music4lover

Herewith Mark Cooper’s MOJO review of the Man in Black’s seminal first American Recordings album…–Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock’s Backpages

Sometime in the late ’80s, Columbia Records unceremoniously dropped Johnny Cash.

No matter that Cash had been one of Sun’s Million Dollar Quaret, alongside Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins, that he’d gone on to build Columbia’s Nashville Division virtually single-handed, that he’d topped the pop charts in 1969 with his extraordinary Johnny Cash At San Quentin live album, and that he’d then hosted a TV show that had brought everyone from Bob Dylan to The Who to Nashville… Columbia had looked at the bottom line and decided that the Man In Black was history.

Dwight Yoakam complained vociferously about the injustice of it all, Cash himself signed to Mercury and cut a series of country albums whose varying excellence and poor sales did nothing to give Columbia’s cold-blooded accountants sleepless nights. The great man had a major operation on his jaw, and settled in to his sixties touring the world like he always has, playing to his now middle-aged fans who whispered along with the same hits he’d played the last time he was in town.

Johnny Cash was momentarily becalmed but he wasn’t about to go gently into that good night. This, after all, was the man who’d written of shooting a man in Reno “just to watch him die”, who knew that love can turn into a “ring of fire”, a white man who’d made millions but who’d never forgotten his poor childhood in the Arkansas delta and who’d always stood up for America’s dispossessed–the Native Americans, the lifers, even the victims of AIDS.

He still had a voice that sounds like the black gold that comes up from under the earth, he’d survived even the crassest novelty songs with his dignity intact and yes, god damn it, he was still the very soul of Americans cool–the only man in whom the contrary demands of Bible, gun and constitution are met with equal long-haired Rick Rubin snatched him up to be the talisman and legend of American Recordings, Rubin’s grown-up version of his two previous labels, Def Jam and Def American.

The album that Rick Rubin and Johnny Cash have made together probably won’t please Cash’s old-time country fans and it will probably be admired more than loved by those who come to the Cash via such young admirers as Nick Cave. If it’s cool, it’s because it manages both to be truthful and confessional, while also making Cash look and sound as big as a monument.

There’s nothing commercial about American Recordings unless it’s a ruthless determination to strip himself bare. Yet that self is a complex thing in Cash’s case, a tangle of pride and humility that give will give ground to no man but know its own weakness in the eyes of the Lord. Cash has always embodied a kind of granite American masculinity yet he’s also always made it abundantly clear that he’s anything but a hard man.

D.H. Lawrence once wrote that the soul of the American white man is the soul of a killer; Cash instinctively understands this and there’s plenty of killing on American Recordings. But Cash is ultimately no John Wayne–unless it’s the Wayne of The Searchers, the Wayne who learns the power of mercy and the meaning of redemption.

The Johnny Cash of American Recordings predates even the boom-chikka-boom of Sun days. There’s no bass, no beat and even no harmonica; this is Cash alone with his guitar and that brooding, wavering voice, back among the folk songs, the cowboy laments and the gospel tunes of his Delta childhood.

That, at least, is the mood, even if Cash originals and the odd folk ballad are surrounded by songs that come from such diverse contemporary sources as Nick Lowe, Kris Kristofferson, Loudon Wainwright, Tom Waits, Glenn Danzig and Leonard Cohen. Yet the songs are so skillfully chosen that each of them sheds light on Cash himself, and fleshes out the overall portrait of a man coming to terms with his life in the face of oncoming death.

This is Cash taking stock, making his last reckonings and weighing his soul with Old Testament gravitas. He’s a woman killer in the droll “Delia’s Gone,” a Vietnam vet in “Drive On,” a bad seed in Danzig’s “Thirteen” and sometimes a monster in Lowe’s “The Beast In Me.” Yet he’s also a sinner in search of redemption, a man taking stock in Cohen’s “Bird On A Wire,” Wait’s “Down There By The Train” or his own “Let The Train Blow The Whistle”–a man looking back on his life struggles and coming clean.

The result is a breathtaking blend of the confessional and the self-mythologizing that makes Cash seem all the larger for his admissions of weakness. American Recordings finds an American hero having the courage, wit, and strength to stare long and hard in to the mirror of his life and then look back at us without blinking. He’s Johnny Cash and everything he’s done is written on his face and engrained in his voice.

I’d like to say “We are not worthy…,” but every tremor in his voice tells me he’d disagree. Let’s just say, “Welcome back, Mister Cash” and leave it at that.