As Cash headed back on the road for most of August, Rubin brought in some musicians to explore dressing up some of the tracks—guitarist Mike Campbell from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and bassist Flea and drummer Chad Smith, both from the Chili Peppers. To experiment further, he later went through the songs again with the Red Devils, a blues-rock band that was generating a lot of excitement on the L.A. club scene.
One song Cash recorded during this period was “Devil’s Right Hand” by an acclaimed young singer-songwriter in Cash’s own maverick country-rock tradition. Steve Earle was one of scores of musicians who would name Cash’s TV show as a major influence. “That show was my main cultural touchstone,” Earle says. “Where else could I see Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and Derek and the Dominos alongside Roger Miller and Merle Haggard? The show made me feel that having long hair and wearing cowboy boots in Texas wasn’t so weird after all.” (When Earle spent two months in jail for cocaine and weapons possession in 1994, he remembers fondly that Cash was one of only three musicians who wrote him a note. The others were Emmylou Harris and Waylon Jennings.)
After weeks of experimenting, Rubin decided that less was more; he favored the intimacy of the solo recordings. In fact, he would use those living room vocals for the record. “I didn’t want anything to distract from Johnny,” Rubin recalls. “I wanted his presence to fill the record.” With the format resolved, Rubin felt it was time for the next step. He wanted Cash to perform the songs live, so he booked the hip Viper Room on the Sunset Strip for the night of December 3.
He chose the Viper Room, which was partly owned by Johnny Depp, because it was small; Cash’s appearance there would be more of an exclusive event than if he had played one of the bigger mainstream clubs, such as the Troubadour or the Roxy. Mainly, however, Rubin had Cash’s needs more in mind than the audience’s. He wanted to introduce John to the role of facing an audience alone.
“That was an enormous leap—to go from the safety onstage or in the studio of singing with a band behind you to just facing an audience with your own guitar,” Rubin says. “Once we decided that we were going to make it a solo acoustic album, I noticed a change in him when he was just singing in my living room. Before, he had been relaxed and singing in a very personal, intimate way. But suddenly he changed. He began performing the songs, and it wasn’t the same.
“What I was looking for was a direct transmission from his heart, and we had that at first. There was even a point—and we have it on tape—where I am saying to him between songs, ‘Can we try to do it a little more personal?’ and he understood, because he says to himself, ‘Get off the stage, Cash.’”
For Rubin, the Viper Room show was part of the process of getting Cash comfortable singing the songs by himself. He figured once Cash got over the anxiety of singing in front of an audience—and he was terrified that night—it would be easier for him to sing when he returned to the informality of Rubin’s living room.
Cash had his usual second thoughts about the whole approach. To try the solo role on someone whose judgment he trusted, he sang several of the songs he was planning to sing at the Viper Room for Marty Stuart in Nashville. “I could tell he had done this for four or five other people, looking for [affirmation],” Stuart says. “I told him, ‘I can’t see nothing wrong with this; this is as pure as it gets. I think it resets country music’s clock. It absolutely takes it back to a new beginning, setting it up for the twenty-first century. In some way, it can parallel what the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers did at Bristol.’ I said, ‘Country music needs that, and in broader terms, American music could use it too.’”
At the Viper, where Cash was introduced by Depp, the tastemaker audience—including Sean Penn and members of the Chili Peppers—was enthralled. Rubin sensed a buzz starting even before Cash concluded his ninety-minute set with renditions of some of his early hits. “Cash was nervous, but the show was a triumph,” Petty recalls. “Johnny was so happy. He felt like he was starting to matter again.” (Depp was Cash’s first choice when asked who he would like to see portray him in any future movie.) To follow up quickly, Rubin took Cash back into his living room three more times that week to make the final series of recordings—and sure enough, Cash was looser. The Viper Room experience had made him more comfortable singing on his own. On the first night, Cash even played Rick another of his unrecorded songs, “Let the Train Whistle Blow,” a bittersweet farewell that combined warmth, independence, and bravado.
