Post by Fuggle on Sept 17, 2006 17:07:18 GMT -5
The man came around
Johnny Cash peaked early — and late. Mark Edwards celebrates a voice that transcends time
The Sunday Times
September 17, 2006
If you were asked to pick the most important body of musical work produced in the 1960s — work that was not only musically brilliant, but had a wider cultural impact — you might perhaps choose the Beatles’ catalogue or Bob Dylan’s albums. Asked the same question about the 1970s, you might choose Bowie’s chameleonic string of records, the Sex Pistols’ brief explosion or Stevie Wonder’s Moog-driven reinvention of soul. In the 1980s, perhaps Prince’s genre-defying genius; in the early 1990s, maybe Nirvana’s all-too-brief oeuvre. You might pick an entirely different list, but in all probability your choices would share one quality with those above: they’d all be young, and their youth would be central to their importance. Young artists communicating with a young audience, helping a new generation to define itself.
Try to identify the most important musical contribution of the past dozen years, however, and something intriguing happens. You might pick the music of Oasis — again, a bunch of young upstarts — but you could put together just as strong an argument for the work of Johnny Cash. Far from young, Cash was 61 when his American Recordings album was released in 1993, signalling the start of his working relationship with the producer Rick Rubin, an extraordinary creative rebirth and a decade of music whose importance we’re only just beginning to understand fully.
Once again, age is vital. The fact that Cash recorded four exceptional albums in his sixties, continuing until the last few weeks of his life, is central to their importance. Post-Elvis, popular music is supposed to be a young man’s game. Cash turned that idea on its head.
Cash did make great music when he was young. Back in the mid-1950s, when he was a label-mate of Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Roy Orbison on Sun records, he recorded tracks such as I Walk the Line, Get Rhythm and Cry, Cry, Cry, which feature on our free CD. His career faltered in the mid-1960s, was reignited at the end of that decade by his incendiary prison albums, then gradually declined again through the 1970s and 1980s. It was only when he met Rubin that Cash reawakened the spirit that fired his best early work.
First and foremost, the late albums are full of brilliant performances. You’ll struggle to find an artist who can match the emotional intensity of Cash on the four albums released before his death: American Recordings, Unchained, Solitary Man and The Man Comes Around. His interpretation of Nine Inch Nails’ song Hurt had a video that showed a frail, elderly Cash — the polar opposite of the pop stars who normally grace music television. That song’s opening line, “I hurt myself today, to see if I still feel”, is the utterance of a drug addict, and Cash had known periods of addiction; but when he asks “What have I become?”, he speaks just as clearly to those lost in a midlife crisis or gazing back at the decades from his position. There is a powerful quality in Cash’s voice that makes it clear that he is speaking directly to you, that he is asking serious questions of you, and that you’d better find some answers pretty quick.
It is never clearer than on the title track of The Man Comes Around. Many of the songs on the American albums are covers, but that is one of Cash’s own. Drawing on the book of Revelations, Cash wants to know if you’re ready for judgment day, and you can protest all you like that you don’t believe in all that religion stuff — it doesn’t matter, because Cash has you by the collar and he isn’t letting go. In the words of Bob Dylan, you ain’t going nowhere.
Dylan was presumably referring to exactly that unrelenting moral gaze when he described Cash as “the North Star”. “You could”, Dylan said, “guide your ship by him.” Not that Cash was a model of moral rectitude; rather, he was a guide to human fallibility and the possibility of redemption. Fortunately for us, he sang about it. We may know that when Cash wrote I Walk the Line, a pledge of loyalty to his wife, he certainly wasn’t finding it “very, very easy to be true”; but the fact that he found it so hard to walk the line makes the song more potent, not less.
Dylan owed a debt of gratitude to Cash. Early in Dylan’s career, when folk purists were criticising the young songwriter’s stylistic meandering, Cash stood up for him — an important endorsement from an established star. Dylan was influenced by Cash’s music, his individual style and the pool of traditional songs he drew from.
Cash remains a template for ageing rock stars. We accept that today’s singers peak in their twenties, may perhaps sustain a reasonable level of creativity in their thirties, but then quickly fade into artistic irrelevance. Musicians in their sixties can churn out the old hits, like Mick Jagger, but they can’t create anything new that matters. Cash blew that one out of the water. He laid down a simple challenge to everyone in the musical world. The work he did in his sixties was as strong as the work he did at the beginning of his career. If Cash could do it, why couldn’t everyone else?
