round 1

(9) johnny cash, “rusty cage”
HELD OFF
(8) the white stripes, “i just don’t know what to do with myself”
260-199
AND WILL PLAY ON IN THE SECOND ROUND

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/3/22.

Everything for Two: chris daley on the white stripes’ “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself”

The few times I’ve experienced true romantic despair, my heart was only the beginning of what was broken. The discarded heap of my mind, pride, and hope for the future would have been left to rot behind the dumpster in Love Alley, if it didn’t share an address with the record store. In an episode of The Sopranos, Tony comforts his son A.J., who has experienced his first broken heart. He tells him, “What you're going through. What you're feeling right now. It happens sometimes. Everybody gets the blues. There's a half a billion dollar industry devoted to it.” When A.J. guesses the Prozac industry, Tony says, “No, the music business. They write thousands of songs about this shit.”
To this day, when I seek heartsore succor through music, I find myself in the same aisle of that Love Alley record store, trying to find the songs that speak to my complete unraveling. I need to commune with the artists who convey what it feels like to fall the fuck apart.

*

I've nurtured a theory for a long time that there are two kinds of heartbreak songs—one kind that comes from despair and one that comes from outrage. In 2003, the White Stripes covered “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself”—the Burt Bacharach and Hal David song made famous by Dusty Springfield in the 1960s—on their album Elephant. Jack White manages to convert the despair of Dusty’s original into a scornful meditation that asks how dare the lover mess up his day. I fear that despair heartbreak songs have gone out of style.

*

I have a set of playlists I’ve created that work through the stages of heart grief. I turn to my “Reluctant Romantic” playlist when I’m living in denial, listening to Adele’s “I’ll Be Waiting” or Lucinda Williams’s “Something About What Happens When We Talk” when I want to be convinced that it’s always complicated, right? Right? I usually then move to the bargaining stage playlist where I haven’t quite let go but I’m on the brink of seeing the light, especially effective for unrequited entanglements and named for Aimee Mann’s song “Wise Up.” I try to comfort myself with Candi Staton’s “I’m Just a Prisoner” and Tracy Chapman’s “Baby Can I Hold You” while dipping into the reality of Caitlin Cary’s “Something Less Than Something More.”
But eventually I get mad and I turn to the playlist named for (Ike-era) Tina Turner’s song “Cussin’ Cryin’ and Carryin’ On.” Neko Case runs out of fools, VV Brown cries blood, Amy Winehouse’s tears dry on their own, Brenda Holloway’s every little bit hurts, Fiona shadowboxes, Stevie Nicks insists that we stop dragging her heart around, and L7 just keeps on drafting that shitlist. Time passes, wounds heal, and I finally inhabit the depression playlist, named for Beth Orton’s “I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine” before I accept that “One Monkey Don’t Stop No Show” with Big Maybelle and move on.

* 

The original version of “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself” opens with the distant peal of horns before Dusty repeats her condition: “I just don't know what to do with myself / I don't know what to do with myself.” Now that we all overuse “just” in our writing, it’s notable to see it here in the title and first line. The “just” emphasizes an exasperation and a submission. The first lines are a surrender to the heart sickness found in the rest of the song.
The melody picks up as Dusty describes her current state: “I’m so used to doing / Everything with you / Planning everything for two / And now that we're through / I just don't know what to do with my time.” That's one of my favorite lines in this song. Because it's the truth: when you experience the end of a romantic relationship, especially when you did not expect it to end, your sense of time is utterly destroyed. How can there be a present when the future has been erased?

*

Dusty Springfield is on every single one of my grief playlists—a companion in all my little romantic deaths by misadventure. When I’m in denial, you can find me “Wishin’ and Hopin.’’’ Her version of “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” plays while I bargain. Depressed, I try to tell myself that anyone who had a heart would love me, too. When I’m over it, I finally know “You Don’t Own Me.” 
“I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself” is perfect for when I’m still carryin’ on. It also captures the bewildered and crippling sense of loss that is not found often enough for my taste in the modern pop world of Ariana Grande’s “Thank U, Next.”