After those sessions, Rubin and Cash picked thirteen songs for the album, and Rubin then listened to all the various solo versions to pick the most evocative take on each song. Most of the final choices, as it turned out, dated back to the original living room sessions in May. Cash was pleased with the decision to make the album barebones. He told Rubin he had been thinking about a solo acoustic album for years; he even had a title, Late and Alone. Rubin preferred American Recordings. He felt it better fit Cash’s classic status in American popular music, and, of course, it was the title of Rubin’s record label. With the content settled during the early days of 1994, Rubin and his staff focused on marketing.
He got an unexpected assist when U2’s Zooropa became not only an international best-seller that stayed on the U.S. sales charts for forty weeks but also a huge critical success, thanks in part to “The Wanderer.”
Writing in Rolling Stone, Anthony DeCurtis couldn’t have given more glowing praise to the collaboration: “It’s a wildly audacious move that could so easily have proved a pathetic embarrassment—U2 overreaching for significance again—but it works brilliantly. Speak-singing with all the authority of an Old Testament prophet, Cash movingly serves as a link to a lost world of moral surety, literally replacing the various corrupted and confused personas Bono…had occupied in the course of the album. Cash’s ‘Wanderer’ is no less lost than the album’s other dead souls, but his yearning to be found and redeemed sets him apart.”
Cash didn’t know what to expect in the weeks before American Recordings was released in May 1994. He even mailed advance copies to a few people whose judgment he valued, asking the straightforward question “What do you think my fans will think of this?” He was encouraged by the responses. At the same time, an equally anxious Rubin was heartened when his marketing and publicity teams reported they were finding lots of interest in the project. He was overjoyed the day he got an early copy of Rolling Stone’s review of American Recordings.
The write-up wasn’t just a rave; it was a game changer in every sense for Cash and Rubin. Not only did the magazine give the album the coveted lead review space, but it was paired with a review of an album by another American musical landmark, Frank Sinatra. To make things even better, Anthony DeCurtis gave the Sinatra album high praise, calling it the “finest available glimpse of the singer onstage: easy, affable and in command,” but went on to say the Cash album was “an even more crowning achievement.”
He called the album at once “monumental and viscerally intimate, fiercely true to the legend of Johnny Cash and entirely contemporary.” And DeCurtis was just warming up. He maintained that Cash’s voice sounded better than it had in more than forty years, and his singing reflected “a control reminiscent of Hemingway’s writing. Not a feeling is flaunted, not a jot of sentimentality is permitted, but every quaver, every shift in volume, every catch in a line resonates like a private apocalypse.”
Cash read the review time and again, trying to convince himself that his years in musical exile were over. It was, to his knowledge, the first time in two decades that Rolling Stone had even bothered to review one of his albums. Over the next few weeks, he read scores of raves in other publications as well. “It’s been ages since anyone of Cash’s stature bared himself so completely—and successfully—as the Man in Black does on his first album for Rick Rubin’s record label,” Randy Lewis wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “With just his own unmistakably craggy voice and acoustic-guitar accompaniment, Cash has collected 13 songs that peer into the dark corners of the
American soul. In that respect, it’s akin to Clint Eastwood’s ‘Unforgiven,’ both in its valedictory, folklore-rich tone and in its wealth of characters who embody good and evil in varying proportions. A milestone work for this legendary singer.”
Though he wanted desperately for all his albums and artists to succeed, Rubin had developed a special fondness for Cash, and he dearly wanted him to regain the respect and attention he deserved. He also felt a responsibility: he had led Cash into this new, unknown territory.
To spread the word, Cash did a show and delivered the keynote address at the annual South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas, a prestigious showcase for vital new music. Knowing the importance of video in reaching record buyers, Rubin showcased Cash in a stark black-and-white video of “Delia’s Gone” in which Cash tossed dirt over the murdered Delia’s face as she lay in her open grave. MTV objected to some of the imagery in the video, which was directed by Anton Corbin, the Dutch photographer who had shot U2’s Joshua Tree album cover. Corbin defended his work, calling the video’s message “anti-violence.”
