washerman's dog: Johnny Cash

Showing posts with label Johnny Cash. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

The Pusherman Prophet: Johnny Cash

One of my earliest musical memories was hearing Ring of Fire cracking out of my dad’s Rambler’s AM radio as we crossed the middle expanses of America in the early 60s. My dad took his religion seriously and still does. But he always had time for Johnny Cash. Several years later when we were back in India, he brought me a cassette of Johnny’s greatest hits from one of his foreign trips. I thrilled to hear the mariachi trumpets of Ring of Fire once again, but also got my first introduction to Cash’s basic repertoire: Five Feet High and Rising, Ira Hayes, I Walk the Line and Were You There When They Crucified My Lord and of course, Folsom Prison Blues.

That Johnny sang heaps of gospel songs, many that my dad recognized from his own poor, rural American childhood, was no doubt what attracted him to the Man in Black. As for me, sure, I liked the gospel songs too, but not as much as his clackety clack railway train guitar rhythm style or his out of this world bass voice. After, Ring of Fire, the only Johnny Cash song I knew was his duet with Bob Dylan, Girl From the North Country. The depths, both sonic and emotional, that Cash plumbs in that song are simply inspired.

Amazingly it was not till many years later that I began to understand what a true giant of American music Johnny Cash was. His songs were so simple, a sort of musical amalgam of Hemingway and Steinbeck. Johnny never left you in any doubt about the point of his song. Whether he was telling you about murdering for fun, and going crazy on cocaine or whether he was telling you how much he loved America yet couldn’t countenance the injustice America meted out to its natives, blacks or poor.

Kris Kristofferson wrote what is about the best and most beautiful summation of Cash in his song Pilgrim Chapter 33:

He's a poet, he's a picker--

He's a prophet, he's a pusher--

He's a pilgrim and a preacher, and a problem when he's stoned--

He's a walkin' contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction,

Takin' ev'ry wrong direction on his lonely way back home.

It is that walkin’ contradiction part of Johnny Cash that means more to me these days than even his voice. A man who was equally believable and compelling when he was giving the finger to society as when he was on his knees calling on the love of Jesus. Johnny Cash had a huge resurgence in popularity the last decade of this life. Since his death I think his peers and fans and the critics have realized just how deep and wide is the hole he has left in American music and society. Always one of the Greats when he was living, in his passing he has ascended to the level of one of the very Greatest.

I hope you enjoy this collection of Johnny Cash faves from Washerman’s Dog.

Track Listing:

01 Johnny Cash Show Intro And Theme

02 Five Feet High And Rising

03 Guess Things Happen That Way

04 Get Rhythm

05 One

06 Closing Medley: Folsom Prison Blues/I Walk The Line/Ring Of Fire/The Rebel Johnny Yuma

07 Were You There (When They Crucified My Lord)

08 Ragged Old Flag

09 Joshua Gone Barbados

10 One Piece At A Time [Album-Version]

11 Girl From the North Country (w Bob Dylan)

12 Have A Drink Of Water [Album Version]

13 The Man Comes Around

14 Jackson (With June Carter)

15 How Great Thou Art (Previously Unreleased)

16 Gospel Boogie (A Wonderful Time Up There)

17 We'll Meet Again

18 Over The Next Hill (We'll Be Home) [Album Version]

19 Hurt

20 Far Away Places

21 Big River [Demo]

22 There'll Be Peace In The Valley

23 Life's Railway To Heaven [Album Version]

24 Satisfied Mind

25 Folsom Prison Blues

26 Wide Open Road [Album Version]

27 Delia's Gone

28 The Old Account Was Settled Long Ago

29 Veteran's Day

30 Put The Sugar To Bed [Single Version]

31 When He Comes (w. Rosanne Cash)

32 I'm On Fire

33 I Walk The Line (w Bob Dylan)

34 Ring of Fire

35 Bird On A Wire

36 What On Earth (Will You Do For Heaven's Sake) [Album Version]

37 I Walk The Line [Early Demo]

38 Careless Love (w Bob Dylan)

39 Cocaine Blues

40 Highway Patrolman (Album Version)

41 Luther Played the Boogie

42 Long Black Veil

here

Friday, October 14, 2011

Double header: Johnny Cash and Bruce Springsteen

It’s a doubleheader tonight!

Johnny Cash released a record in 1983 which was in the shops for the same amount of time as the proverbial snowflake in Hell. The critics ignored it. Of course the radio stations, especially those specialising in country music, did the same. They were into blow-dried glossy candy music not real songs sung by a man of experience and depth.

Johnny Cash

Cash had had a rough decade. His glory days as the Man in Black and sanctified sinner of American music were well behind him. In the 1970’s times changed. Cool people turned away from country music. Even Clapton went middle of the road and soft. Raw country music had no market. Alt country, Americana and roots music were not even a twinkle in anyone’s eye.