*

I’ll talk about the three major changes The White Stripes make to the song throughout this essay, but the omission of “my time” in the line “I just don't know what to do with my time”— replacing it with another “myself”—signals a shift. In the cover, there are subtle changes that point the listener back to the scorned singer, when the original focuses more on what feels like a tear in the fabric of the universe itself.
The White Stripes also cut the next line Dusty sings: “I'm so lonesome for you, it's a crime.” I’ve been a longtime fan of Jack White in every incarnation—with Meg, solo, The Raconteurs, The Dead Weather—and I feel like I’m going through a little breakup right now in writing this essay. Watching Kate Moss poorly pole dance for three minutes in the Sofia Coppola-directed music video for “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself” hits different in 2022. I somehow thought of Jack as not like the other boys, but I can’t help but interpret the deletion of this line as Lonesome’s not cool, bro. “I’m so lonesome for you, it’s a crime?” I can do crimes worse than lonesome. I can break your heart and steal your time.

*

The two versions of the song mostly converge again at this point: “Going to a movie only makes me sad / Parties make me feel as bad / When I’m not with you / I just don’t know what to do.” These lyrics so poignantly capture the ruined landscape that follows a breakup: as if a crop plane has sprayed misery and regret over every café, concert venue, and crosswalk. Nothing is spared.
Throughout Dusty’s version of the song, there is a raw vulnerability. There's a fear for the future. There's a taking of responsibility. There's an acceptance of love as something that, as much as you might want it to stay, won't.
In The White Stripes version, Jack seems to mock the idea that someone wouldn’t be able to go to a party, trilling the words “planning” and “movies” from the first verse with such disdain that it’s hard to understand what he’s singing. In Dusty’s version, there’s an acknowledgment that co-dependency and love are intricately entwined. She’s been doing everything for two and now doing anything for one is useless.

*

Next in both versions of the song, the bass drops—timpani in the original, Meg’s kit and a heavy guitar riff in the cover—and the chorus follows the scenes of the singer wandering like a rejected outcast through movies and parties. “Like a summer rose / Needs the sun and rain / I need your sweet love…” Here we have the second of three significant changes The White Stripes made in their cover version, and possibly the least comprehensible. While Dusty needs “your sweet love to beat the pain,” Jack sings that he needs “your sweet love to feel all the way.” Let’s think on this for a minute.
“Beat the pain,” sure. The pain is definitely winning at this point in the breakup. Any help would be greatly appreciated. But “feel all the way”? I looked up several versions of the lyrics to confirm that “feel all the way” has definitively replaced “beat the pain” in The White Stripes cover. With “beat the pain,” the lovers presumably would unite to conquer the encroaching anguish and all would be well. With “feel all the way,” however, something more vapid is afoot. Jack is placing the responsibility for the full expression of his feelings on the shoulders of his lover, a burden she may not have welcomed.

*

When the twenty-first century breaks my heart, I can’t find what I’m looking for in today’s songs. I want to pine. I want to dwell. I want to linger in the liminal space where the world actually is ending. Just for a little while.
Breakup songs aren’t what they used to be. I don’t want to be a survivor with Destiny’s Child or be good and gone with Lykke Li. I want to wallow. I want Nina Simone singing “My Man Is Gone” or Sinead O’Connor covering “Nothing Compares 2 U.” There are so many ideas in these songs that are unhealthy. I fully admit that, and while my friends will testify that I should not be encouraged, these feelings are also realistic.
But the other alternative to this despair is anger. When the summer rose blooms in The White Stripes version of “I Don’t Know Just What to Do with Myself,” the guitar is furious. There are occasions, of course, where angry heartbreak is completely appropriate. Anger is one of the stages of grief. But it's not the only stage. And I think we lose something by skipping the sadness and the bargaining.
That's partly what's happening in The White Stripes cover: the bargaining is gone. The denial is gone. The songs I return to when I am heartbroken go through the stages of grief and really acknowledge the beginning stages. “I Just Don't Know What to Do with Myself” portrays the early disorientation of a breakup. What this cover and so many of today’s breakup songs are doing is jumping straight to the outrage.

*

The final significant cut in the cover follows this refrain in the original, and Dusty repeats it twice before the song is over: “Baby if your new love ever turns you down / Come back I will be around / Just waiting for you / I don’t know what else to do.” It’s bleak but honest. Anytime there’s any acute vulnerability or obvious grief in the original, it’s cut in the cover.
The sentiment in these vanished lines also appears in one of my favorite Neko Case covers: Sarah Vaughan’s “Look for Me I’ll Be Around.” Neko sings, “When the new crowd starts to bore you / Just remember there is someone to adore you / When you’re weary of nights out on the town / Look for me, I’ll be around.” If your new love puts you down, come find me. The other path at the fork in the road. The idea that love can return. There is a lack of ego in such an offer. Some might see it as a pathological loss of pride, but what does love care?

