A TALE OF TWO JOHNS: In the biggest day for simultaneous, unrelated celebrity deaths since Sammy Davis, Jr., and Jim Henson both bought the farm on May 16, 1990, country legend Johnny Cash and sitcom mainstay John Ritter passed away within a few hours of one another this morning.
Ritter's death is unquestionably the bigger shock, as the actor was only 54. The best thing I ever heard said about John Ritter (and I don't remember who said it) is that he took one of the stupidest shows of all time, "Three's Company," and made it consistantly hilarious. In Jack Tripper, Ritter created a character as iconic as any in sitcom history, one that made us forgive the show's often lame and always repetitive nature- when for a time I had two female roommates, I never minded being called "Jack Tripper."
Ritter went on to a semi-successful post-'Company' career, later starring in the underrated cop show "Hooperman" as well as in movies, his most memorable big-screen role being as the sensitive gay man with the funny haircut in Billy Bob Thornton's 1996 "Sling Blade." At the time of his death Ritter was starring in the sitcom "8 Simple Rules For Dating My Teenage Daughter." John Ritter will be missed, and I don't think I'm alone in the Blogosphere in wishing that it had been Saddam apologist Scott Ritter who died, not John.
I confess that I only became familiar with Johnny Cash's work in the last year or two, but the man was clearly a great performer, as well as a brilliant songwriter (if you don't believe me, go read the lyrics to "One Piece at a Time," or listen to the gradual walk-up-the-scale of "I Walk the Line.") The one country singer who for whatever reason the rock 'n' roll crowd always "got," Cash had a strange late-career moment in which he recorded a cover of Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt," and made a video that will be looked back on as nothing less than a self-eulogy. The video was nominated for seven MTV Video Music Awards, and rigged as those are I'd imagine Cash would've won Video of the Year had he not missed the ceremony for health reasons.
Hard-living as any singer in history, Cash nonetheless made it to age 71 before succumbing to diabetes. For the last week I've been trying to buy the last Warren Zevon album and haven't been able to find it anywhere in New York or New Jersey; we can now expect a similar run on Cash records.