings. And the style works well in forcing the reader to make his or her own conclusions, which is perhaps why Klosterman is largely considered one of the keenest pop-culture critics of our time. I think his goal is to find overlooked similarities and simplifications of the weird ways in which we embrace celebrities and their culture.

But back to the bad-art-as-good issue, another interesting story Klosterman tells is how Cobain forced his wife, Courtney Love, to return the Lexus she purchased. He didn't identify with the rich-person car. At this point, Cobain "merely looked like a millionaire trying to convince people that he still wanted to be the kind of guy who refused to buy a Lexus.

"In Utero sounds like what it is: Guilt Rock."

Eating the Dinosaur: The Interview As Conversation

This is the first part in a series about Chuck Klosterman's new book Eating the Dinosaur.

When speaking to people, Klosterman prefers to interview them rather than talk to them "for real." He doesn't like the social limitations that tact puts upon real conversations, and he also doesn't like talking to most people more than once or twice in his lifetime.

Examining the odd phenomenon of the "interview," Klosterman recounts the singer Prince's behavior through much of the 1980s, when he declined almost every interview request he received. When he did allow an interview, he would demand that the reporter not use a tape recorder or write notes. Prince did this not because he was crazy but rather because he wanted the writer "to reflect only the sense of the conversation," as opposed to the specific phrasing he used.

Interesting. I often feel like I'm interviewing people when we're talking. I think it comes from actually interviewing people as a major part of my newspaper and PR jobs over the years. Sometimes I feel a little guilty about this, but I'm not sure why. The interviewing technique is a good way to get to know people and it keeps conversations with strangers from becoming awkward and filled with silences.

Beach Boys' Success Forced On Them By Father

Brian Wilson's father, Murray, was "a tireless worker with a penchant for big ideas, [but] nothing came easy for him. A gruesome accident at Goodyear cost him his left eye" which caused him to have an aggressive personality that alienated him from his co-workers and "stalled him on the lower rungs of management."

This accentuated his desire to "kick the world in the ass." He wanted everything for himself, but since his accident seemed like that wouldn't be possible, he transfered that desire over to wanting everything for his kids.

Murray noticed Brian's skill for music just before his son's first birthday, when he was carrying Brian on his shoulders and singing a song. It didn't take long before Brian was humming along in a note-perfect replication of his father's voice.

Murray loved his son even more because of his obvious talent. But that didn't stop the Wilson boys from later recounting horrific allegations against their dad. He forced Brian to defecate on a plate as punishment for some small deed. He forced tomato-hating Dennis to eat them until he puked. He beat Brian with a two-by-four for unleashing a neighborhood dog. He took out his fake eye and forced the kids to stare into his blood-red socket.

These tales begin the examination of Brian Wilson in the book, Catch a Wave, by Peter Ames Carlin (who also penned the new Paul McCartney: A Life). Unfortunately, this doesn't seem like the best book to read about the Beach Boys. It's poorly written and not very coherent, and I don't plan on continuing reading it, even though the Beach Boys are one of my all-time favorite bands and their story (what I know of it) really interests me.

Isn't One Christmas Enough?

Now, I'm a guy who likes a good chick flick fairly often. But Four Christmases goes beyond my capacity to enjoy the feel-good family holiday cutefest.

Whoever conceptualized this turkey made some big mistakes. Not that they didn't perhaps have a seed of a good idea at first. I can't remember much of the movie (it was sooo bad), but it had something to do with a couple that finds their Caribbean vacation canceled and is forced to spend the holidays with their four parents and their extended families.

Seems like this could work, at least slightly, once the usually reliable leads Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon were cast. But they may both have a difficult time recovering from this mess. A particularly porous scene is the one in which they pack their bags with sickening joy. I know it's the movies, but anybody having this much fun packing luggage is not a joy to watch.

Abhorrent performances are also on display from Sissy Spacek, Dwight Yoakam, Mary Steenburgen, Jon Voight, Jon Favreau, and Tim McGraw.

Sorry I've wasted this much time recapping this horrible experience (which, notably and embarrassingly, has grossed about $80 million since its Thanksgiving release).