Bruce Springsteen

In 1982 another guy named Bruce Springsteen made a dark ominous record called Nebraska. A deliberate attempt, it seemed at the time, to become as obscure and marginal as his hero Johnny Cash. No E Street Band, no drums, no sax no nothing. Just Bruce with fragile voice and acoustic guitar. The record became an instant classic hailed as a master stroke for its searing, paranoid, violent and yet somehow redemptive vision. When you’re hot you’re hot.

And when you’re not you’re not. Just ask Johnny Cash.

Cash had always championed young songwriters. Neil Young, Bob Dylan, and Joni Mitchell had all been invited to share the stage with Johnny on his hugely popular weekly television show in the late 1960s/early 1970s. While his country music peers were bemoaning the long-haired hippies Cash was publicly defending them and promoting their music.

So it should have come as no surprise that he covered two of Springsteen’s Nebraska songs on Johnny 99, his ill-fated 1983 record. He always had great taste. But even that didn’t get Cash visibility or respect in those bleak days of deep Reaganism. The record disappeared without a trace.

A few years later Cash joined forces with a few other country music rejects (Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson) to form a supergroup that played the sort of insipid musak Nashville and Madison Avenue demanded. After limping along that path for a few years he seemed to genuinely retire. Cash was no more.

Of course, he then hooked up with Rick Rubin to make a record in1994 that cracked out of nowhere like lightning on a summer’s day. The rest (5 American Recordings) is history. Cash was back, still singing the songs of young songwriters.

Johnny 99 is a truly wonderful record. The song selection is diverse and his singing is sure, solid and as powerful as his early work. Stand out tracks, beside the two Springsteen covers are Joshua Gone Barbados and the duet with his beloved June, Brand New Dance.

For your listening pleasure I post Johnny 99 and Nebraska. Two fine American recordings.

Track Listing:

Johnny 99

01 Highway Patrolman

02 That's The Truth

03 God Bless Robert E. Lee

04 New Cut Road

05 Johnny 99

06 Ballad Of The Ark

07 Joshua Gone Barbados

08 Girl From The Canyon

09 Brand New Dance (Album Version)

10 I'm Ragged But I'm Right (Album Version)

Listen here.

Track Listing:

Nebraska

01 Nebraska

02 Atlantic City

03 Mansion On The Hill

04 Johnny 99

05 Highway Patrolman

06 State Trooper

07 Used Cars

08 Open All Night

09 My Father's House

10 Reason To Believe

Listen here.

Friday, March 11, 2011

A Journey Up Highway 61: Memphis

The rolling hill country of northern Mississippi melts into the horizon as 61 Highway rumbles into Memphis, Tennessee. Grandly named by its founding fathers for the ancient river port of Old Kingdom Egypt, Memphis has taken after its namesake with gusto. A major inland port high above the banks of the Mississippi, Memphis by the early 20^th century was the largest lumber, cotton and mule (!) market in the world. In the days when it meant something, Memphis was one of the most important railway junctions in the United States and today Highway 61 turns into I-55 and runs up through Arkansas for a while before veering east. All this economic activity and accessibility meant that sharecroppers and vagabonds, hobos and hoods drifted into the city looking for work, anonymity and prospects that were brighter than those they were leaving behind.

As in New Orleans, it is a fool’s game to try to ‘encapsulate’ the musical culture of Memphis with any single description or label. All the genres of New Orleans are found here if in altered forms. The journey up through the bayous of Louisana, across the Delta and through the hills has changed the jazz and blues and into something at once more grittier and silkier in Memphis. Smooth uptown soul and funky r&b are this city’s greatest gifts to the world but they are by no means the only ones. Every form of American music has its champions and purveyors in Memphis. And no other city, possibly in the world, has seen so many influential recording studios/labels operating to shape popular music as in Memphis. Sun Studios recorded virtually the entire first generation of rock ‘n roll (Elvis, Jerry Lee, Johnny Cash, Howling Wolf, BB King, Carl Perkins, Ike Turner, and on and on). Stax, reinvented the blues and soul in the late 60s with the likes of Issac Hayes, Albert King, Irma Thomas and Booker T and the MGs (apologies to the myriad others who made great music in those hallowed walls). Over at Hi the sweet Willie Mitchell sound was being perfected by the angelic singing of Al Green and Ann Peebles.

How does one select just five ‘Memphis’ records? How do you cover all of this city’s musical bases? Don’t know. Certainly can’t be done in one simple blog post. So let this ultra thin sample simply be that aperitif that gets the juices flowing and moves you to spend many hours and days feasting on the rugged sounds of this bustling cultural petrie dish.

First up, the King himself. Elvis Presley returned to his hometown after a decade in Hollywood where his mighty Almighty-granted talents had been smothered by B-movie shlock. In January 1969 he went into American Recording Studios for ten days of recording. He was determined to reclaim his crown as the King of Rock ‘n roll and cleanse his soul of the syrup of his lightweight and sanitised soundtrack work of the past ten years. Elvis (not without some powerful persuasion to stay in Memphis to record rather than escaping up the pike to the familiar, yet more conservative Nashville) went on record the most powerful music of his career since his first Sun and RCA work of the mid 50s. Indeed, these sides were his first sessions in Memphis since he’d last recorded for Sam Phillips at Sun Studios in 1955.To use the vernacular, he burned the fucking house down.

