Aussie rocker Tex Perkins began his musical career covering songs by Johnny Cash, and now he plays him in acclaimed stage show The Man in Black, which is coming to New Zealand. He talks to Graham Reid.
The hotel's drawn blinds shut out the mid-morning Auckland sun, pills are scattered on a table, the remains of takeaway food are on another and there's a pervasive air of "the morning-after".
"Yeah, very Johnny Cash," says Tex Perkins, the room's slightly dishevelled occupant, in a husky and weary voice.
The Australian singer-songwriter - from bands such as the Dum Dums, the Cruel Sea, Beasts of Bourbon and others - lets out a wry laugh. In the production The Man in Black - which he is touring nationally from late June - he plays the legendary Cash who, at one period in his life, was quite the pill freak.
Perkins' morning-after condition however is the result of a disturbed night and a sleeping pill taken too late more than any rock 'n' roll hedonism - although he's not been unfamiliar with that during his life on the road.
Perkins is a big entry in any encyclopedia of Australian music, but The Man in Black allows him to go back to where it began, in the post-punk Dum Dums which he formed in "tediously boring" Brisbane.
"When we first put the Dum Dums together, the band I was obsessed with as a 16-year-old was the Cramps. Their thing was minimal rockabilly done in a post-punk way. We approached country music like that and I loved minimal twangy guitar - so Johnny Cash provided pretty much half our set. So I learned my craft with those songs."
Perkins left Brisbane and the Dum Dums behind at 18 and explored other musical avenues, but in the Cruel Sea and when he teamed up with Don Walker and Charlie Owen (as Tex, Don and Charlie) there was a distinct country influence.
So slinging on an acoustic guitar for The Man in Black and delivering a whisky-barrel baritone alongside Rachel Tidd (who sings the June Carter Cash parts) and being out front of a band named the Tennessee Four (Cash fronted the Tennessee Two in the 50s) comes naturally to Perkins.
"I don't really play Johnny Cash. I share the narration with Rachael and I'm acting as Johnny Cash in the songs, and occasionally when I quote him I will do an impression.
"I introduce myself as Tex Perkins so it's not an impersonation. But you put on the boots and you play the part. It's important to give a performance that has reality and truth in it rather than a detailed impersonation."
The production - which won the 2010 Helpmann Award Best Australian Contemporary Concert - has undergone fine tuning over the years ("the first script was, for want of a better word, s**t") and while some songs are immovable - Walk the Line, Folsom Prison, Ring of Fire - "the others are changeable and we can rest some". "Some of them serve the narrative, some are just fun to sing like Cocaine Blues and quite a few are really good duets with Rachel."
The show doesn't ignore those final years when Cash was rediscovered by the American Recordings albums: "I sing Hurt after June has died then I talk about his death. I've cried during that bit and I imagine some in the audience have too."
After 132 performances it is still a show Perkins enjoys, but he also has parallel projects. There's the new Tex Perkins and the Dark Horses album, the Cash show group - as Tex Perkins and the Band of Gold - have recorded an album of country songs, and he's finishing the narration to a documentary about Australian country singer Chad Morgan, famous for his protruding teeth.
"Chad's never really been embraced by the country scene but it doesn't do him justice to call him a comedy act, even though most of his sons are comedy-based and he does play up his freakishness. He's a true outsider because at 79 he still puts his wife in station wagon with the caravan on the back and drives thousands of kilometres to do these s****y little gigs all over the country.
"It's what sustains him and I see great dignity in that. This is what we are and what we do, and we just have to go and do it. And love it."
LOWDOWN
Who: Australian singer Tex Perkins as Johnny Cash
What: The Man in Black
Where and when: Baycourt Theatre, Tauranga June 27; Rotorua Civic Theatre June 28; Great Lake Centre, Taupo, June 29; Regent on Broadway, Palmerston North, June 30; Royal Wanganui Opera House, July 1; TSB Showplace, New Plymouth, July 2; Opera House, Wellington, July 10; Municipal Theatre, Napier, July 11; Founders Theatre, Hamilton, July 12; Pukekohe Town Hall, July 13; Aotea Centre, Auckland, July 15
- TimeOut
