Scenes from the Simulacrum

I've been wanting to blog this for some time, so now, sans excuse, I will.

About a month or so ago my parents took us to a performance by a Johnny Cash tribute band called Train of Love. Now, I was skeptical of what this evening might entail, not least because the whole concept of a tribute band is a little strange when you think about it, but I appreciated my parents taking an interest in my interests, so we went.

The first moments of that evening did not necessarily work to allay my anxieties. The rest of the audience was largely senior citizens (my father quipping that it is rare he feels so young in a crowd), and the program showed a disturbing picture of a mulletted man in a sleeveless leather vest and had an essay about his career and his interest in Johnny Cash that put religious witness very near the heart of the whole event. Now, that last thing is not inherently negative, but, having northern city-boy notions about the South, I feared we could be in for some cheesy sentimentalizing and some form of slapdash sermon meant to convert the whole room. Oy...

The lights went down, the crowd hushed, and the opening notes of "Folsom Prison Blues" sounded from the speakers as the curtains parted on a spare stage with four older men spread out upon it. The middle man, in black, with his back to us. Suddenly turning, he stepped up to the mic and, in a familiar deep, resonant voice said, "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash."

There was something chilling in how like this voice and the band's whole sound were to the recordings I knew. There were, naturally, subtle differences in rhythm and in some of the solo licks, differences significant to someone who appreciates Cash's instinct for the drama of timing, but otherwise there was an uncanny sense of time collapsing upon itself, the kind of thing which people attribute to "channeling" and of which they say it "was like being back in 19--."

It's not clear there's enough of a myth of Johnny Cash one might wish a tribute band to live up to, but of course we were witness to a particular version of his legacy. Between songs, "Johnny" would tell stories from his life and introduce the next song, and the band warped from the '60s to the '70s during intermission, then took a wormhole to the late '90s to perform "Hurt," before returning to the more familiar Cash repetoire. You knew it was just a version, a simulation, but there was something compelling about the thought that, "It might have been like this," some dream or fantasy of "being there" that had a unique pleasure.

This was notable toward the very end, when suddenly "Johnny" spoke in his real voice, described Cash's death, and introduced a tribute song he wrote in memoriam. There was a notable break, a shift, an adjustment of the mind as you were forced to go, "Oh yeah, we were just pretending; Cash was a real man, who lived and died. Now he is dead."

The long and short of it is, I still don't know what I think of tribute bands, but I understand better that they do offer a unique and pleasurable experience that needn't be shmaltzy or cheesy or even delusional. After all, they have a lot to live up to, performance-wise, to really give the audience what it wants, which means they have to be sufficiently talented musicians. But that doesn't mean I'm going to go get tickets to Mini K.I.S.S.