The resulting controversy delighted Rubin, who wanted to position Cash on the cutting edge of contemporary music. “From the beginning of rock ’n’ roll there’s always been a stark figure that never really fits,” he told Rolling Stone. “He’s still the quintessential outsider. In the hip-hop world you see all these bad boy artists who are juggling being on MTV and running from the law. Johnny was the originator of that.”
To further emphasize that maverick image, Rubin selected a photo for the album cover that showed a menacing Cash, wearing a full-length preacher’s coat and standing in the wilderness holding onto his guitar case with two dogs at his side. It was an image reminiscent of Robert Mitchum in the role of the crazed preacher in the film The Night of the Hunter. “They did the photo shoot while Johnny was on tour in Australia, and the idea was just to show him with his guitar,” Rubin says. “This stark image fit the mood of the album, but the whole thing about the dogs was an accident. John thought it was great—the fact that one was black and one was white. To him, it was the idea of sin and redemption.”
By most standards, the album was only a modest success. It’s easy to see why the country music establishment—including country radio—would turn a cold shoulder. Here was an “outsider,” Rick Rubin, stepping in and tampering with a Nashville artist. Plus, they maintained, this wasn’t even a country record. Cash was doing songs by a heavy-metal rocker and Tom Waits, for goodness’ sake. And finally, country radio had already turned Cash out to pasture; there was no reason to backtrack now.
Even so, American Recordings made it to the middle of the country charts, likely propelled by old fans intrigued by all the media praise. But the real audience for the album proved to be the young, adventurous wing of the rock ’n’ roll market. The album sold nearly 80,000 copies in its first two months—a figure the New York Times called disappointing. But it was a victory for Rubin and Cash. The CD sold more copies than any Cash album since Man in Black in 1971. By the end of the year, the figure had reached nearly 150,000.
More important to Rubin, the album’s impact on critics and tastemakers laid a foundation. “I felt as if we were starting from scratch and introducing a new recording artist,” Rubin says. “By those standards, the album was a huge success.”
For Cash, making music was once again a consuming force in his life. He was no longer, as he had for years, leaving everything to chance. He felt relevant.
“I was worried that I had blown everything by not treating my music seriously enough for all those years,” Cash told me. “I was even starting to think that no one would care about it after I was gone. But Rick made me think I might have a legacy after all…and even add to it. I vowed not to let it slip away again.”
Cash’s daughter Rosanne looked at the new relationship in even more dramatic terms. “Rick came along at exactly the right time,” she says. “Before Rick, Dad was depressed, discouraged. It was a powerful thing that happened between them, and Dad was completely revitalized and back to his old enthusiastic self. I think Rick saved his life at that moment. Well, maybe ‘saved his life’ is too strong, but…maybe not.”
Chapter 33
The End of the Concert Trail and Struggling with Physical Pain
I
CASH’S CREATIVE RESURGENCE with American Recordings should have led to a victory lap—and a few shows served as just that, starting with an invitation-only industry audience at Fez Café, an intimate music club in New York City. It was three days before the release of the album in April, but the buzz was already strong. Cash was as nervous as his friend Mark Stielper had ever seen him. “He thought they would laugh at him,” says Stielper. “Instead, he was a god…and he was astonished.”
After years on the family circuit, Cash was self-conscious about playing to young rock audiences. “I feel a little pressure with this new surge, this new promotion,” he told me at the time. “It’s like ‘the old rebel is back,’ and what do I have to rebel about? There’s nothing right now, and it makes me feel like I’m playing a role, but that’s what show business is about. The important thing is I enjoy being out there again.”
To relate better to this new audience, Cash spent time familiarizing himself with some of the best young bands, especially Nirvana and its gifted leader Kurt Cobain, who spoke about youthful insecurities with such sensitivity and insight that he was widely hailed as the John Lennon of his generation. Cash identified strongly with the young man from Seattle, not just his struggle with drugs and early poverty, but also the fact that Cobain felt he didn’t deserve the adoration of fans around the world.
