Johnny Cash – American III: Solitary Man
It is a long-established romantic conceit of country music and its audience that the singer is a simple, unsophisticated soul untouched by modern urban catastrophe, who touches us by serving up American innocence on a platter.
Johnny Cash is not one of those.
He will lie to you as easily as he’ll tell you the truth; indeed, he’ll tell you, charmingly, that he’s lying to you. He will not hesitate to strike a pose, including the pose of The Honest, Simple Man. He has always connected, in his songs, with cowboys and prisoners and preachers and saints — largely through an application of imagination and art so convincing that half the time people mistake him for the characters he sings about. Kris Kristofferson famously alluded to these qualities, gently, in calling him “a walking contradiction, partly truth, partly fiction.”
The thing of it is, the important thing: Johnny Cash knows all of this to the roiling depths of his complicated country soul. From the beginning, 45 years ago, he told us that he walks the line — on purpose. For reasons that can be rescinded. Far from arriving from Dyess, Arkansas, experience-free, this country boy had already taught the weeping willow how to cry, or at least boasted he did, in one of the great lines in all of American tall tale invention. “My name…is Johnny Cash! Or whatever the hell else I say it is — and don’t you forget it!”
A telling moment in Cash’s life that we can see in public occurs on the recently reissued-on-DVD documentary Johnny Cash: The Man, His World, His Music, filmed in 1969-’70. Johnny and June are on their way to what will be the historic Live At San Quentin performance, and the new Mrs. Cash, looking for meaning in the surroundings, notes, “It doesn’t look like Folsom Prison, does it? But it gives you the same feeling.”
“It’s a prison,” Johnny responds. “And that’s all it is.”
No gussying up, ma’am; Cash knows what he knows, and he calls things by their real names. It is this quality of unmitigated, radical awareness, and the utterly of-a-piece integrity behind it, that has permanently endeared this man to both country and rock ‘n’ roll fans of the emotionally authentic.
But if he was so experienced young, we have to wonder, what harrowing stories will he have to tell us old?
After some 75 original albums, after an apparent near-death experience that had his audience believing the stories might be over, he’s walked back in with this new album, the third with Rick Rubin and American Recordings — and some answers to that question.
It’s a powerful disc. As with its predecessors, the key to its impact is in the reimagination — remaking of old songs and new, country songs and alternative rock songs, and even some new Cash compositions of love, god and murder — to make them Johnny’s right now, late in life, stirred and shaken. The result is to relate them to what he’d always been doing in the first place.
With the likes of Marty Stuart, Randy Scruggs and Norman Blake providing the picking, and Laura Cash’s expressive fiddle or Benmont Tench keyboards adding flow, the rough-but-freshly-vulnerable singing style of these sides is set off to maximum advantage. The sound strikes a fine balance between the relatively lavish production of the first two discs, and is arguably more consistent and workable than either. With the exception of the opening cut, a shockingly ravaged and frail take on Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down”, Cash’s way of delivering the songs is, if anything, invigorated in its impact by aging.
The approach works with a wide range of song choices — perhaps best of all with such chestnuts grabbed from ’round the corner as “Lucky Old Sun”, previously handled in versions from Broadway to bluegrass to Deadhead, but sweet and blunt from a rocking chair here, and the hundred-year-old “Nobody”, a devastating and warm-hearted strike against invisibility and being forgotten first offered up by another master of songster disguise, The Man In Blackface, Bert Williams. (Cash’s weary and knowing version is also reminiscent of his own gallows humor in “25 Minutes To Go” years back.)
The ironic (and touching) reinvigoration a mature reading can give a youngun’s song is nowhere more apparent than in Cash’s reading of “Would You Lay With Me (In A Field Of Stone)”. Hearing this 68-year-old man testing a possible love for being true before giving himself up to her is more convincing and somehow more “innocent” than the early teen Tanya Tucker-meets-David Allan Coe (the song’s author) version could have been. The song is nearly a nursery lullaby anyway, and here, it’s unforgettable.
Also deceptively twinkle-twinkle and nursery rhyme-like is the potent new Cash original “Field Of Diamonds” (sung sweetly with June Carter Cash and Sheryl Crow), which appears to be about facing the stars in heaven. Head-on.
In Cash’s credible hands, the title track, Neil Diamond’s “Solitary Man”, is exuberantly reinstated as a take-no-guff alt-country ballad, reminding us that its author was once capable of this, sans the overblown showbiz bluster.
Songs from the now-expected modern-rock arena fare well, but may strike some as more obvious, less daring choices for an “alternative label audience” than the older cover numbers. For example, Nick Cave’s affection for Cash’s music — and his debt to him — are well-established and well-known by now, so while the dramatic turnabout-is-fair-play version of “The Mercy Seat” works (Cash naturally has no problem casting himself as a death row inmate imagining Jesus), there’s also a sense that this dead-on look at truth and lies in the face of death won’t wear as well as that new and personal “Field Of Diamonds”.
In this vein, too, is Cash’s take on Will Oldham’s “I See A Darkness”, which you’d suspect might be equally unsurprising. But in its contemplative, confessional sort of way, with Oldham singing along, the tune surprises and sticks.
It’s been a long time since Cash has furnished many fine original compositions, but there are several here. In “Before My Time”, he finds common ground with those who came before him and sang of “blood on blood”, and of those who’ve come since, less common for old country hands. “Nothing’s changed except the names,” he tells us.
“Country Trash”, first recorded by Cash decades ago, is a cousin to both Dylan’s “Million Dollar Bash” and to old-timey sources that inspired it. If a bit of a throwaway, it’s also utterly charming and traditional.
The other original that stands out is “I’m Leaving Now”, which brings together, at last, Cash and his friend and fellow squirrelly rejuvenated ol’ guy Merle Haggard. The “finally, years later” on-screen matchups of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton in Limelight, or Daffy Duck and Donald Duck in Roger Rabbit, come to mind. It’s not a battle of the bad boys this time, but a comic dual jolt of feistiness “on the way out” — and it doesn’t sound like either of them are.
These haunted but lively, often-touching sides, along with that riveting, live and kicking cover of Springsteen’s “I’m On Fire” on the recent Bruce tribute Badlands, show Cash very ready to roll again. “Life and love go on,” he reports in his liner notes. He sings of blood, loss and heaven, in his own voice, in the voice of characters he creates.
Some may quibble that the selection of cover songs for this disc, given his two previous efforts for American, is inevitably less of a surprise the third time around. But with performances stripped right down, from a bag of tricks that was always a triumph of expression over range, this new collection is a Special Limited Cosmic Edition of Name That Tune. Wizened but wise, Johnny Cash looks you right in the eye and tells you, “I can sing your life in three notes.” And then he does.
And, of course — he knows it.