Walk Alone

Bastard Sons Of Johnny Cash

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Description

Anybody worth a damn has a different road. And everybody who takes their own road has to find their own set of Mile Markers. Waylon Jennings spent most of the Sixties singing other people's Nashville hits in a nightclub stuck next to a bone-dry river bottom on the outskirts of Phoenix. More nights than not, Waylon had to wade through the cowboys and fratboys busting each other up out in the parking lot so he and the Waylors could drive home and watch the sun come up. Meanwhile, at daybreak, Marty Robbins was a few miles away out in the desert shooting his own black-and-white western tv show, just as the networks were ready to switch to color. Johnny Cash only ever really spent a night or two in jail, but it was an El Paso jail, and he'd been caught smuggling pills across the border from Juarez inside his guitar. One sock was stuffed full of uppers and the other packed with downers, so it wasn't likely he got much sleep inside the slammer. But that tangled road he took eventually led to a live album at San Quentin. And that record made him more famous than anybody in country music had ever been, more famous than Hank Williams, more famous than Jimmie Rodgers, too famous to play San Quentin without a crowd of fans clamoring to get in too. He was pretty much done with the inside of jails, unless you count being too famous. Merle Haggard turned 21 in prison. -- matter of fact, he was actually in San Quentin the first time Johnny Cash played there. When he got out of jail, he got a gig in Las Vegas playing bass with Wynn Stewart and the West Coast Playboys. He cut one of Wynn's tunes called 'Sing A Sad Song,' and got his first taste of what a hit might be like. Fifty or so Top 10 country hits later, he received his first royalty check after he signed with a punk rock label early in the 21st Century. No further Top 10 country hits were forthcoming. For Mark Stuart and the Bastard Sons of Johnny Cash, it's been a long road as well, a twisting trail, a two-lane highway, a road full of ruts, and it all led to Texacali. Texacali is a mythical place maybe, but it's real enough all the same. It's a borderland, la frontera, somewhere right near where San Diego meets Juarez, where Ensenada and El Paso cross paths. And like all the rest of these tales, like every story that happens in life instead of on a page, sometimes you don't notice the Mile Markers until you look up into the rear-view mirror. A quick look in the rear view mirror: Mark Stuart formed the Bastard Sons of Johnny Cash on a whim, by accident, by chance. He'd been in a punk rock band but that was done, over, finished, and it had nearly finished him. He had a dream one night, and out of the dream came a band name: the Bastard Sons of Johnny Cash. The new name was a joke, sort of. And yet, soon enough, it wasn't a joke anymore. Soon enough, it was a band, and soon enough, it was enough of a band that Johnny Cash himself gave them his personal seal of approval, and Johnny Cash's own legitimate son helped produce their first album. It was a little like waking up alone and naked in a strange new country next to another man's clothes, and discovering that they weren't anybody else's clothes -- they were your own. That they fit you like nothing else ever had, and that it was more than just a new suit of clothes, that it was a new life. And it was yours. For keeps. 'I kinda got the calling like one of those Pentecostal preachers gets the calling,' Stuart says now. 'It came like lightning out of the sky. And Johnny Cash coming to me in my dreams wasn't weird. It was just that I had these dreams, and the dreams led to a body of work, to a bunch of songs, and they led to all of this.' For Mark Stuart and the Bastard Sons, the last ten years has been a blur of miles and markers. BSOJC has played more shows most years than most bands do in their entire careers, and they've done it the hard way, piling their own gear into their own van, and then heading off into a dark night that's just a couple of hours away from day. A lot of indie bands have done a lot of this, but not many have m