JOHNNY CASH - AMERICAN RECORDINGS

Thirty years ago, on 26 April 1994, Johnny Cash released his album American Recordings, his first on his new label and with a new producer, Rick Rubin. In this latest blog, an expanded and updated article that originally appeared in Issue #40 of Johnny Cash-The Man in Black in September 2004, we look back at how his career took on a new direction, the release of the album and its commercial and critical success.

Photographer: Andy Earl

CBS’s decision to drop Johnny Cash after an unparalleled twenty-eight year partnership angered many people. Dwight Yoakam, an up and coming country star back in 1986 that Cash rated highly, didn’t hold back when he said, “The man’s been there thirty fuckin’ years making them money.” And talking about the Columbia executives offices he raged, “He built the building.”

Even in 1986 Cash still had a loyal following playing sell-out concerts throughout the world and shifting over 40,000 copies of every album but this was not enough to justify a record companies investment and many other country stars would suffer the same fate in the years that followed. 

Not one to even consider retirement Cash started looking for a new label and eventually Dick Asher, President at Mercury/Polygram, offered him a deal that would find Cash teaming up once again with producer Jack Clement. Unfortunately things didn’t work out any better. Despite recording some fine albums his five releases only shifted around 200,000 copies in total and once again he found himself without a label. One wonders if he knew what was coming when he recorded the song I’ll Go Somewhere And Sing My Songs Again on his last album for the label.

Photographer: Andy Earl

It was all down to demographics, statistical studies etc. “Demographics! They were always ramming that stuff down my throat,” Cash would often comment.

To his credit he was never angry or resentful towards the people at CBS or Mercury/Polygram and remained friends with many of the company executives. It was beginning to look like he would never find another label but during a show in California in early 1993 he was introduced to a man who would bring about the most dramatic turnaround in country music history.

On the 27th February Cash was playing a show at the Rhythm Cafe in Santa Ana, California and at the end of the show as Cash left the stage his manager, Lou Robin, said, “There’s a man here named Rick Rubin that would like to meet you and would like to record you.” Apparently Cash just laughed and enquired “Record me? What for?”

Photographer: Unknown

Co-founder of the legendary Def Jam label, Rubin was one of the key figures behind the commercial and artistic rise of hip-hop. He was born Frederick Jay Rubin on Long Island, NY, in 1963, and while attending New York University he met Russell Simmons.

Together they founded Def Jam in 1984 and the following year they entered into a distribution deal with Columbia Records. Rubin’s interests extended beyond hip-hop and he produced Slayer’s Hell Awaits the same year. In 1986 both the Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill and Run-D.M.C’s Raising Hell, both Rubin productions, made Rap a worldwide phenomenon. Rubin and Simmons’ partnership finally ended in acrimony, and Rubin founded his own label, Def American (American Recordings).

Early signings included the aforementioned Slayer and the controversial gangsta rappers the Geto Boys. Def American scored one of its biggest hits in 1991 with Sir Mix-a-Lot’s Mack Daddy. That same year, Rubin also produced the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ breakthrough effort, Blood Sugar Sex Magik. Altogether an unlikely producer for Johnny Cash.

On 1st June a press release was issued that read: “The legendary ‘Man in Black,’ Johnny Cash, has signed a worldwide exclusive recording contract with American Recordings, it was announced today by label owner Rick Rubin. Rubin will not only be Johnny’s new label boss, but will also serve as Cash’s producer.” Ironically it was Polygram, Cash’s previous label, that would be distributing his new material in the UK, Europe and other foreign markets with WEA taking care of the US distribution.

Rubin was looking forward to working with Cash. "To work with Johnny Cash will be an honour," he said . "I have respected him for years, both as a performer and a writer, and it’s going to be a pleasure having him with American." He went on to say, "The dark side was the side of Johnny Cash that really interested me, and I just tried to do whatever I could to get that point across in the song selection, and just trying to explain that this is really what people wanna hear from you."

