Rosanne Cash had it all: Gold records, number one hits, a Grammy award, three daughters, a famous dad, a Nashville marriage, a place in country music royalty.
Then things started to come apart.
Her 1990 album “Interiors,” a dark, mostly acoustic song cycle (which, she says, in retrospect, was partly about troubles with husband and music partner Rodney Crowell) was not received well by her record label. She confronted the head of Columbia and suggested they part ways. To her shock, his words were “We’ll miss you.”
Credit: Wade Payne/Invision/AP
Credit: Wade Payne/Invision/AP
She later told the Bitter Southerner, “Twelve years, like, done.”
She asked her father, Johnny Cash, what to do.
“He said ‘screw ’em, move to New York’.”
So she did, leaving behind Nashville, her Nashville husband, her record label and the country music world she knew, renting a small apartment in Greenwich Village in 1991.
What came next was a remarkable record called “The Wheel,” which is now celebrating its 30th anniversary.
Cash, 68, brings songs from “The Wheel” to the Buckhead Theatre in November. (Their show was planned for April 7, but was rescheduled.) With her will be her producer, songwriting partner and husband John Leventhal, who will also perform songs from his debut album, “Rumble Strip.”
Ownership of “The Wheel” reverted to Cash after 30 years, and last year she decided to remaster and re-release an expanded version of the recording on her own label, including live performances from Austin City Limits and the Columbia Records Radio Hour.
It is a portrait of what she calls “despair and ecstasy.” The despair is apparent in the big-city loneliness of “Seventh Avenue”:
“Now the candles burn all night/ Without you/ And the moon hangs out of sight/ So blue/ On Seventh Avenue.”
Cash had, in fact, moved to an apartment on Seventh Avenue, around the corner from the famous Greenwich Village club The Bottom Line. Leaving her 3-year-old with a babysitter one night, she went to see Leo Kottke at the club by herself, and scribbled those lyrics on a napkin. (”It sounds like a trope,” she admits.)
She went to see Leventhal, with whom she had worked in Nashville, and asked if he wanted to collaborate on the song and finally on a new album. She says now, plainly, that the songs and the album were a way to work herself into Leventhal’s life.
Credit: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP
Credit: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP
“I had a vision,” she said, in a telephone call from her Chelsea brownstone, “and I had no idea how to get there, so part of it was writing my way to it.”
Leventhal, a tall, shaggy presence with a Pete Townshend profile, didn’t know he was being stalked. “He was clueless in the beginning,” said Cash. “It was like, ‘wake up dude! I traveled through time to get to you!’”
Eventually they were a couple. Their musical partnership has proved fruitful, with seven albums together, including “The River & The Thread,” which won three Grammys.
The new life was frightening but exhilarating. “My support system was gone, The community I had developed, my friends, my marriage, my record label,” she said. But on the other hand, “I felt younger, everything felt new. I felt released.”
“If There’s a God on My Side” tells of the dark side: “I’m falling deeper/ Than I thought I could go.” There is also anger at the world she left behind, for example the story of tossing a bouquet into the fireplace in “Roses in the Fire.”
Was she mad at someone? “That would have been Rodney,” she said. “I don’t think he would mind me telling you about that. Never let it be said that I don’t like a dramatic gesture.”
Credit: Rosanne Cash
Credit: Rosanne Cash
Promoting “The Wheel” brought her to Paris for 10 days earlier this year, after which she had most of the month of March off. Her tour behind the re-release will be “intermittent,” which is a sign that she’s not the road warrior she might have once been.
“I like my own bed,” she said. “Being on the road is getting harder and harder. Some people have that kind of engine: Mavis (Staples), Lucinda (Williams), Elvis (Costello). I get it. My dad had it, until he didn’t. He stopped and we all thought, ‘oh my god, he’s going to die,’ but he loved it. He loved stopping. I’m not wired to want to do this for the rest of my life. I’ve seen enough hotels and airports for the rest of my life.”
She added, “to be honest, I want to stop when my voice is still in good shape. And it’s in good shape right now.”
Her attention, she said, will turn to writing “for other people.” She has published a well-received memoir, “Composed,” and is working with Leventhal on a musical, “Norma Rae,” about the legendary union organizer.
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