On the cover of American recordingsJohnny Cash’s stunning 1994 comeback album, The Man in Black sits squarely between sin and redemption—literally, since that’s what he named the black and white dogs that surround him as he stares into your soul. At the time, he also felt metaphorically between sin and redemption, and the album was an act of faith. The new archival compilation, Songwriterwhich contains Cash demos recorded in 1993 just a few months before American recordingspresents an alternate history of the period when absolution still seemed unattainable, and many songs show Cash treading water in the same low tide that nearly withered his career in the ’80s and early ’90s.
The key to understanding the entire compilation is found in “Like a Soldier,” a survival track that Cash recorded in both Songwriter And American Recordings sessions. On the song, he sounds flabbergasted that he even sang: “I said a hundred times I should have died,” he crudely understates in one lyric, while in another he beams, “My spoils of victory are you,” surely a nod to his long-suffering wife, June Carter Cash. His verses are brutally stark, but when he recorded it for 1994’s American Recordingshe sang the chorus, “I’m like a soldier recovering from war,” with hope shimmering through the gravity of his deep bass. He sang it clearly — no electric guitar chicaboom, no galloping snare, no Ennio Morricone soprano floating behind him — it was just his voice and his guitar, his words and his chords. It’s intimate and inspiring.
When he recorded the song for the Songwriter However, he had decided to keep this session to himself. It was big and welcoming, but it lacked punch, and he knew it.
After refusing to jump on the bandwagon of urban cowboys and outlaws of the 80s, the great river that was once his career had flowed down to the drops of water (not counting the Highwayman albums). His label wanted nothing to do with him, so he tried to blow up his entire career with the self-parody “The Chicken in Black” in 1986, and when he tried to get serious on another label, the discs exploded. (Water from the house wells (It still sounds awesome, though.) Cash would have retired if he hadn’t felt compelled to support his musicians and family, according to Robert Hillburn’s 2013 biography.
So Cash continued touring and writing songs, and eventually met producer Rick Rubin in 1993. Rubin was best known at the time for records by the Beastie Boys, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Slayer and Andrew “Dice” Clay. Somehow he convinced Cash that he understood country, too. He saved Cash’s career simply by asking him to sing his favorite songs with only a guitar to accompany him, and those songs became American RecordingsIn his autobiography, Cash describes the sound as “late and alone in a room”, but the austerity of the sound, coupled with some comically macabre lyrics (even for Cash), made him an alternative icon at 61.
SO Songwriter asks the question: What would Johnny Cash have been like if he had never met Rubin? In early 1993, the same year, he met Rubin, Cash and various members of the group and recorded a dozen demos of songs he had written at LSI Studios in Nashville. For SongwriterCash’s son, producer and guitarist John Carter Cash, erased everything from these sessions (including, unfortunately, W.S. “Fluke” Holland’s drums) except Cash’s vocals and gathered musicians to re-record the instrumentation with guest appearances by Vince Gill, Marty Stuart and the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach. His intention was to give the recordings a supposedly more modern sound – but it still doesn’t match the cowboy-boot-like heel of American recordings.
The songs themselves are a mixed bag, some showing promise and others disillusionment. “Like a Soldier,” as a song, still feels moving, but it begins with an electric guitar flip that recalls the opening bars of “Folsom Prison Blues” and “I Walk the Line.” Waylon Jennings sings backing vocals, sweetening the chorus, but even those flourishes and lush instrumentation lack the power and immediacy of the better-known. American recordings version.
Likewise, “Drive On” – another track that Cash didn’t feel comfortable recording officially until he met Rubin – carries a sort of Three Dog Night, “Mama Told Me (Not to Come)” a psychedelic swamp-rock arrangement that undercuts the directness of the Rubin version. If these songs had been released in this format, they might still be beloved, but they wouldn’t have had the weighty punch they delivered with Cash’s vocals and guitar alone.
In 1991, Cash released his last pre-Rubin album, The mystery of life — a record he thought so little of that he didn’t type the title correctly in his autobiography, misnaming it The meaning of life. His chunky arrangements sound like Cash-by-numbers, and Cash’s originals, other than the re-recordings of “Hey Porter” and “Wanted Man,” sound just as uninspired. The original song “Beans for Breakfast” (as in “Beans for breakfast again, hard to eat them out of a can”) takes it up a notch on “The Chicken in Black”, showing where his mindset was at the time. So it’s curious to think that he was selfishly holding on to really good songs like “Like a Soldier” and “Drive On.”
Ironically, the best songs of Songwriter which Rubin did not later record for American or its sequels have a new side. The rockabilly catchphrase, “Well Alright,” sees Cash talking to a woman at the dry cleaners, and eventually taking her home — well, okay! He hums “mmm-mmm-mmm,” and Stuart’s guitar echoes the melody back to him, resulting in a song that needs more instrumentation. Meanwhile, on “She Sang Sweet Baby James,” Cash tells the story of a trucker mother separated from her child, singing James Taylor’s “Sweet Baby James” for comfort. He even sings very loudly and lullaby-like, like Taylor (a feat for Cash), and the song probably could have benefited from a lighter arrangement like Taylor’s “Sweet Baby James,” rather than the spaghetti western tremolo on the mandolin on Songwriter.
The other songs are good, but none shine as lost gems from Cash’s blandest era. The elegy for lost love “Spotlight” benefits from Auerbach’s bluesy guitar solo, but the music doesn’t live up to Cash’s moving lyrics, “Let me feel like losing her will be all right.” “I Love You Tonite,” which also features Jennings, is a sweet love song to June, but the bouncing percussion and whiny steel guitar still feel dated even though it was recorded recently, while another ode to June and her mother, “Poor Valley Girl,” echoes the Fifties. A re-recording of “Sing It Pretty Sue” sounds good enough but never tops the 1962 original. The sound of Johnny Cash.
The collection’s biggest fringe, “Hello Out There,” finds Cash cosmically singing about the Earth losing its shine, echoing his own lyrics over a jumping triangular rhythm (as in the orchestra’s instrument) before pivot to a hymn about the king restoring the kingdom of Earth. The original demo is still online, and while it lacks some of the drama of the new recording, particularly the religious heel turn on the bridge, it shows that Cash’s state of mind at the time was always focused on the bland and bloated middle line. from the land of dirt roads where he stopped in the early 80s.
The title of the collection, Songwriter, suggests that John Carter Cash wanted to show off his father’s abilities as a songwriter, a talent that was well proven by the time he wrote these songs. The Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame previously inducted Cash in 1977, citing songs like “Folsom Prison Blues,” “Get Rhythm” and “I Walk the Line” as reasons for induction. None of the songs here reach the level of those classics. Instead, they show Cash analyzing his place in the strata of country music at a time when Billy Ray Cyrus and Garth Brooks were combining traditional two-chord country elevated by Cash with pop music for untold success and he was still the Chicken in Black.
Cash probably would have continued to spin around — and hold on to his best songs — if he’d never met Rubin. In this regard, Songwriter it’s like an alternate universe American Recordings – one that also overlooks Cash as a great interpreter of other people’s songs (see: “Solitary Man,” “Hurt”). Fortunately for Cash and for all of us, the planets aligned in this universe, setting Cash up for one of music’s greatest final acts.