The feeling was mutual. "I’ll be expanding my scope of activity while experiencing the excitement of today’s contemporary music,” said Cash. “I look forward to exploring the kind of artistic freedom, creativity and open-mindedness that I knew with the Memphis rockabilly sound."

Cash had always wanted to record an album called 'Johnny Cash Late and Alone', just him and his guitar, and with Rubin he was at last able to do it. Sessions began in May 1993 and would continue, on and off, at various locations, including Rubin’s living room, up to the end of the year. They recorded a lot of songs, well over 100, many more than once. An entire album of acoustic gospel material was also taped that would remain unheard until they worked on a tenth anniversary set in 2003. 

Photographer: Robert Sebree

Many of the early sessions were experiments. Cash would revisit some of his old songs, pick a few favourites and then Rubin would also suggest material. Many of Rubin’s suggestions at first appeared strange to Cash although after they recorded them they felt right. These demo sessions, held in Rubin’s living room and Cash’s Cabin in Hendersonville, in most cases featured just Cash and his guitar. At these early sessions there was no plan to record and release an acoustic album and for some numbers Rubin brought in various musicians, from rock and blues bands, not the country pickers Cash was used to recording with.

Both Flea and Chad from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Mike Campbell from the Heartbreakers and members of The Red Devils played on some sessions. Talking about the making of the album Rubin said “We recorded a lot of songs with different musicians and tried a lot of things to decide what would be the best record for us to make.” Although unissued at the time the Dolly Parton song I’m A Drifter is a good example of this experimentation. A version was recorded that featured Michael Campbell while a second version featured Flea and Chad. Both would eventually find a release on the tenth anniversary set in 2003. This diversity is further demonstrated on the outtake I Witnessed A Crime which was written by Billy Gibbons of the group ZZ Top. In fact Gibbons also played on this track and another unissued title, Black Boots And A Sack Of Silver Dollars. Cash also delved into his own catalogue re-recording several songs like Understand Your Man, New Cut Road, I’m Ragged But I’m Right and Go On Blues. 

Photographer: Robert Sebree

Photographer Robert Sebree captured images of Cash before and during the sessions as he told me in an interview I did with him for the Fanzine. "This was an interesting job for me because usually when I shoot it's really all about the shoot but in this situation there were times where I was asking Johnny to engage with me and their were other times where I tried to 'disappear' and just be that fly on the wall." He went on to say, "By the time we got to Rick's house Johnny had enough trust in me that I could move around and go about my business without him taking too much notice. There are a lot of outtakes from the shoot that make me laugh! When Johnny did realise I was shooting he would make a silly face for the camera which is something that you would never imagine him doing."

None of his images appeared on the album, but he wasn't disappointed, "I was aware that we weren't capturing anything that would work for packaging. It was intended to be a publicity shoot and it worked perfectly tor those needs." 

In December 1993 during the final weeks of recording Rubin thought it would be interesting to get up in a club and perform some of the songs they had been working on. The place he chose for Cash to play was the Viper Room owned by actor Johnny Depp and infamously remembered as the club where, outside, River Phoenix died.

That was on a Monday and the show was scheduled for Thursday night. Cash had never done a show all alone and Tom Petty recalled that Cash was, “Nervous, very nervous.”

Talking about his appearance after, Cash commented, "I said no at first, then I thought about it. I've played every kind of venue there is, so why not? I felt so free and easy and relaxed. Nobody yelled at me or threw things."

Cash opened the show with Delia’s Gone and followed with several tracks that they had been working on including No Earthly Good, Bad News, Tennessee Stud and The Man Who Couldn’t Cry. After running out of new material he turned to early hits like Folsom Prison Blues and I Walk The Line.

Although the show was filmed only a couple of songs have ever been broadcast although two did make it to the final track listing on the album. “It was an incredible night,” remembered Rubin. While Cash felt , “It turned out really well.” For those who were there, and it was a specially invited crowd, it was an incredible experience and for those who weren’t, they can only wish they had been invited!