*

Love doesn’t care, but grief does. Grief wants us to know that there are ways we can avoid her next time or, at the very least, try. Don’t get involved with someone who brings the pain.
In Dusty's version of “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself,” the pain she wants to beat comes from the loss of her relationship. In The White Stripes version, the pain is why the singer is in the relationship, because the pain pre-dates the relationship, which is why feeling all the way was never something the lover could enable.
In the most recent cover of the song, unlike Jack’s rendition, Men at Work’s Colin Hays adds a lyric at the end and says the quiet part out loud: “I’m no good by myself.” Caveat emptor.

Chris Daley has written about books, cults, and heartbreak in the Los Angeles Times, Air/Light, The Collagist, Alta: Journal of Alta California, Essay Daily, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Brief Encounters: A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction, and other venues. Her novel-in-progress An Astonishing Force for Betterment has been supported by the Ucross Foundation, the Yefe Nof California Writing Residency, and the Studios of Key West.

kirk wisland on johnny cash’s “rusty cage”

Is there a more muscular three-note acoustic guitar riff in the history of rock music?
You wired me awake, and hit me with a hand of broken nails…
Faxness: what is the point of the cover song? Singing someone else’s song was in fact the default setting of the early music industry. The era of the singer-songwriter, the creator-performer all-in-one package is a relatively recent phenomenon. Sinatra co-wrote a handful of songs, but none that mattered. Elvis never wrote a song. The early work of the Beatles and the Stones were mostly covers of American bluesmen. There were stables of songwriters scrawling away like Dickensian poets huddled over their coal stoves, and somewhere out there on the road were the singers and performers who sang those words for guts and glory.
In our modern singer-songwriter era, the cover song has often been a strategic career-oriented decision by the aspiring star. While the up-and-coming artist would lose, financially, by singing someone else’s lyrics, the attention garnered might be worth the tradeoff. Get play by covering someone else; get paid when those people who heard you singing someone else’s song tune in to the rest of your catalog.
By the time Johnny Cash begins covering contemporary artists in the late-90s and early aughts, in the waning years of his life and career, these covers are essentially an honor. Validation of a particular song as decreed by Johnny Cash, the baritone Professor Emeritus of American Music. Cash singing U2’s “One,” Tom Petty’s “Won’t Back Down,” and Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt” is the sonic Pulitzer or Nobel Prize bestowed.
The art of the good cover is in doing it different. How to hew true to the initial vibe of the song while stamping it with something new. Cake’s excellent cover of I Will Survive works so well because it is slowed down, virtually stalled, Diana Ross’s soaring disco dancefloor triumph replaced by John McCrea’s laconic-depressive musings.
Much terrible Faxness exists because of artists whose version of a cover is simply karaoke. Tune in to hear Artist Y sing Artist X note for note! One of my great disappointments of the 1990s era of CD shopping was Stone Free—a 1993 Jimi Hendrix cover album featuring mostly flaccid note-by-note reproductions of Jimi’s work(*). The greatest individual tragedy of Stone Free was Eric Clapton—long before my respect for him cratered as Clapton devolved into an angry old anti-immigrant anti-vaxxer yelling at kids from his porch—recording a version of “Stone Free” so true to the original that it appeared he was merely trying to prove that he could do what Jimi had done.
The karaoke covers transport me back to my brief tenure in the music world as an aspiring sound engineer in Minneapolis, 1996—the same year Cash sang “Rusty Cage”—listening to a supremely talented guitarist wow the combined student and faculty of Music Tech with a virtuoso note-by-note performance of Purple Haze. I gave him props as a technician, while also yawning (interiorly at least) because who cares? You can play Hendrix? Good for you—enjoy your karaoke life.
(*Side note: the best cover from the otherwise limp Stone Free is the Cure’s version of Purple Haze, which works because it nails that perfect cover song blend—true to the original, but strained through a more sinister, gothic Cure treatment).
Cash’s “Rusty Cage” isn’t a cover. There is no other version. Yes, there is theoretically an original by Soundgarden, from 1991’s Badmotorfinger. But this is a rumor, a myth, a sonic rip in the fabric of reality, like all those people who insist that there’s a 90s Sinbad movie called Shazaam, like the altered world revealed by the black cat dejavu in The Matrix. I had never heard that other “Rusty Cage” until a few years ago.
Wait.
This statement—which feels true—is likely impossible, because I distinctly remember getting high in my dorm in the late fall of 1991 and listening to my cool-if-arrogantly-certain musichead neighbor Mitch play Badmotorfinger while assuring we fellow toker-musicheads(*) that Soundgarden was in fact going to be the next Led Zeppelin, a statement that earned a serious eye roll—albeit one that would seem much less ridiculous three years later when I was practically melting my Sony Discman with Soundgarden’s Superunknown on repeat. But I only remember hearing Outshined in the dorm—vividly remember the sludgy-stoner 7/4 meter chugging through Mitch’s of course annoyingly high-end stereo.
(*side note: it is amusing to acknowledge how much of my undergrad-era drug use was determined primarily by functional accouterments: Who has the best stereo? Best Christmas lights? Best CD collection? Best room for getting high in)?
So in excavating the past it seems impossible that I had never heard the Soundgarden version of “Rusty Cage,” unless Mitch had simply skipped that first track and gone straight to Outshined. Let’s put that at a 10% possibility. Whatever the empirical truth might be, I have no memory of the Soundgarden version of “Rusty Cage” until after hearing Cash.
But I digress. Again, “Rusty Cage” is not a Soundgarden song: it is a Johnny Cash song.

