Drive On: Johnny Cash’s American Recordings Turns 30
Looking back on the album that reintroduced the Man in Black
How’s this for pathetic: The first time I ever truly heard Johnny Cash was on U2’s “The Wanderer” the day Zooropa had been released.
I had spent my first 20 years of life with no real proper country music education, so it took me until 1993 to help me get right with the Man in Black. Less than a year later, Cash would be reintroduced to my generation in the form of his 81st studio LP, American Recordings. It was his first of several sessions he cut with hip-hop and heavy metal super producer Rick Rubin, a union that no doubt had the entire music world curious to what they were building in there.
What the two men created together is Cash at his most intimate, utilizing nothing more than an acoustic guitar and a microphone to craft these 13 songs. Two of them were cut before a small crowd at Johnny Depp’s Viper Room, including Jimmy Driftwood’s “Tennessee Stud” and “The Man Who Couldnt Cry,” originally written by Loudon Wainwright III. The rest of the tunes were recorded either in Rubin’s living room or Cash’s cabin in Hendersonville, TN, both of which surely elicited the sense of comfort, calm and quiet the duo needed to capture the essence of these performances.
“When performing, it doesn’t matte4 the brand, the color or the cost,” Cash wrote in the original liner notes for the album. “All that matters is that the guitar and I are one. I have to feel that sound of instrument comes out of me with the song, from inside, from the gut. And it doesn’t matter to me that I only know three or four chords. With the left fingers on the frets, the heel of my right hand hugging the body of the guitar, letting just my right thumb lead and drive the rhythm. Sometimes it’s magic, and I just believe that when it all comes together it’s the right way fir me to do it.”
Five of the songs on American Recordings were written by Cash himself, including stripped back renditions of two chestnuts from his catalog: opening track “Delia’s Gone,” from the 1962 album The Sound of Johnny Cash and “Oh, Bury Me Not,” from 1965’s Johnny Cash Sings the Ballads of the True West.
Other originals include “Drive On,” a harrowing meditation on the horrors of Vietnam, and “Like A Soldier,” in which a sinful man seeks forgiveness for his foibles. “Redemption” is another standout from the Cash songbook, where Johnny sings, “My old friend Lucifer came / Fought to keep me in chains / But I saw through the tricks / Of six-sixty-six.”
And with the exception of two covers in Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on a Wire” and Kris Kristofferson’s “Why Me Lord,” the rest of the songs on American Recordings were written for Cash by an unorthodox array of songwriters, including Nick Lowe (“The Beast in Me”), Tom Waits (“Down There By The Train”) and new labelmate Glenn Danzig, who penned the foreboding “Thirteen.”
“‘Thirteen’ was just my idea of Cash as a badass and cool and the Man in Black,” Danzig told Revolver Magazine in 2019.
“I went down and taught it to him. He loved the song. Rick has a tape of me and him doing the song together in his living room – because he recorded a lot of that Cash record in Rick’s living room. Cash was really cool because if he was in town, he would find out if I was in the studio and just come down to one of my sessions: ‘Hey, Glenn, what’s up?’”
American Recordings, released 30 years ago today, was met with rapturous acclaim from critics at the time. I think it might have been Anthony DeCurtis’s five-star review in Rolling Stone that convinced me to pick up the cassette at Media Play in Poughkeepsie shortly after its release date.
“American Recordings is at once monumental and viscerally intimate, fiercely true to the legend of Johnny Cash and entirely contemporary,” he wrote, and I heeded to his advice.
Very shortly after American Recordings hit my tape deck, I was quick to make up for lost time with the Johnny Cash oeuvre by picking up some of his Columbia Records classics. I started, naturally, with the Folsom Prison and San Quentin live albums, both of which I picked up on vinyl, and then began scooping up Legacy Recordings’ reissues from his catalog on CD. Orange Blossom Special remains a big fave in our house, and I’m still hoping for a proper remastered edition of his 1983 LP Johnny 99 to this day.
But my favorite still remains my first, as the original American Recordings album continues to offer dark solace in its earnest simplicity even 30 years after it first emerged.
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