On 17 March 1994 Johnny Cash delivered the keynote speech at the South by Southwest conference held at the Austin Convention Center. At 10.30am he was introduced by co-directors Roland Swenson and Louis Meyers and opened with Delia’s Gone a track from his forthcoming album American Recordings. “I’ve always known that when I had to make a speech it would be good if I had my guitar handy to fall back on” he joked. During his speech he also performed Tennessee Stud, Drive On and The Man Who Couldn’t Cry. Before he left the stage, Austin City mayor Max Nofziger proclaimed the day ‘Johnny Cash Day’ and presented him with the key to the city.

In the evening he played a show at EMO’s, a grungy, partly open-air club holding approximately 500 people. Outside several hundred were turned away. Both the keynote speech and his evening show were filmed and broadcast.

Photographer: Unknown

Following his successful shows at the Viper Room and EMO’s Cash also played a show at the New York club The Fez. An invitation-only show and among the audience were Kate Moss, Johnny Depp, and Rachel Williams. However, Cash’s new younger following was not just in America.

During a promotional tour to Europe, after the albums release, he was a surprise triumph at the Glastonbury Festival in England where he gave a performance before an enthusiastic crowd that covered past glories and material from his new album. Edited parts of the show was broadcast on radio and television.

Over two days in late-April a video for Delia’s Gone, the first single lifted from the forthcoming album, was filmed. Location scouts had chosen Hendersonville as the perfect spot and scenes were filmed off Galatin Road, just across from the House of Cash with additional footage shot at a cabin in Monthaven.

Photographer: Kal Roberts

Supermodel Kate Moss appeared on the video as Delia. The video included scenes of Moss tied to a chair and shot through the head while Cash is shown shovelling dirt on her face. In between takes they signed autographs and talked to local residents and members of the crew.

Anton Corbijn, director of the video, said Cash was "very straightforward and nice" and "a delight to work with."

It is hard to believe that Moss was condemned by TV bosses for the video while MTV took it one stage further by ordering certain scenes to be axed before they would broadcast it. They insisted that the scene where Cash is seen shovelling dirt into an open grave and onto Delia's fresh, white-clad body be replaced with her lying motionless with soil already on top of her!

Photographer: Candace Webb

A spokeswoman for Cash’s label was quoted as saying "I guess they have a thing about dead women. We don’t quite understand their reaction." Cash also responded, saying, "It ain't an anti-women song, it is an anti-Delia song!"

Hendersonville Star News reporter Candace Webb covered the shoot and I had the opportunity to interview her a few years ago. She told me how she ended up covering the shoot, "Johnny's friend and assistant, Hugh Waddell, called me first thing in the morning and told me they were shooting and there was going to be almost no media allowed, but he would allow me to cover the shoot and I accepted immediately." Webb has fond memories of the day and in particular how friendly and gracious both Cash and Moss were, "Johnny made a point of coming over to me early on, introducing himself, letting me know that Hugh had spoken highly of me and that he (Johnny) looked forward to reading my story. The basis for the story wasn't actually going to be about Johnny Cash as much as it was about what a crew does to put together a successful video. He was pleased that it was going to focus on the many workers who seldom get recognition and as he said, 'deserve the majority of it'. Several times throughout the day he would stop by me, between filming takes, and ask if I needed anything, talk about life in general etc."

Although she didn't interact with Kate Moss as much as she did with Cash she did notice that both Kate and Johnny were clearly professional and were taking the whole shoot seriously, adding, "there were no diva attitudes from either one of them."

On it's release Chris Willman, in the Los Angeles Times, had this to say about the video, "The Man in Black goes really noir with Delia's Gone. He looks uncharacteristically frightening, coming at the camera with a piece of rope, re-creating the way his murder ballad's doomed narrator went after his cheatin' fiancee, tying her to a chair before unloading two shells into her."

Talking about MTVs reaction and demands, Willman said, "In our lifetime, there will be but one man who gets his music video rejected by MTV because of violence and purported bad taste and can lay claim to being a regularly featured speaker at Billy Graham crusades. Ladies and gentlemen... Johnny Cash."

