Johnny Cash American V

[howfast]

i think American V is fantastic

 

unearthed may be the best of all of them

 

can't wait until American VI

[imsjry]

Johnny did some spectacular recordings in his life, I would personally like to remember him that way.

 

LouieB

 

Since you seem to be a fan, I can't believe you can listen to this and not enjoy it as a fan. Of course non-Cash fans shouldn't start here. I think that is obvious to anyone that followed Cash's work. And I don't find it depressing in the least. It is a man at the end of his life singing amazingly personal songs to the woman he loves. I find it amazingly inspirational. Who would not want to hear a favorite artist do something like this? AND, I find the vocals to be some of the best of his career, frail or not.

[Sid Hartha]

I don't find it depressing in the least.

 

Exactly what I was about to post. It's a really good Johnny Cash record.

[Mr. Heartbreak]

I don't care to listen to music by people who are about to die every day of the week. (That includes Warren Zevon.)

I felt the same way about Warren's "The Wind," which is why I won't be picking this up.

[Sid Hartha]

seriously, dying people should stfu

[jdlee23]

Didn't necessarily wanna go here, but... I feel like we are going places that we don't really know of by insinuating or stating that Rick Rubin is simply using Johnny as a cash cow. By all accounts of people who really know the two, they became very close friends (some might say 'best friends') over the years they worked together, talking and praying together everyday, sometimes for hours. Maybe Johnny put it to Rick to make sure these songs were released or maybe Rick feels that this is an important artistic statement of a dying friend. My point is, we shouldn't assume...

 

[imsjry]

Didn't necessarily wanna go here, but... I feel like we are going places that we don't really know of by insinuating or stating that Rick Rubin is simply using Johnny as a cash cow. By all accounts of people who really know the two, they became very close friends (some might say 'best friends') over the years they worked together, talking and praying together everyday, sometimes for hours. Maybe Johnny put it to Rick to make sure these songs were released or maybe Rick feels that this is an important artistic statement of a dying friend. My point is, we shouldn't assume...

 

 

With these records, Rick Rubin has presented Johnny Cash as the most true to the real Cash as anyone Johnny ever worked with. These American Recordings are a Godsend and I can't believe anyone would bash Rubin for this new disc if they really listened to it. It is my disc of the year no matter what else is released.

[LouieB]

I felt the same way about Warren's "The Wind," which is why I won't be picking this up.

Ya know, it ain't bad, but it sure isn't prime stuff. I wasn't goign to get back into this EVER, but let's face it, when you want to remember Zevon, THe Wind isn't going to be the album you put on. Excitable Boy is the way I want to remember him.

 

With these records, Rick Rubin has presented Johnny Cash as the most true to the real Cash as anyone Johnny ever worked with. These American Recordings are a Godsend and I can't believe anyone would bash Rubin for this new disc if they really listened to it. It is my disc of the year no matter what else is released.

It is fair enough to say that Rubin presented Johnny well. I agree with that, but to say this was the REAL Cash is just plain goofy. I am certain Sam Phillips felt like he captured the real Johnny and I am sure that Johnny's Columbia producers (did John Hammond ever have anything to do with him?? Don't remember) also felt like it presented the real Johnny; particularly Live at Folsom etc.

 

There are how many songs on this new album at what price? There are how many songs on the Personal File disks at what price?? Do the math. With this album and an additional Cash VI (which I hope will be called "nearer my God to thee...), Rubin IS CASHING in (pun intended), why else would he not just release the whole batch as a nice twofer and be done with it. Because he KNOWS people will pay him for two disks. Nice work if you can get it.

 

LouieB

[Sid Hartha]

Actually it was Jack Clement who produced most of Johnny Cash's sun sessions.

 

Don Law & Frank Jones handled the early '60s Columbia albums, then Bob Johnston...

 

I personally haven't the slightest clue what Rick Rubin's inner thoughts are, nor do I care. What's important to me is that Cash's last albums are among his best work. Thankfully, his career didn't end with the mediocre product he put his name to when he was with Mercury Records back in the late '80s.

[Dr. Steve Brule]

I was not really looking forward to listening to this, but I finally got the LP and really really love it, even more so than American 4.

[Beltmann]

I don't think there is anything wrong with these recordings either, except I don't care to listen to music by people who are about to die every day of the week. (That includes Warren Zevon.)

I know what you mean, but for me, I would argue that no good album is ever truly depressing. We can be saddened by tragedy, but exhilarated when that tragedy is transformed into good art.

[LouieB]

I know what you mean, but for me, I would argue that no good album is ever truly depressing. We can be saddened by tragedy, but exhilarated when that tragedy is transformed into good art.

I don't disagree with this either, because I did like The Wind. And I have listened to this Cash album and it is is okay in many respects. I am done arguing about the actual material (a lame Gordon Lightfoot song and Rod McKuen??!??? ugh....), which ranges from truly affecting to non-essential. And the tasteful back-up, added later, is well suited to the material.

 

Someday when it crosses my tracks used I will probably buy it to go with the other Rubin produced material of Cash's I have, but somehow something feels weird about this one. I can't quite put my finger on it, despite all the discussion.