Since Cash laid down the challenge, we’ve seen Paul Simon and Paul McCartney seek out new collaborators (Brian Eno and Nigel Godrich) to challenge them creatively; and Neil Diamond has worked with Rubin. None of them has matched Cash’s late-flowering majesty, but all have dragged themselves back from irrelevancy. They are contenders once more.
One of the first artists to rise to Cash’s challenge may have been Bob Dylan. Of course, it may just be coincidence that Dylan’s reawakening from two decades of mainly below-par activity occurred four years after American Recordings; but it’s hard to believe that Dylan wouldn’t have checked out his old friend’s album and been impressed by Cash’s ability to get back to basics.
Here’s Cash describing how he worked with his producer: “Basically, he and I saw eye to eye. We both knew up front that my music had to stay simple, uncomplicated and unadorned, and we both felt that if the performance was really there at the heart of the song, it didn’t matter much if there was some little musical error.” But that’s not Rubin Cash is describing; it’s Sam Phillips, back in Sun Studio in 1955.
Those early songs, the ones you can hear on our CD, really are simple. In the early 1960s, a new generation of would-be guitarists — Keith Richards among them — came to Cash’s concerts to try to learn what technique he and his side man, Luther Perkins, used to get their trademark boom-chicka-boom sound. What Rubin did for Cash was simply to guide him back to his original way of working, allowing him to rediscover what had fired him up in the first place. The Man Comes Around is built on that same boom-chicka-boom sound. Almost half a century separates the two songs. The utter simplicity of that guitar strum holds them together.
That is another reason Cash’s influence will live on. He taught us that all these songs, all these bands we would like to separate into genres and generations, are connected. Cash covered Nick Cave, Bob Marley, Will Oldham, Tom Petty and Beck, as well as Nine Inch Nails. He also recorded Danny Boy and We’ll Meet Again. And he made it clear that all the songs belong together, that they all come from the same emotional place, and that we can find the same qualities in all of them if we care to look.
When he played Glastonbury in the mid-1990s, he was surprised and delighted to find that the young audience who came to hear his 1990s songs, and were just about familiar with some of his 1950s songs, were equally happy to hear songs he had learnt as a child in the 1920s and 1930s. In a world that seems to be changing so fast that we’re not sure if the past matters any more, Cash reconnects us to some history and makes a little clearer where we belong.
Johnny Cash peaked early — and late. Mark Edwards celebrates a voice that transcends time
The Sunday Times
September 17, 2006
If you were asked to pick the most important body of musical work produced in the 1960s — work that was not only musically brilliant, but had a wider cultural impact — you might perhaps choose the Beatles’ catalogue or Bob Dylan’s albums. Asked the same question about the 1970s, you might choose Bowie’s chameleonic string of records, the Sex Pistols’ brief explosion or Stevie Wonder’s Moog-driven reinvention of soul. In the 1980s, perhaps Prince’s genre-defying genius; in the early 1990s, maybe Nirvana’s all-too-brief oeuvre. You might pick an entirely different list, but in all probability your choices would share one quality with those above: they’d all be young, and their youth would be central to their importance. Young artists communicating with a young audience, helping a new generation to define itself.
Try to identify the most important musical contribution of the past dozen years, however, and something intriguing happens. You might pick the music of Oasis — again, a bunch of young upstarts — but you could put together just as strong an argument for the work of Johnny Cash. Far from young, Cash was 61 when his American Recordings album was released in 1993, signalling the start of his working relationship with the producer Rick Rubin, an extraordinary creative rebirth and a decade of music whose importance we’re only just beginning to understand fully.
Once again, age is vital. The fact that Cash recorded four exceptional albums in his sixties, continuing until the last few weeks of his life, is central to their importance. Post-Elvis, popular music is supposed to be a young man’s game. Cash turned that idea on its head.
Cash did make great music when he was young. Back in the mid-1950s, when he was a label-mate of Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Roy Orbison on Sun records, he recorded tracks such as I Walk the Line, Get Rhythm and Cry, Cry, Cry, which feature on our free CD. His career faltered in the mid-1960s, was reignited at the end of that decade by his incendiary prison albums, then gradually declined again through the 1970s and 1980s. It was only when he met Rubin that Cash reawakened the spirit that fired his best early work.
