Pocket Cash [ペーパーバック]

A fantastic collection of images from start to finish
which pays an honorable tribute to the subject, as well as his relationship
to the photographer. Both legends of their craft.

Jesse Diamond

This is book is an amazing look not only into the life of Johnny Cash, but also into the work of Jim Marshall. Unlike Jim's other books, this book takes a focused look at one subject, Johnny Cash, documented over many years. Because of this it shows you how Jim shot and how he thought as a photographer. The book also takes you with Johnny on his historic visits to Folsom and San Quentin prisons and inside his home at the most intimate moments of his life. I could not recommend this book more. It's a must have.

Michael Grecco

Two Looks Back at the Mythic Johnny Cash

John Hood / SunPost Weekly June 23, 2011
bit.ly/iE4YGs

With few exceptions, mythbusters are a bore. I mean, why the hell would anyone wanna rid the world of something as sacred and special and colorful as myth? It is myth that helps us live in and through this world. And it is myth that becomes legend.

Of all America's myths, Johnny Cash stands among the most mythic. And as Tony Toth proves in his detailed look at the man's American Recordings (Continuum $12.95), it is his myth which matters most.

Make that myths. Like Whitman, Cash contained the proverbial multitudes. He's both "the lean fierce wildman of the late 1950s and early 1960s," and "the somber leviathan of the final decade." There are the creation myths (The Gift that is that voice; the otherworldly chordings of "I Walk the Line"), and re-creation myths (Emo's 1994; Rick Rubin's living room). There are even re-re-creation myths ("Delia's Gone" 1962, `69 and `94). There are mythic parallels in cinema (Robert Mitchum's Preacher in Night of the Hunter; John Wayne's cowboy persona), and in living myth itself (Caedmon, Whitman). It is that mythology which drives Toth. Why? Because in the end "the story is better than true."

To get to the myths of the matter, Toth also scours the mystic (Jakob Boehme) and the obscure (Richard "Rabbit" Brown; Hasil Adkins). He cites Cash's contemporaries, especially Kris Kristofferson, who considered his mythic friend a sorta "Abe Lincoln with a wild side." Watching Johnny walk among the come-and-gos was akin to "watching an old coyote walk through a poodle party," said Kris. And we see just what he means.

So does Toth -- and then some.Toth not only gets to "the spot where songs come from." he sees "the potential for lonesome weirdos to step out of the shadows and into a kind of redemption." He traces Cash's place "in a long lineage of armed hustlers and holy avengers," and discovers "fierce images that could have been lifted from the notebooks of Townes Van Zandt or John Milton." Toth cores the Cash mythology with the reverence it deserves, and in so doing gets to "the very logic of reckoning."

You will of course want to re-listen to those American Recordings as you read into Toth's mythology. You'll undoubtedly want to seek some of the many moving images that are available online. But there's a third kinda companion to this stirring set piece; that of the still. When Cash gets captured in moments often greater than word and more enduring even than movie.

For that you'll want to go to Jim Marshall's Pocket Cash (Chronicle Books $19.95), which features more than 100 images of The Man in Black beginning back when he was that "lean fierce wildman" Toth so reverently re-conjures, and through to the "somber leviathan" at the end. Reading about such fierceness is one thing of course; seeing it caught in the moment is another altogether. Marshall, who died last year at 74, shot Jimi at Monterey and The Beatles very last stand, but began shooting Johnny at Newport back in `62. It is his eye that has done much to make this myth into legend. And the photographs in this collection, many of which were posthumously shown at New York's Morrison Hotel Gallery, are, as John Carter Cash writes in the introduction, simply "magic."

Marshall was one of that rare breed of lensman who could "snap the shot they supernaturally know is coming, perfectly in time with the approaching instant" says the son, reminding us again of the father's holy ghost. They don't make myths like Johnny anymore. Chances are they cant.