A promotional video was also produced for Drive On and The Man Who Couldn't Cry featuring black and white footage of Cash on stage at the Viper Room and various candid footage. Unlike Delia's Gone, these video did not create such a negative reaction from MTV or TV bosses.

Released in April 1994 American Recordings featured thirteen tracks. Cash wrote five of the songs, four within the previous year. There was a love song, Like A Soldier, his Vietnam veterans song Drive On, the gospel song Redemption, Let The Train Blow The Whistle and the last of his own compositions was a new version, with slight lyric changes, of Delia’s Gone, which he originally recorded back in the early sixties opens the album.

Photographer: Andy Earl

He also arranged and adapted Cowboy’s Prayer which leads into Oh Bury Me Not, another song he had recorded earlier in his career. The remaining eight tracks came from a variety of sources. Ex-son-in-law, Nick Lowe, wrote The Beast In Me and had offered it to Cash back in 1979, although it took several years before he finally recorded it. The Kris Kristofferson track Why Me Lord, also recorded by Elvis Presley, is covered on the album.

Other tracks came from Leonard Cohen (Bird On A Wire) which had originally been recorded by Cohen and issued on his 1969 album Songs From A Room, Tom Waits (Down There By The Train) a song he gave to Cash who considered Waits, "a very special writer, my kind of writer",  and Glenn Danzig (Thirteen). Danzig was a young punk artist that Rubin had previously worked with and he wrote the song specially for Cash. He would eventually record his own version which appeared on his 1999 album 6:66 Satan's Child.

Two tracks, Tennessee Stud and The Man Who Couldn’t Cry, recorded at the Viper Room back in December 1993 also feature. The former was written by Jimmy Driftwood and originally recorded back in 1959 and first covered by Eddy Arnold who had a top five hit in the same year. The latter was a song composed by Loudon Wainwright III, singer/songwriter who specialised on novelty songs and whose version appeared in 1973 on his Attempted Mustache album.

In 2003 alternate versions of some of the material would appear on the ten-year retrospective, Unearthed, including Down There By The Train, Like A Soldier, Drive On with alternate lyrics and a live version of Bird On A Wire with an orchestra.

Delia's Gone was issued as a CD single in Europe with two previously unreleased tracks from the sessions, Billy Joe Shaver's Old Chunk Of Coal and Cash's own Go On Blues. In the USA two promo CDs were produced. A one-track CD featuring Drive On and a second CD with five tracks, Thirteen, Go On Blues, The Man Who Couldn't Cry, Thirteen (Live) and Old Chunk Of Coal. The live version of Thirteen was recorded in 1995 at the Pantages Theatre in Los Angeles.

The cover artwork featured Cash with two dogs, one white and one black, which summed up the theme of the album – sin and redemption. The photo was taken by Sussex born photographer Andy Earl during Cash’s Australian/New Zealand tour in February. 

Photographer: Andy Earl

Earl was not the only photographer involved in the project. Martyn Atkins, who had first met Rick Rubin in 1990 and would take photos for future albums produced by Rubin, was also in Australia during the photoshoot. In my interview with him he recalled how he got the job of working with Cash and Andy Earl, "For the first record release I wanted to feature John looking strong, looking real, no make up, no hairstyles, like a man that should be carved on Mount Rushmore, a flawed but true American. Unfortunately John was on a tour of Australia and New Zealand when we needed to photograph him and I wanted an American landscape. I called a photographer friend in England, Andy Earl, and asked him if he would fly down to Oz with me to shoot John. Of course he was thrilled." He continued, "John's aura was so powerful the dogs just came to him, with just a simple beckon they came from 200 feet away. We lucked out finding corn fields reminiscent of a Depeche Mode album cover I'd done ten years earlier and lonely railway tracks. We shot the photos within a forty-minute session."

Atkins also told me about how, with Rubin, they decided they needed to re-launch Johnny Cash. "The first thing that we decided with re-launching John was that we had to create the perception that he had always stayed true to this outsider 'man in black' image. I wanted people to forget anything about John's career after his prison shows. This to me would give the impression that he had never sold out or commercialized himself. We decided that any visuals relating to John or his image were to be always shot or filmed in black and white. I also suggested that we rename him on his album covers as simply CASH. This would leave people in no doubt that this was powerful new music."