I chose to write about “Rusty Cage,” even though “Hurt” is probably the best known cover of Johnny Cash’s late-career catalog. “Hurt” is even arguably the most affecting of the Cash covers: I still feel the hair on my neck stand on end, and the tears well in the corner of my eyes when Cash’s Hurt crescendos and distorts in that final sonic reckoning: if I could staaaaaaaarrrrt again, a million miiiiiillles away...
I chose “Rusty Cage” because this sonic blast was Cash’s reemergence, his first foray back into my contemporary consciousness, the historical artifact reborn. And also, perhaps in a subconscious sabotage of the current game at hand, I chose “Rusty Cage” because of my need to be contrarian? When weighing which Cash cover I wanted, my inner critic immediately piped up with EVERYBODY knows that cover of “Hurt.” Be original, man. I will thus also note here that I kind of suck at these competitions: my history in the annual Xness tournaments is that of the glass-jawed high-seed that goes down easy, the sonic Duke or Kansas waiting to be knocked off by some barely-D1 song.
I liked Johnny Cash before “Rusty Cage,” much in the same way that I still liked some Elvis, and some Beatles and some (old) Stones circa 1996—as a fan of the musical legend, as a necessary building block in the musical library: Elvis-Cash to Beatles-Stones to Prince-U2. A necessary brick in the wall, a pleasing historical patina. But Cash’s “Rusty Cage” blasted through that wall of musical history like Sultan Mehmet’s Dardanelles cannon laying waste to Constantinople. Cash’s “Rusty Cage” was an exuberant young West German taking a sledgehammer to the Berlin Wall, searing into my consciousness the same way the opening rumble of U2’s “Zoo Station” had five years earlier. “Rusty Cage” blasted Johnny Cash into the present day of 1996. “Rusty Cage” was a cover of purpose, a flag planted, a statement.
I remember thinking: Return of the King. “Rusty Cage” was the banished hero returning to reclaim the throne.
Unfortunately, I don’t remember where I first heard Cash’s “Rusty Cage.” On the radio? Highly unlikely circa ‘96. At my favorite cafe? More likely. From somebody I knew? Hey man, holy shit—have you heard this?!? This genesis is unimportant, and yet I obsess over it, seeking my Saul of Tarsus sonic memory moment—as if knowing that specific detail will render my take on “Rusty Cage” more authentic. But if I don’t remember the where, when or why, I remember the how. How I felt when I heard that muscular three-note opening guitar riff. How I felt when I heard Cash’s baritone bellowing I’m gonna break myyyyyyyyyyy, gonna break my rusty caaaaage and run…  How I feel, a quarter-century later, closer now to Cash’s age when he sang “Rusty Cage.” How I feel, still listening, still singing along.