 

LouieB

[Albert Tatlock]

19 July 2006 The Independent

How Johnny Cash's career was revived

For record producer Rick Rubin, resurrecting the career of Johnny Cash meant forging a musical - and spiritual - bond with the country legend

Published: 18 July 2006

 

What first gave me the idea of working with Johnny Cash is a question I don't have an answer to. It just felt like the right thing to do. Most of the artists I'd worked with at the time were young, artists like the Beastie Boys, Slayer and LL Cool J, so a country legend in his sixties, who had been making records forever, was a whole different perspective. I remember I'd been thinking, in general terms, "Who's really great but not making great records right now?" and Johnny was the first and greatest that came to mind. He was playing not far from Los Angeles, where I live, at a dinner theatre in Orange County, so I went to see him play and met him after the show.

 

I can't remember much at all about what we said, only that we got along really well. There was an immediate sense of connection - very powerful, spiritual almost. I think that if we were to have spent the same 15 minutes sitting together with our eyes closed, not speaking, the connection would have been the same. And it continued through the years we worked together and even after he passed away. It was there when we were making the new album, American V.

 

What did he see in me? Well, a friend of his told me, after the funeral, that he loved me because I saw something in him that he didn't know he still had. That I thought better of him than he thought of himself. That my support basically enabled him to be Johnny Cash. Because at that time he felt discarded. He thought that his recording career was over. I think he felt he was still doing well on tour - before he got ill, he'd done around 300 shows a year for 40-odd years - but having been dropped by Columbia Records and then not having much success with the records he made for Mercury, he thought the recording part was finished. If I'm honest, probably one of the reasons that he was open to this kind of close collaboration and basically trying anything was really just out of thinking that it didn't matter.

 

So we started what became an ongoing process of just recording all the time - lots of songs, really a lot; songs he'd chosen and songs I wanted him to sing - and this went on right until the end of his life. For American V alone he recorded about 60 songs, with probably 28 or 29 that warrant coming out; I'm also working on American VI.

 

We experimented all the time - recording solo, with rock bands, blues musicians - just changing the way he viewed the record-making process. That took time, because when you've been recording for as long as Johnny had, you think you know how to do it, and of course he did, but at that point it wasn't so greatly important to him any more. So part of the experimentation was to give him the head space of working hard and doing whatever it took for a record to be great, instead of: "Well, here are 10 songs and I'm going to record them so I have a new album."

 

I can remember what I was thinking, though I don't think I shared it with him at the time, which was that most of the artists I worked with are younger artists, and the passion that a young person brings to making their first album is a really big deal, it's like their whole life, and with an artist who has made a hundred albums, it doesn't have that same importance, it's just another album. And the goal was really to reframe the experience from being allowed to think that just another album is OK - everything we do has to be the best we've ever done.

 

We had no preconceived idea for that first American Recordings album. It was an acoustic album simply because, going back through all these experiments, nothing beat the stuff recorded in my living room. My feeling was, if the demos are better then the demos are the album. It just felt like that was the essence of it. It was very powerful. Everyone loved that album.

 

It won a Grammy - they all did, but that one was special to Johnny, after the way he had been discarded. He got a real satisfaction from the way that he was talked about in the press and that he was selling more records than he had in a while. But he got the biggest kick out of young kids liking him. I think they were drawn to the same darkness and individuality and outlaw quality had first attracted me to Johnny. The Man in Black figure was really just a mythological version of that electrifying energy that he had.

The success made him feel better about himself and very excited about the recording process again - which I think in many ways saved his life. Because when he became ill and stopped touring - a very difficult time, since that's really how he identified himself, the guy on-stage every night - recording took on a bigger role in his life. By the end it became less about making albums and more just about the therapeutic value of music; it wasn't so much about, "Boy, we're going to have a great album," it was more, "We need to keep this process going because this is what's keeping him alive."

 

I had a phone conversation with him at the hospital the day June Carter, his wife, passed away. He was clearly a wreck, the worst I'd ever heard him. His voice was weak and shaky and he sounded beaten, but he said, "I've got to work, I've got to keep going."

 

It frustrated him greatly that his voice shook and he was unable to play guitar, but he kept going. Actually he seemed to be getting better at the end, even though he was so ill. He'd been working with a new doctor and was able to see better, read better and starting to walk and getting back to being able to play. So I was very surprised that he went when he went. He was going to come to California to record with me the week after he passed away in September 2003.

 

I don't remember exactly when, but at one point during his illness we started taking Holy Communion together on the phone. When he was out here one time I brought a video of this TV evangelist, Gene Scott, that I played in the studio. Scott was told he had cancer and refused to take any of the medicine and just fasted and prayed and did communion every day while he was sick and the cancer went into remission. Johnny really liked it. We talked about what a sacred act communion was. And I said I'd never done it and could we do it together? And he said: "That would be great, I have a communion kit."

 

So we made it a ritual that we did on the phone every afternoon around 2pm LA time. He would say the words and I listened and then we would both visualise eating the bread and drinking the wine. I kept up doing the communion for a long time after he passed away. I would tune into him and hear his voice saying what he would say and I would visualise doing what he would say was happening.

 

It was very hard going back to the tapes he made for American V. Emotionally hard. And then with all of the attention around the biopic, Walk the Line. The record company people were always, "We need to capitalise on the movie," but my feeling was "No, we really need to distance ourselves from the movie." Not that there's anything wrong with the movie, but it's essentially a fiction - even if the story is true it's still actors playing roles, it's not a documentary - so I wanted our stuff, which I feel is much more personal and intimate, and where Johnny was now, not to be lumped in with that.

 

I think this album shows Johnny as very truthful, honest, open-hearted, real and brave - because to me it's a very edgy record to make at that stage of your life, and to sing such personal, vulnerable songs. I think it's a beautiful record, although not everything in it is beautiful, if that makes sense. The beauty is in the humanity of it.