How Nick Cave’s story began with Johnny Cash: “My hero”
It’s almost expected for most musicians to discuss how much they fell in love with music from an early age, it becoming a prophetic calling they knew they had to pursue. But what about Nick Cave?
Well, Cave’s ascent to legendary musical status didn’t really start the way you think it might have. In fact, he actually once admitted he “didn’t have any understanding of music” growing up, which is a fairly unusual statement considering everything he does seems to seep from deep within his bones, like music was something he was put on this earth to do, not something he accidentally discovered one day and thought, “That’ll do”.
Because most things he does coast that delicate line between intricate storytelling and something lingering deeper beneath the surface of reality, like all those moments you’ve wallowed alone, catastrophosing or dramatising narratives and memories just for the sake of letting it steep in the pit of your stomach, a poetic kind of quiet rumination some might call “main character energy” while others would call it simply depressing.
Obviously, that kind of over-simplification doesn’t do justice to all parts of Cave’s discography or his clear versatility as one of the greatest modern-day songwriters, but it’s a starting point. One that points towards him being the kind of musician who always had it in him, the kind that never really needs to look to other people for inspiration or basic influence because it was always there, in the darkened shadows or gritty, country and western-esque realism people would later attach to a Peaky Blinders-esque antihero.
But Cave’s story wasn’t like that at all. He didn’t understand music as a boy, at least not in the ways you think he might. But all of that changed the moment he discovered Johnny Cash. While it’s not too much of a stretch to find the burgundy melancholy of Cash’s country ouvre in much of Cave’s work, the moment he first caught a Cash special on television was the moment the idea for a western-inspired world unlocked in his mind – the moment it all made sense, where before it was merely an aspect of existence he felt like an outsider to.
“I remember understanding suddenly, by watching Johnny Cash, that music could be some other thing,” he said during his This Cultural Life interview. “It was dangerous. It was this outlaw guy, ‘The Man In Black’, kind of evil. I think I just started to see music in a different way. It was exciting.”
You could imagine the thrill Cave later experienced when the two came together to record ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’, the moment he not so surprisingly called one of his favourite ever: “These are the days, and you don’t have them often, that can’t be taken away,” he said.
“Johnny Cash is my hero,” he once said during an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Recalling an incident that all but proved Cash to be some kind of subhuman musical maestro, Cave went into detail about how he met Cash once at a recording studio, but the country singer had fallen ill, though this subdued temperament fell away instantly the moment he went into the recording booth.
“He transformed from this sort of suffering individual into something really extraordinary, literally before my eyes,” Cave said. “It was as if all the frailty melted away, leaving only the essence of the man I’d admired for so long.”
Cave might not have started out as the brooding prophetic kind of musician he feels like he is, but the moment he saw Cash was a lightbulb moment that he couldn’t turn away from. Suddenly, he knew the meaning not only of artistic storytelling but of blending poetic whimsy with the gritty realism of life. And, considering all the tragedy he’s experienced thus far, it seems a match made in heaven.