First and foremost, the late albums are full of brilliant performances. You’ll struggle to find an artist who can match the emotional intensity of Cash on the four albums released before his death: American Recordings, Unchained, Solitary Man and The Man Comes Around. His interpretation of Nine Inch Nails’ song Hurt had a video that showed a frail, elderly Cash — the polar opposite of the pop stars who normally grace music television. That song’s opening line, “I hurt myself today, to see if I still feel”, is the utterance of a drug addict, and Cash had known periods of addiction; but when he asks “What have I become?”, he speaks just as clearly to those lost in a midlife crisis or gazing back at the decades from his position. There is a powerful quality in Cash’s voice that makes it clear that he is speaking directly to you, that he is asking serious questions of you, and that you’d better find some answers pretty quick.
It is never clearer than on the title track of The Man Comes Around. Many of the songs on the American albums are covers, but that is one of Cash’s own. Drawing on the book of Revelations, Cash wants to know if you’re ready for judgment day, and you can protest all you like that you don’t believe in all that religion stuff — it doesn’t matter, because Cash has you by the collar and he isn’t letting go. In the words of Bob Dylan, you ain’t going nowhere.
Dylan was presumably referring to exactly that unrelenting moral gaze when he described Cash as “the North Star”. “You could”, Dylan said, “guide your ship by him.” Not that Cash was a model of moral rectitude; rather, he was a guide to human fallibility and the possibility of redemption. Fortunately for us, he sang about it. We may know that when Cash wrote I Walk the Line, a pledge of loyalty to his wife, he certainly wasn’t finding it “very, very easy to be true”; but the fact that he found it so hard to walk the line makes the song more potent, not less.
Dylan owed a debt of gratitude to Cash. Early in Dylan’s career, when folk purists were criticising the young songwriter’s stylistic meandering, Cash stood up for him — an important endorsement from an established star. Dylan was influenced by Cash’s music, his individual style and the pool of traditional songs he drew from.
Cash remains a template for ageing rock stars. We accept that today’s singers peak in their twenties, may perhaps sustain a reasonable level of creativity in their thirties, but then quickly fade into artistic irrelevance. Musicians in their sixties can churn out the old hits, like Mick Jagger, but they can’t create anything new that matters. Cash blew that one out of the water. He laid down a simple challenge to everyone in the musical world. The work he did in his sixties was as strong as the work he did at the beginning of his career. If Cash could do it, why couldn’t everyone else?
Since Cash laid down the challenge, we’ve seen Paul Simon and Paul McCartney seek out new collaborators (Brian Eno and Nigel Godrich) to challenge them creatively; and Neil Diamond has worked with Rubin. None of them has matched Cash’s late-flowering majesty, but all have dragged themselves back from irrelevancy. They are contenders once more.
One of the first artists to rise to Cash’s challenge may have been Bob Dylan. Of course, it may just be coincidence that Dylan’s reawakening from two decades of mainly below-par activity occurred four years after American Recordings; but it’s hard to believe that Dylan wouldn’t have checked out his old friend’s album and been impressed by Cash’s ability to get back to basics.
Here’s Cash describing how he worked with his producer: “Basically, he and I saw eye to eye. We both knew up front that my music had to stay simple, uncomplicated and unadorned, and we both felt that if the performance was really there at the heart of the song, it didn’t matter much if there was some little musical error.” But that’s not Rubin Cash is describing; it’s Sam Phillips, back in Sun Studio in 1955.
Those early songs, the ones you can hear on our CD, really are simple. In the early 1960s, a new generation of would-be guitarists — Keith Richards among them — came to Cash’s concerts to try to learn what technique he and his side man, Luther Perkins, used to get their trademark boom-chicka-boom sound. What Rubin did for Cash was simply to guide him back to his original way of working, allowing him to rediscover what had fired him up in the first place. The Man Comes Around is built on that same boom-chicka-boom sound. Almost half a century separates the two songs. The utter simplicity of that guitar strum holds them together.
That is another reason Cash’s influence will live on. He taught us that all these songs, all these bands we would like to separate into genres and generations, are connected. Cash covered Nick Cave, Bob Marley, Will Oldham, Tom Petty and Beck, as well as Nine Inch Nails. He also recorded Danny Boy and We’ll Meet Again. And he made it clear that all the songs belong together, that they all come from the same emotional place, and that we can find the same qualities in all of them if we care to look.
When he played Glastonbury in the mid-1990s, he was surprised and delighted to find that the young audience who came to hear his 1990s songs, and were just about familiar with some of his 1950s songs, were equally happy to hear songs he had learnt as a child in the 1920s and 1930s. In a world that seems to be changing so fast that we’re not sure if the past matters any more, Cash reconnects us to some history and makes a little clearer where we belong.