The first live gig I ever saw was Johnny Cash at the Birmingham Odeon in 1971. I was 14 and went with my dad. He wasn’t really a Cash fan. He liked light operatic tenors like Josef Locke and Mario Lanza. He once, after several drinks, was unable to bring Lanza’s name to mind. In desperation, he asked my mum for help. “I don’t remember,” she said. “Well, of course you don’t remember,” he replied. “That’s because you’re rubbish and all your family are rubbish.” At the time, it seemed unnecessarily harsh but now I can’t help thinking that, if he’d lived, he could have completely revitalised the quiz show format.
I’d got into Cash after I’d used my pocket money to buy his Live at San Quentin album, just because I liked the cover. It turned out I liked the record inside even more. There were songs about being on the run from the law, one about a train wreck in which the driver was “scalded to death by the steam”, and another about a man called Sue brawling with his estranged father.
It was recorded live at San Quentin State Prison in California and the whole atmosphere of the album was electric, with whoops of approval for any reference to casual violence and/or reform of the penal system. They loved him. Cash was in with the locked-in crowd.
The Birmingham gig was amazing as well. To my delight, Cash began the show with his catchphrase: “Hello. I’m Johnny Cash.” As catchphrases go, it’s not a complex construction but it had the advantage of being very hard to plagiarise. Cash did all his best-loved songs. Even my dad liked it.
It could be said that it was Cash who, just a few months later, started me on the rocky road to alcoholism. Hearing that I’d been to the Odeon show, my elder brother, Terry, suggested we visited a nearby pub in Smethwick to see a Johnny Cash impersonator. I’d never been in a pub before so I was a bit scared, but I couldn’t resist the opportunity to relive that glorious first gig, albeit with a stand-in for the great man.
It was a rites-of-passage night for me. My brother laughed off my request for dandelion and burdock and got me a big, dark pint of beer. I didn’t much like the taste but my whole body tingled with excitement, like when you put the last piece into a jigsaw. The counterfeit Cash was good. He even did the catchphrase, thus destroying my anti-plagiarism theory. When he stepped off stage, my brother called him over. Faux Cash looked at me and said: “He’s a bit young.”
“Yeah,” said my brother, “but he’s seen the real Johnny Cash live on stage.” Copy-Cash looked crestfallen. “Why did you bring him here then?” he said and walked away. I learned a valuable lesson that night: when you meet a big fish in a small pond, never acknowledge the existence of a larger body of water. I also learned, after three whole pints, that alcohol made life lovely.
I don’t know if country music often leads to heavy drinking, but I’d say the reverse is certainly true. The more I drank, the more country I listened to and Cash was my soundtrack of choice. Alcoholism and country music are both tremendous aids to self-dramatisation. I saw myself as an outlaw, someone outside the polite norms of society. I never actually, as the Cash lyric goes, “shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die”. But then again, even if I had, I probably wouldn’t have remembered it.
Meanwhile, Cash was also living on the slippery slope, though obviously he had a much more interesting life than me. So he messed it up in much more interesting ways: popping pills, wrecking hotel rooms and getting ripped down the middle in a fight with his own ostrich. He was the Man in Black, I was only the Man in Black Country.
By the time I quit drinking in 1986, Cash’s career had nosedived. His brand of “shot my woman down” theatrics was no longer in vogue. I was mocked when I told people he was my first gig. Sans booze, Cash’s troubled outsider lyrics didn’t move me as much as they had, but I still loved him. Over the space of a few long drives, mainly to and from West Bromwich Albion matches, I listened to him recite the entire New Testament on 16 CDs. The themes of being on the run from the law, gruesome death and father-son relationships still featured.
After I became a professional comedian, I took to listening to Cash’s classic hit Ring of Fire before I went on stage. I always found it completely exhilarating. Some comedians used Bolivian marching powder before they went on. All I needed was Mexican trumpets.
In the 1990s, the music producer Rick Rubin saw past the cheesy Christmas-specials sparkle and country music bouffant and treated Cash like a real musician again. He redefined him as the primal American folk singer. Suddenly, he was a cool “first-ever gig” story again.
Cash died in 2003. I shed a tear. It’s what country music fans do. I still get a pain in my heart when a checkout person asks me if I’d like cash back. So I decided to write a half-hour TV comedy about the man. The fight with the ostrich was my first thought. Not only does it feature a music legend battling with a creature whose natural design is fundamentally comic, the story is also further enriched by the fact that Cash’s resulting injuries led to a painkiller addiction.
Obviously, on one level, this is a tragic set of circumstances, but I can’t help thinking, for Cash, it must have been almost worth having the addiction for the anticipatory thrill of that moment when yet another doctor asks you what triggered it. The script knits together the ostrich encounter from 1981 with a second incident from 1983, when Cash wrecked a Nottingham hotel room during a UK tour. He suffered from hallucinations in Nottingham. It seemed to me that the nature of these hallucinations was open to speculation. So I put two and two together and got ostrich.
I’ve even been allowed to play the lead. I don’t naturally look like Cash, but a prosthetic version of his much-broken nose and a wig that looked almost as bad as Cash’s real hair in the early 1980s helped towards the final transformation. I figured we could explain any further shortfall by the fact that addiction to painkillers can really change a man.
Also, just as we began shooting, I was struck down by a horrible virus. Lying on my dressing room floor, being sick into a bin while fully made-up and costumed as Cash, is the sort of preparation for a part that even Daniel Day-Lewis might balk at. We lost three days filming and I returned with a voice that sounded like a late-night message from the underworld. It was perfect.
Of course, Cash was the subject of an award-winning movie, Walk the Line, but I have to say, though I probably shouldn’t, that I prefer my portrayal to Joaquin Phoenix’s. He goes for the sexy gunslinger aspect of Cash. I concentrate on Cash the decidedly unstable Old Testament prophet, a sort of Isaiah on analgesics. That said, I still think the best Cash portrayal I ever saw was that singer in the Smethwick pub. He really got the inner-torment thing.
What I didn’t want to do, in all this, is mock a great man’s addiction. I love Cash and the stories of him being a drug-crazed destroyer are massively outnumbered by stories of his kindness and social conscience. It’s just that those latter stories aren’t funny. Still, I think his better side is apparent in the show. As is his amazing music.
Anyway, I spent a day as Cash, in a field of synthetic snow, fighting with an ostrich puppet operated by the man who controls BB8, the droid in Star Wars. It’s not as good a story as “an ostrich got me addicted to painkillers” or even “Johnny Cash got me addicted to alcohol” – but it’s not bad.