Have a listen.

Track Listing:

1. Stranger in My Own Hometown

2. Power of My Love

3. Only the Strong Survive

4. Any Day Now

5. Suspicious Minds

6. Long Black Limosine

7. Wearin’ that Loved On Look

8. I’ll Hold You in My Heart

9. After Loving You

10. Rubberneckin’

11. I’m Movin On

12. Gentle on My Mind

13. True Love Travels on a Gravel Road

14. It Keeps Right on Hurtin’

15. You’ll Think of Me

16. Mama Like the Roses

17. Don’t Cry Daddy

18. In the Ghetto

19. The Fair is Moving On

20. Inherit the Wind

21. Kentucky Wind

22. Without Love

23. Who am I?

Listen here.

Elvis got his start in Sun Studios as did so many other giants of American music. Johnny Cash, the sharecropper’s boy from Arkansas turned up at Sam Phillips doorstep with a couple of friends and recorded some gospel songs as well as Cry, Cry, Cry. The rest, as they say, is History. Here is a collection of his Sun Studio hits. There are 28 of them. Nearly everyone is by now deeply embedded into every American’s subconscious. Raw, outlaw country. The real stuff.

Track Listing

1. Cry, Cry, Cry

2. Folsom Prison Blues

3. So Doggone Lonesome

4. I Walk the Line

5. Get Rhythm

6. There You Go

7. Train of Love

8. Next in Line

9. Don’t Make Me Go

10. Home of the Blues

11. Give My Love to Rose

12. Ballad of a Teenage Queen

13. Big River

14. Guess Things Happen That Way

15. Come in Stranger

16. The Ways of a Woman in Love

17. You’re the Nearest Thing to Heaven

18. Its Just About Time

19. Luther Played the Boogie

20. Thanks a lot

21. Katy Too

22. Goodbye Little Darlin’

23. Straight A’s in Love

24. I Love You Because

25. Mean Eyed Cat

26. Oh Lonesome Me

27. Rock Island Line

28. Down the Street to 301

Listen here.

Three Sun Studio musicians decided to branch out on their own and ended up setting up Hi Records. After a couple successful runs with mainly rockabilly and instrumental music a producer cum trumpet player named Willie Mitchell took control of the company and developed a sound that is one of the most distinctive of any recording label/studio. His first great success was the fabulous Ann Peebles best known for her hit Can’t Stand the Rain. Her smooth slinky style fitted perfectly with Mitchell’s preference for unison horn lines, organ/ guitar fills and snappy driving drumming. Her classic albums Straight From the Heart (1972) and Can’t Stand the Rain (1974) are offered here as evidence of the heights to which the highly refined Memphis soul sound could ascend.

Track Listing

1. Slipped, Tripped and Fell in Love

2. Trouble, Heartaches and Sadness

3. What You Laid on Me

4. How Strong is a Woman

5. Somebody’s On Your Case

6. I Feel Like Breaking Up Someone’s Home

7. I’ve Been There Before

8. I Pity the Fool

9. 99 Pounds

10. I Take What I want

11. I Can’t Stand the Rain

12. Do I Need You

13. Until You Came into My Life

14. (You Keep Me) Hanging On

15. Run, Run, Run

16. If We Can’t Trust Each Other

17. A Love Vibration

18. You Got to Feed the Fire

19. I’m Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down

20. One Way Street

Listen here.

Willie Mitchell and Hi Records best known artist was Al Green who dominated the R&B charts in the early 70s and has yet to be seriously challenged as the greatest southern soul singer America has ever produced. His 1972 masterpiece, I’m Still in Love With You is the place to start (but hopefully not end) an appreciation of this man’s amazing ability to squeeze air from his lungs. If there is a record more perfect in its pacing, its varied song selection (Green has always covered country music and his slow paced Pretty Woman gives Orbison’s classic a complete and absolutely believe make-over)and more sensual in its exposition of LOVE, then please contact me! I want to hear it.

Track Listing:

1. I’m Still In Love With You

2. I’m Glad You’re Mine

3. Love and Happiness

4. What a Wonderful Thing Love Is

5. Simply Beautiful

6. Oh Pretty Woman

7. For the Good Times

8. Look What You Done for Me

9. One of These Good Old Days

Listen here.

We can’t leave Memphis without a taste of the blues and I’ve selected Memphis Blood: The Sun Sessions by James Blood Ulmer. A jazz guitarist who made his reputation with the free jazz maestro Ornette Coleman, Ulmer’s 2001 interpretation of some of the blues’ most famous songs is full on. He has fun and lets it all hang out but keeps the blues feeling without allowing his fingers to run too far off into avant garde jazz land. A wonderful, powerful blues outing. And recorded at Sun Studios to boot!