In the early 1980s, Johnny Cash was at a low ebb. The Man in Black – who once sang to an audience of prisoners that he “shot a man in Reno just to watch him die” – had become little more than a family entertainer. “He’d turned into a weird old grandpa and he didn’t like that,” says the guitarist Marty Stuart. Stuart had just joined Cash’s band and “expected to see that guy who made Folsom Prison Blues and San Quentin. Cash was living a lifestyle that called for a certain amount of money – but I think he knew that there was a cool guy buried back in there.”
But by the early 1990s, that cool guy still hadn’t re-emerged. Prior to being resurrected by a partnership with legendary producer Rick Rubin, Cash’s career looked like it might be over. In 1986, he had been dropped by Columbia, the label he had helped make one of the greats, and a spell with Mercury had not worked out. He had also spent the previous decade in and out of rehab, due to a longstanding addiction to amphetamines. At the start of 1993, a 61-year-old Cash, Stuart and others went into LSI Studios in Nashville and began recording songs from across the previous four decades that Cash had kept in his back pocket. But since Cash didn’t have a record deal, the tracks never got released, and lay ignored and incomplete for years.
Eleven of those songs make up the new album Songwriter, with Cash’s original vocals transposed on to freshly recorded instrumentals. “These songs are some of the best compositions he ever did, important songs,” says Cash historian Mark Stielper. “It’s a shame they weren’t heard at the time.”
The songs reveal the Cash so admired by Bob Dylan for being “what the land and country is all about”. She Sang Sweet Baby James is a tender portrayal of a young single mother consoling herself and her baby by singing James Taylor; Drive On is a lament for Vietnam veterans (“Well, a mortar fell 20ft away / And I carry shrapnel to this day / I came home, but Tex did not / And I can’t talk about the hit he got”); and I Love You Tonite is a startlingly direct declaration from Cash to his wife, June Carter.
But the 1993 recordings were “really rough”, says the album’s engineer, David Ferguson. “He probably only let the band do it once, or until he had something he thought he could work with later. He’d say: ‘OK. We’ll fix it. I’m leaving.’”
Sensitive new arrangements, made with Cash’s son, John Carter Cash, as producer, do the songs justice. But was it hard, knowing that you are engineering a record by a man who can have no input, for an audience with clear expectations of what a Cash record should sound like?
“I learned a long time ago that I’m not trying to make a record for an audience,” says Ferguson. “I’m trying to make it for me and the group that’s working on it. But yes, I was trying to do something that, if he were here, he wouldn’t be embarrassed by – that he would be proud of. I owe it to him to do my best work.”
Stuart says Cash had a set routine for recording during the 1980s. “He would drop John Carter off at school, then head straight to Jack Clement’s studio and have the engineer turn on the microphone. He would sing five, six, seven songs, whatever he had on his mind, into the microphone, get up and leave.” Then, with collaborators such as Ferguson and the bassist Jimmy Tittle, Stuart “would stay late at night, take those tapes and Johnny-Cash-ise them”. They took this approach again for Songwriter.
By the early 90s, John Carter had grown up and joined his father, Stuart et al as a guitarist, playing frequent residencies with them at the country entertainment hotspot of Branson, Missouri. “We played six days a week, with two shows on two nights,” says John Carter. “But by ’91, ’92, the Branson shows were getting a little old to him. He had always been on the road, always travelled. So it was hard being in a theatre and sometimes getting a lacklustre reaction.
“But he never lost his drive and he never lost his faith in music itself. My father lived his life, then he would be alone and he would have a period of creativity, a thrust that gave him material. You didn’t see him on the bus playing guitar. He was reading. He was studying scriptures.”
Stielper suspects the decisions Cash had made over the previous decade, from his Branson gigs to cultivating a family-friendly image, were the result of insecurity – and a need to prove he could be part of the mainstream country establishment. “He wanted the legitimacy; he had always felt inferior. And when he had the opportunity to have a network variety TV show [which ran from 1969 to 1971], then by definition it was going to be a family show. He felt that was a vindication.”
Come 1993, Cash was unsigned. Stuart and Stielper disagree about the effect being without a label had on him. “I don’t think it put much of a dent in his character, because he was Johnny Cash and he was bigger than all of them,” Stuart says. But Stielper says: “He was embarrassed. He was very hurt he didn’t have opportunities. He had many opportunities, when contracts ended, to leave Columbia over the years – but he didn’t, because he felt a loyalty to them.”
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Stielper believes it makes the sessions that led to Songwriter significant. “This is probably on a par with the moments right before he recorded Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison in 1968. Many people will tell you this was a fallow period, but I don’t necessarily agree with that. It was a quieter period, but the man was 61 years old – most people of 61 in his profession have already done what they were going to do. And these were his last recordings before he met Rick Rubin.”
Cash’s biographer Robert Hilburn backs up that conclusion in his magisterial Johnny Cash: The Life. “What proved to be the most important 30-day stretch on Cash’s career since Folsom began in February 1993 with an encounter in Dublin with the Irish rock band U2 and ended with his meeting an admiring record producer in California,” he writes.
The meeting with U2 led to Cash singing The Wanderer on their 1993 album Zooropa and was followed by the link-up with Rubin. It completely revitalised him: he rediscovered the Man in Black and began making stark, grave records that confronted mortality and pain. And it took going outside Nashville to do that. “A lot of people in the industry in Nashville had preconceived ideas about what Johnny Cash was supposed to be and what the country sound of the day was supposed to be,” Stielper says. “Rick Rubin didn’t have any of that. He said to Cash: ‘You just be you. Let me hear what you’ve got to say.’”
The American Recordings albums Cash made subsequently with Rubin completed his redemption arc. He had committed himself to his love for June, he had found sobriety and a measure of inner peace – and with Rubin he had found artistic renewal. For the last decade of his life, Cash’s mythology, life and status were all of a piece.
“He could see something in humanity and he knew how to tell a story and describe it in a few words,” says Ferguson, summarising Cash’s greatness. “That’s the real challenge of songwriting: how much can I get out of this sentence? You know, there were a lot of Johnny Cashes, but they were all based on this kind-hearted family man. He was a religious man, but he loved dirty jokes.”
John Carter says: “My father’s was a life of ups and downs. He hit some pretty hard rock bottoms. He wound up in hospitals and in rehabs. But at the point when Songwriter was recorded, he was at a great ‘up’ in his life. He was focused, clear, sober. Everybody gives Rick Rubin all the credit in the world [for what came next] – and Rick was brilliant. But it was bound to happen.”
Stielper says: “We’re not sitting here talking about George Jones or Porter Wagoner,” referring to a couple of other country music greats. “When we say Johnny Cash, it transcends music. There’s a statue of him in the US Capitol building – there are 100 statues representing the 50 states, saying: ‘This is the best of us.’ And Johnny Cash is one of those people.”