1/2 out of ***** stars

The 10 Best Tarantino Flicks

10. Kill Bill Vol. 2 (2004) (director)
09. Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003) (director)
08. From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) (screenwriter)
07. Natural Born Killers (1994) (story)
06. Inglourious Basterds (2009) (director)
05. Jackie Brown (1997) (director)
04. True Romance (1993) (writer)
03. Killing Zoe (1993) (executive producer)
02. Reservoir Dogs (1992) (director)
01. Pulp Fiction (1994) (director)

Inglourious Basterds - Misspelled, But Still Great

Inglourious Basterds continues to round out the case that Quintin Tarantino is one of the greatest movie directors of all time, right up there with the likes of Alfred Hitchcock, Oliver Stone, Stanley Kubrick, Woody Allen, Steven Spielberg, and Victor Fleming.

Perhaps the movie's most powerful scene is the slow-builder tension of the opening sequence, in which a Nazi colonel known as "The Jew Hunter" (an award-deserving Christoph Waltz) visits a family in France to make sure there is no harboring of Jews on the property. From there, we follow this wicked and charming colonel as he faces off against American Lieutenant Aldo Raine (a typically awesome Brad Pitt), who leads a group of Jewish-Americans on a mission to kill as many Nazis as possible.

Also of note is the stunning and magnetic Melanie Laurent as a Jewish girl who is living under an alias in very close proximity to many of the top-brass Nazis.

**** out of ***** stars

One-and-a-Half Hours in Amsterdam

In the midst of an entire weekend spent in airports and airplanes (about 80 percent of my time between Friday night at 10 EST to 12:30 a.m. Monday), I was able to squeeze in 90 minutes in downtown Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

I had hoped to walk a full loop of the city, but instead only got to jump off at the Amsterdam Centraal train station and briskly walk through frigid, 10-degree temperatures in the famed Red Light District.

That's me above entering the area next to an oddly phallic statue. Passed the "coffeeshops," hookers in windows, headshops, and an endless variety of pizza-by-the-slice dives.

The picture to the left is a photo next to one of the city's many canals, where the ladies of the evening were displaying their wares in the front windows (you can barely make some of them out if you look closely). If the windows had white blinds drawn, that meant they were temporarily busy and not open for more business.

Fascinating, but I had no time to enjoy any of the local delights because I had to get back to the airport Sheridan so as not to worry about missing the last train.

Snowcopalypsed In in Amsterdam

This picture to the right is the "Snowpocalypse" that's keeping me from getting home to D.C. after two weeks in Sweden/Denmark.

The good news: I made it to Amsterdam! United is putting me up for the night in a fairly swanky Sheridan that is a 3-minute walk from the United ticketing desk and a 5-minute walk to the train, which is a 15-minute ride to downtown (American city planners take note; in the U.S., I would have had to take at least one shuttle to the nearest airport hotel).

The bad news: My kinda luck today. After waiting for four hours at the airport for someone to finally give me a hotel room, I then spent another two-and-a-half hours sitting on a train that was going nowhere while somebody tryed to commit suicide on the tracks between the airport and downtown. I finally gave up after a disgusting Dutch airport burger and went back to my hotel room.

It's pretty late on Saturday night, but I have nothing better to do, so I think I'll try again to check if the trains are going downtown. I really want to walk around the Red Light District and see Ann Frank's house.

And what with United apparently canceling 500 flights today, of which most of those were headed to D.C. airports, I'm not really counting much on getting back home anytime this weekend. The upshot of that would be that I would get to see Amsterdam in the daytime and have more than an hour or two to explore. The down side being, I really am ready to be home for a change. They told me to come back to the airport at 9 a.m. tomorrow to get on an 11 o'clock flight. We'll see how that goes ...

Obama, My Hero on Yet Another Issue. This Time it's Climate

Obama is THE MAN! Looks like no sleep for me before leaving for the Copenhagen airport in 5 hours, but who cares, when it means Jackson will get to live in a world that's not filled with droughts, famines, wars, flooding, etc.! I am gonna party when I get home!!!

Check out http://www.wri.org/news in a few hours when our news release is up.