Now-and-then music (7)

Then Music
Unchained
Johnny Cash
released November 5, 1996
(Warner Bros.)

The earliest that I can remember there being music, there was Johnny Cash, his baritone rumbling through the gaudy burgundy fabric stretched across the speakers of my father’s home stereo parked along the wall of the family room, as big as a compact car. I won’t lie—as a youngster my first impression of Johnny Cash was not esteem. His voice seemed more akin to a novelty act, almost comical in its subterranean movements. But like coffee, with age Cash became an acquired taste.

For my father, whose stack of Cash vinyl could grow wobbly in its height, Cash’s music was largely a machine for nostalgia, transporting the aging man back to his prelapsarian youth, before children and marriage conspired to urge responsibility upon him, and it was in these moments of his youthful reminiscencing—sometimes we’d just sit, sometimes play gin rummy—that my infant ears first heard Cash's music.

I rediscovered Cash on a visit home during graduate school when my father and I reprised our card games, and out came those old Cash LPs. I was amazed at how my perception of that ‘novelty-act’ voice had been transformed. Obviously, those old recordings hadn’t changed, but rather I had, and the little store of life experience I had built up conditioned my ear to sense a new brokenness and sincerity in Johnny Cash’s music, qualities that had been there all along.

My rediscovery of Johnny Cash happened to coincide more or less with that of Rick Rubin, famed producer of early rap and post-punk rock n’ roll. As is well known, by the early 1990s, Johnny Cash’s fame was waning and his career as a recording artist was virtually over. Major labels wanted nothing to do with him, and Cash had resigned himself to touring about, playing in front of enthusiastic, yet small, audiences. He was, as they say, washed up.

When Rubin first approached Cash with a proposal to record a collection of songs, Cash astutely asked him, “What are you gonna do different with my music?” As it turned out, quite a bit. Instead of laying on the hard sell, Rubin asked Cash to join him for a session of “just playing,” and soon thereafter the two began to pick through an amazingly broad catalogue of songs in Cash’s living room. After having Cash run through a number, they would chat about the song, making mental notes, marking songs as “keepers.” In this way, Rubin and Cash developed trust, and the rest, as they say, is history, as Cash’s comeback album, American Recordings, was released in 1994 to wide critical acclaim. The success of that album rested largely on Cash’s intuition about the material he chose to record and Rubin’s unfailing ability to steer Cash into the quirky corners of contemporary popular music. The result was Cash covering artists as divergent Nick Lowe, Kris Kristofferson, Leonard Cohen, and Tom Waits. While American Recordings did not reestablish Cash as a premier country and western act, it really wasn’t meant to. But what it did accomplish was even more important: it solidified Cash’s standing as something more than an erstwhile country star. It introduced Cash to a new generation of listeners and broadened his appeal to that of first-rate songwriter and interpreter of American popular music.

Unchained, the follow-up collection to American Recordings, in many respects outstripped its predecessor in terms of quality. American Recordings was intentionally spare and folky; Unchained, by contrast, was slicker and more complex in its arrangements, but both collections ultimately revolve around Cash’s signature voice. Unchained begins with one of Cash’s unlikely covers, Beck’s “Rowboat,” and ends with the jaunty “I’ve Been Everywhere,” a song made famous by country artist Hank Snow over 30 years before. This selection of music again bears the stamp of Rick Rubin’s uncanny sense of history and marketing, but Cash’s accomplishment with Unchained and the other Rubin-produced collections is not mere marketing. These are timeless collections that attest to Cash’s catholic tastes, and this is not a product of Rick Rubin’s sensibility so much as Cash’s own predilections. After all, few country artists of Cash’s generation felt so at home with folk and rock artists, as evidenced by his many collaborations, most notably his famous duet with Bob Dylan (“Girl from the North Country”) on Nashville Skyline (1969). Unchained, like the collection before it, brings all of this together…Cash’s love of popular music and Rubin’s almost machine-like ability to rummage through song catalogues. This pairing is what produced perhaps the most affecting song on Unchained, Cash’s cover of Soundgarden’s “Rusty Cage.” Cash transforms the song’s bleak, post-punk sensibility into a kind of alt-country-noir apocalypse, and by turns, Cash similarly makes each song on Unchained his own, whether polishing well-worn pop standards (“Sea of Heartbreak”) or claiming another artist’s signature songs as his own (Petty’s “Southern Accents”).

These are important recordings, and I have no doubt that future generations will consider their debts to Rick Rubin as great as those owed to Alan Lomax, the conservator of much early American folk and jazz. While Cash’s reputation was assured long before Rubin arrived on the scene, Rubin did play a valuable role in extending that reputation and in pushing Cash to make the last decade of his life his most fruitful. If you haven't listened to these recordings, you're in for a treat.