Rosanne Cash - Black Cadillac
In an entertainment age of pyrotechnics and bombast Rosanne Cash, in Black Cadillac, simply sets out to tell a story. It's mesmerisingly successful, partly because she has a story to tell and partly because she is a consummate storyteller.
Although the Grammy nominated album-turned stage show Black Cadillac is widely seen as a paean to her father, the late great omnipresent Johnny, it is much, much more. The singer-songwriter begins in the 17th century when the first Cash arrived on the eastern seaboard of America from Scotland. She continues down the centuries through the seafarers and songmakers who make up her musical and biological ancestry and never went further west than Tennessee.
"I am the ghost of his future," she says of William Cash, the first seafarer, shipwrecked on the Atlantic coast. It's part of a startling beginning for an evening of country and country rock: a darkened stage, a wide narrow screen on which grainy black and white images of ocean and a lone figure are projected, and Cash's disembodied voice in a poetic monologue. It segues into a plaintive ballad, with Cash alone on piano, which delineates the tone and territory she will cover in an hour and 45 minutes of subtle and uncompromising theatre.
The 12 song album Black Cadillac looms large but she also digresses into a few from the list of "100 country songs my dad said I had to know"; and adds her own pick of what she believes would the 101st: a spinechillingly soulful version of Bobbie Gentry's Ode to Billie Joe. And from her personal-historical oeuvre comes a thrilling reworking of the Appalachian folk classic Wayfaring Stranger.
In Black Cadillac Cash delivers a quite unexpected show with this mix of country, cabaret, song-cycle and theatre. But in any event she's a quite unexpected Princess of Country: an American who speaks of "America without illusions", whose politics are plain to see and whose anger is fierce - so very like her father who looms large in death as he did in life. He was lost to her in the same 18 month period in which she also had to deal with the deaths of first, her stepmother June Carter Cash and her mother, Vivian Liberto.
The outcome of these emotional blows was the dozen songs of Black Cadillac. However, the title song whose lines go: "It was a black Cadillac/That drove you away/Now everybody's talking/But they don't have much to say./It was a black sky of rain/None of it fell./Now one of us gets to go to heaven/One has to stay here in hell" was written shortly before her stepmother died. In a recent interview Cash observed: "I've always found that songs can be postcards from your future."
The fact is, however, that Rosanne Cash is an intellectually exhilarating songwriter whose work across 13 albums and a couple of decades has always focused on those moments and intentions that cause listeners to respond: "yes! She really, really gets it." Meaning she captures the essence of whatever universal-personal event is going on in their own lives whether it's heartbreak, joy, loss, abandonment, betrayal, childhood memory - the full gamut of human experience.
[page]It also helps that she has a voice like unpasteurised honey: rich, sweet, dark and scrumptious. And she surrounds herself with top talent. As well as her husband and long-time co-producer and co-writer, John Leventhal, the second co-producer on Black Cadillac is Bob Bottrell. And on this tour, her pared-back and exceedingly tasty band comprises just three musicians: a dazzling guitarist Steuart Smith who made the most of a wondrous extended solo on Tennessee Flattop Box; bassplayer Zev Katz and drummer Dave Mattacks. Between them, the four (Cash on acoustic jumbo guitar) epitomised the term "less is more".
Cash's 'tween numbers chat is wryly humorous and minimal; she tells as much as is needed then lets the songs and the story take us forward. Her personality becomes apparent in what's left unspoken rather than in any kind of rambling egotism. And she's spontaneous too: she "can be difficult" she warns a member of the audience who calls "Rosanne, we love you."
It seems, she is a devout believer in ... belief, as she makes plain in a line from one of the songs on Black Cadillac which runs: "God is in the roses/the petals and the thorns." So when she offers a "Good night and God bless you," to her noisily appreciative Parramatta audience it's not the mawkish benediction of so many latterday American entertainers. (Apparently the State Theatre mob was "po-faced" but that's first nights in Sydney for you.)
Black Cadillac on stage is the latest of a series of surprising discoveries about the woman who refers to herself as "Mrs L" and who writes an informative, amusing, wide-ranging blog on her website (check out her high- and lowlights of 2006, for instance, on www.rosannecash.com). The final treat and surprise for the evening was another encore in which she confessed to being a closet show music fan - "I'm a gay man in a woman's body" - she explains then she sang the most unlikely, touching and elegant version of Wouldn't it be Luverly (yes, that one, from My Fair Lady) that's ever sent an audience happily into the night.
Rosanne Cash is now back in New York where she'll be performing later in January. More on the Sydney Festival at www.sydneyfestival.org.au.
You can also hear an audio interview with Rosanne Cash in the current StageCast.