Although it was Earl's image that made the front cover Atkins does get a credit on the album. One of his images, of John's hands, taken during the Viper Room concert is included.

Many of the photos, several previously unseen, taken by Andy Earl for the first album can be found in his coffee-table book, Johnny Cash - Photographs by Andy Earl.

American Recordings was a stark, serious collection and one which Cash was proud of. On it’s release Cash had this to say about the album. “I think I’m more proud of it than anything I’ve ever done done in my life. This is me. Whatever I’ve got to offer as an artist, it’s here.” Talking about the working relationship with Rubin he went on, “I don’t think I ever worked so well with a producer in my entire career. Rick came up with some songs that I thought were so far out of left field and such weird ideas for me to do… Now that we’ve done them, they feel so right.”

The album received rave reviews from the press. Rolling Stone in their 19 May 1994 edition, wrote, "Rick Rubin knew exactly the sort of album Johnny Cash needed to make. American Recordings is that album in spades: Cash, alone with an acoustic guitar, confronting traditional folk songs by the likes of Leonard Cohen, Glenn Danzig and Tom Waits with biblical intensity." They went on to say, "American Recordings is at once monumental and viscerally intimate, fiercely true to the legend of Johnny Cash and entirely contemporary. Not a feeling is flaunted, not a jot of sentimentality is permitted, but every quaver, every hesitation, every shift in volume, every catch in a line resonates like a private apocalypse."

In the UK, Q Magazine reviewed the album saying that, "Pairing Johnny Cash with Rick Rubin sounds like somebody's idea of a joke or nightmare. Instead it turns out to have been a move of pure inspiration. Rubin's involvement didn't go much beyond inviting one of the great and grizzled American voices around to his home, making sure he brought his guitar with him, and letting the tapes roll while Cash sang whatever he fancied. Shorn of all vanity and support, the results are, at times, almost too painfully intimate, like witnessing first-hand somebody putting their affairs in order before going to meet their maker. There simply won't be a braver or more honest record all year."

The album was the July 1994 'Spotlight' album in Country Music People and in their review they said, "You will never hear John more basic than here. The recordings sound little more than demos, but frankly, to have cut them any other way would have destroyed the brutal honesty that hallmarks the recordings. Don't expect to be entertained by American Recordings. It is a serious, often dark and menacing collection, frightfully stark, awesomely commanding and, in a sense, like scrutinising another man's soul, staring fascinated at his battle scars and almost eavesdropping on his confessions and prayers to himself and his maker,"

There were many more positive reviews... "A milestone work for this legendary singer." (Los Angeles Times), "…the alternative rock community has been buzzing about it for months." (Newsweek) and  "Never has the man in black produced a work of such brilliance as this one." (Billboard).

The album won a Grammy Award in the category ‘Best Contemporary Folk Album.’ “It was a very special Grammy, the one I got for that first Rick Rubin production,” said John.

It wasn’t long after the release of the album in April 1994 that ‘bootleg’ tapes and CDs appeared that included several outtakes from the sessions held in May. Tracks included Banks Of The Ohio, The Caretaker, One More Ride, Bad News and All God’s Children Ain’t Free.

The quality of this material meant that any of the tracks would have fitted comfortably on the album and one wonders how they managed to whittle down the hours worth of material to just seventeen tracks.

Photographer: Andy Earl

I am surprised, and to be honest very disappointed, that a thirtieth-anniversary edition has not been released with additional tracks along with comprehensive liner notes, photos and other memorabilia, all of which exists.

Today, albums receive deluxe editions, often with extra discs of material and hardbacked books. American Recordings could have received a similar treatment with extra CDs featuring outtakes, previously unreleased material and even the Viper Room concert on CD and Blu-Ray. I have a thirty-minute video of the concert so it does exist.

However, we do have this classic album which stands as one of Cash's greatest albums.