On Missing

A meditation on Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Merle, Willie and the ever-accruing toll of love.

Standing in a burned-out wasteland wearing a Merle shirt.

Two overlapping memories of a great American. That’s how I think of these two songs anyway. I can’t say for sure that Bob Dylan intended the crushingly hilarious 2001 track “Po’ Boy’” as a tribute to his fast-fading friend. I personally just never heard it any other way. Maybe I was pre-mourning Cash—his wind down was long and sometimes glum—but this sure as hell made me laugh:

Workin’ like on the mainline—workin’ like the devil

The game is the same—it’s just on a different level

Poor boy, dressed in black

Police at your back

This too:

Poor boy in a red hot town

Out beyond the twinklin’ stars

Ridin’ first class trains—making the rounds

Tryin’ to keep from fallin’ between the cars

Cash and Dylan’s mutual artistic affinity was rational but the conditions for their deep and abiding friendship were not necessarily intuitive. Cash was older, with a different audience and a massive stature. Dylan had for a time fallen in with hippies. Their differences brought them closer.

Letters from Johnny Cash to Bob Dylan, taken at the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, OK

Still, it was obvious Cash knew well before the mass public that Dylan had changed the game inextricably. What they shared in common was obsessive work ethic, unbearable obstinacy, an almost guileless love of all kinds of music, and a panoramic artistic ken which I guess you could only call genius. And they dug each other's idiosyncrasies—their correspondences are full of absurdist wordplay and the kind of mutual encouragement that maybe only can come from someone impossibly on the same wavelength.

The other song about Johnny Cash that undoes me is “Missing Ol’ Johnny Cash” from the absolutely astounding 2015 Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson duet album, death’s specter laughingly everywhere. Diabolically, it invokes for me three emotional titans at once. Live in concert, I was too young to see Merle and way too young to catch Cash. Amazingly, one hope remained.

That last Willie and Merle album was called Django & Jimmie, and there is a song to match, country music's endless, occasionally exhausting liturgy of what has come before and what will come next. Willie and Merle had done a lot of work together over the years—I don’t know how many “collaboration” albums they recorded, but it was a non-trivial number during the flood-the-market ‘80s, that intrepid time. At a truck stop I once had a disappointing experience with my $3.99 purchase of Merle and Willie’s 1987 Seashores of Old Mexico cassette, which in retrospect I feel slightly reformed in my judgment, but at the time seemed shockingly mailed-in.

The seemingly Seconal-produced version of Merle's “When Times Were Good” is a remarkable achievement of finishing, by which I mean, literally getting over the vocal finish line.

This is the defiant but exhilarating mood of the Willie-Merle final stand Django & Jimmie—they are clearly exhausted and the inhibitions have come down, and they are both going to die and what does it even matter anyhow? Hence comes a crucial American oral history. We must realize that revealing some weird shit they have witnessed or heard about Johnny Cash is irrelevant, since Merle is heaven-bound soon, Willie’s already been in jail and nobody’s going to put his back out on some ongoing rumor.

Merle: “Now Johnny Cash knew just what to do,” “Had a TV show.” He was “Long and lean.”

Here’s a key change.

Willie: “Cash had the fire of a thousand men/ Loving life was his greatest sin.”

“Carried his pills in a paper bag.”

I went to Jones Beach the other night and saw Lucinda Williams, Wilco, Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson. Willie is 92, but that grizzled old bastard still does bedazzling things. I confess to crying regularly at concerts—I’m not sure I even saw an actual moment of the recent Rod Stewart show I witnessed at Merriweather Post Pavilion. Either I’m too sensitive, or else I’m getting soft. Point is, Nelson’s endgame was incredible: “Last Leaf on the Tree”/“Roll Me Up and Smoke Me”/“Will the Circle Be Unbroken” (with Wilco)/ “I’ll Fly Away”/“The Party’s Over”/“I Saw The Light.”

That night, incredibly, Dylan performed “Blind Willie McTell,” a song that possesses maybe the single most withering and irreparable curse ever visited on our karmically complicated nation: “Seen the arrow on the dart board/ saying this land is condemned.”

Even more incredibly, I watched Willie, at least briefly, lift us from that place. He covered Waylon Jennings, and in passing, invoked old Johnny Cash. When the set was done, Willie made a point of walking the length of the big stage tossing his cowboy hat into the audience, and then, like Elvis, his scarf on the other side. Then he shuffled off to the band playing Hank Williams—absolute, total Gary Cooper shit—perfect, I guess. The crowd went nuts. Seagulls flew by, looking like doves. I suppose, statistically speaking, I’ll never see him again. Such a night.

Had to get a Willie shirt, too.