This was on Cash’s mind in the days after Cobain killed himself on April 5. “I can understand why Cobain felt that way, but he wasn’t justified in thinking he was a fraud,” Cash told me. “He was successful because he was speaking honestly from his gut, but we all worry about whether we deserve the attention. In the early years, I felt guilty about it all. I had come from this real poor background and I didn’t feel like I deserved all this money and attention. I kept thinking, ‘I’m not what they think I am. I don’t have all the answers. I’m not magic.’ But then you grow with it and you learn that it really doesn’t matter what other people think of you. You’re just one human being, and you’re doing the best you can. But it’s not easy. It almost destroyed me, too.”
The high point of Cash’s reconnection with the adventurous wing of the young rock world came when he appeared before more than fifty thousand fans on June 26 at one of England’s most popular outdoor festivals, Glastonbury. The safe thing would have been for him to perform on one of the festival’s secondary stages, but he agreed to test himself on the main stage. Sharing the bill with such established stars as Peter Gabriel and such upcoming ones as Radiohead and Rage Against the Machine, Cash—backed this time by his band, including John Carter on rhythm guitar—was again embraced by the audience during a set with a solo stint featuring four songs from the new album, including “Delia’s Gone” and “Let the Train Whistle Blow.”
Interviewed backstage for a TV broadcast, Cash was asked, “How does it feel to be cool again?”
Cash chuckled and acknowledged it felt great.
The audience looked so young to him when he walked onstage, he told the interviewer, he thought of saying, “Hello, grandchildren,” but the young faces mainly reminded him of the days when he and Elvis did shows together. “Feels like déjà vu,” he said. “No time has passed; it feels like that sometimes, no time has passed.”
British critics were as enthusiastic over the “new” Johnny Cash as their U.S. counterparts. Writing in New Musical Express, England’s most influential music weekly, Paul Moody declared, “Here’s a man so capable of putting on a show that we simply fall into the palm of his hand and let him take control…it’s a legend come to life before our eyes.” The rival Melody Maker agreed: Cash was “absolutely brilliant.”
Rubin and Lou Robin had hoped
to follow Glastonbury with a main stage appearance two months later in the States before hundreds of thousands of fans at the twenty-fifth-anniversary salute to the granddaddy of all rock festivals, Woodstock. Other main stage acts ranged from Bob Dylan to one of the decade’s most dynamic young bands, Nine Inch Nails, featuring Trent Reznor, a favorite of Rubin’s. But Robin backed off when Woodstock organizers offered Cash only a spot on a secondary stage at the upstate New York affair. This disappointment was largely behind the scenes. To the public, Johnny Cash was back in a big way.
It was difficult for Cash to bounce back and forth between the acclaimed, spirit-raising gigs and the regular old concert trail, where a few young fans would show up, drawn by the new album, but most just wanted the old favorites. The mood of those shows was backward-looking, and Cash’s performances were inconsistent.
Rubin pushed strongly for Cash to invest in his future by devoting more time to shows with the cutting-edge sensibilities of American Recordings, but the traditional dates were more lucrative, and June too preferred that approach. There was also resistance from musicians in the Cash camp to anything associated with Rubin because he hadn’t used them on the recordings.
“I could tell from day one that Rick Rubin didn’t like me or the Johnny Cash band,” W. S. Holland says. “I don’t think any diehard Johnny Cash fans would pick those [Rubin albums] over the things he did earlier.” Others in the entourage felt that Rubin must dislike June Carter, because she didn’t appear on the records or onstage at the Viper Room or other club dates.
While Rubin did want his own musicians who would be comfortable moving from country to supercharged rock, he says the situation with June “was not about excluding her, but about playing to his [Cash’s] strength.”
Johnny Cash: The Life Page 60