“Rusty Cage” was simultaneously Cash’s rocket blast of renewed relevance and the opening bars of his swan song. His voice would never again sound this full, this powerful. By the time we heard American III, Cash’s next album—four years later, in a new century, a new millennium—the autonomic neuropathy that would eventually overwhelm him was already deflating the defining fullness of that baritone. A bout of pneumonia in 1998 caused irreparable damage to his lungs, leading to the creaky raspings of his final albums—a veracity both defiantly honest, and intensely sad.
The Soundgarden version of “Rusty Cage” is mainlined early-1990s stoner rock speed and energy—which I can still appreciate on occasion, as I did thirty years ago. But it is a relic now of a specific moment, inseparable from bongwater and flickering lights and Mitch’s subwoofer pulsating reverberations and declarations off cinder block walls.
Perhaps the story of this cover is simply Cornell’s Rusty Cage Allegro versus Cash’s Andante.
Chris Cornell’s “Rusty Cage” is the wailing rage of youth, adrenaline and angst, charging the horizon, Hunter S. Thompson’s suicidal werewolf-motorcyclist finding the edge, trying to break on through. Cornell’s vocals are sheathed in psychedelic effect, slithering in and out of the track, crescendoing to tremelos at impossibly high registers.
Cash’s “Rusty Cage” is about the way a man, having evolved beyond that excess energy of youth, finds a slower but more assured pace. Where the young man is obsessed with destination, with the seeking of his strut, his elder flaneur-self enjoys the hard-earned swagger of his stroll. We experience this symbolic pace change viscerally in “Rusty Cage,” at that abrupt mid-song tempo shift from loping gallop to restrained trot, in those two seconds of silence between Cash singing caaaaaaaaage…and ruunnnnn. Linger on the way Cash sings and ruuuunnnn, the stalling vocalization contrasted with the implied speed of the word a pleasing oppositional harmonic, similar to Cash famously singing down down down up the vocal register in “Ring of Fire.”
The Cash version of “Rusty Cage” is stripped of artifice, his voice unfiltered, raw, resonant. There is a flinty biblical(*) clarity to Cash’s vocalization, in particular after that mid-song rubato. It’s raining icepicks on your steel shores in Cash’s baritone sounds like the ghost of Jim Morrison, swaying god-vision poetry.
(*Side note: in the frighteningly frequent footage of California burning, in those harrowing images of cars running gauntlets of fire, my interior soundtrack always defaults to Cash’s Old Testament rumble: when the forest burns along the roooaad…like God’s eyes in my headlights…)

What is “Rusty Cage” but an update of Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues?” Soundgarden’s wasteland vision of cages and chains, sonically amped up through the intervening thirty-four years, Cornell’s screech the diamond produced by the downward geological pressure of those decades of war, assassination, mass-incarceration, American stagnation.
Cash’s “Rusty Cage” is not just sonic obliteration of the original song: Cash’s version is a thematic refocusing. Cash is singing himself free of the accreted life, the cage of his own legend, which had nearly killed him in his youth, and then merely destroyed him spiritually in his middle age. This sonic and thematic clarity is a product of maturity, the basic equation of Survival + Time: Johnny Cash at age 64, versus Chris Cornell at age 26. Of course Cornell—like Cobain, Staley, Weiland, those other lost Gods of Grunge—won’t survive until age 64, will never know the trials, tribulations, and resurrections of that Third Act. Cornell’s “Rusty Cage” is the thrashing energy of youth, powerful but ungainly and undisciplined, a young colt trying to jump the corral. As a man ages he sometimes misses that easy fountain of energy that he took for granted at twenty-six. But the man at 64 (or 49) recognizes the value of slowing down, the life gained through moving more efficiently, with a calm and resolute stroll—and dare he hope?—genuine wisdom.
This is why Cash’s “Rusty Cage” resonates: he is the ghost of a future Cornell recognizing that the cages we envision in our youth are imaginary, too young to be real, let alone rusty. Cornell in ‘91 couldn’t know about the Rusty Cage. Johnny Cash did—by the time he stepped up to the mic to record his version he had just broken free of his rusty cage—had only recently emerged from the creative and spiritual malaise of his fifties. Cash’s baritone bellow breaks through the cage of his past, and triumphantly plants a flag in the zeitgeist of the last gasp before the millennium. Cash’s “Rusty Cage” is a perfect distillation of everything he had ever been, but resurrected for that third and final act, the phoenix rising, the prophet returning from his desert exile, eyes blazing. Cash, singing “Rusty Cage,” is the most Man in Black he had been in the nearly-three decades since he sang “Folsom Prison Blues” to those momentarily-uncaged Folsom inmates.

Kirk Wisland is a PhD Candidate in Creative Writing at Ohio University. He may even be Dr. Wisland by the time you read this. His essay collection, The Melancholy of Falling Men, was selected by Roxane Gay as the winner of the 2015 Iron Horse Chapbook Contest. He has some other work scattered about in print and online, including at Brevity, DIAGRAM, Proximity, The Normal School, Electric Literature, and Essay Daily. Kirk lives in Tucson, where he teaches writing at the University of Arizona.