I'm hoping, of course, that some of you have read some of my long, long interview with legendary producer Bob Johnston ("A Boy Named Sue," November 30, 2007). There is now posted a working discography ("Bob Johnston Discography," December 7, 2007) of all the albums he produced (neither complete nor including singles). This is a list chock-full of so many masterpieces, including Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, John Wesley Harding, and Nashville Skyline; Simon & Garfunkel's Bookends, Sounds of Silence, and Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme; Leonard Cohen's Songs From a Room and Songs of Love and Hate; Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison and Johnny Cash at San Quentin; Lindisfarne's Fog on the Tyne; and the first four Michael Murphey albums; he also co-produced Willie Nelson's Who'll Buy My Memories.
A recording of Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash together, performing maybe 15 songs, recorded in a Nashville studio in February 1969, is one of the acknowledged great unreleased albums produced by Bob Johnston. I've been listening to a bootleg of these recordings and thinking about them a lot lately. In every way, the recording is quintessential Johnston. It features his strengths as a producer: It is clear everyone is having a great time; the performances are unique, laid-back, and flowing; the playing is crisp; and the sound is very good, with a micing system that captures it all. The other ways in which it is so typically Bob Johnston are not as meritorious. Way too often, writers buy Johnston's crap: that he really didn't do much on many of his albums but just let the artists go off on their own. They also tend to underestimate the quality of his recordings. All too often, these Dylan/Cash recordings are regarded as being more important historically than musically. This week, I'm writing about it again because I've been listening to it over and over. Sure, crucial to the enjoyment is the awareness that two of the great musical talents of the past half-century are sharing an intimate performance. Recently, however, playing it over and over, I've come to fully love it as music.
The two voices together almost always work; sometimes they know the same version, and sometimes they veer away from each other while also cleaving closely. The more I listen, the more its charms grow on me, while the problems fade. Some songs sound as if they were rehearsed for a long time; others sound as though the two musicians had never met. "Careless Love" wanders down many a pretty country road on its leisurely journey to wherever it is going. The rich, dark contradictions of "You Are My Sunshine" are clearer in the Dylan/Cash version than in many others. In the best tradition of Daniel Johnston, they cover "Good Ol' Mountain Dew." Cash does a hymn at Dylan's suggestion, though it becomes very obvious very quickly that Dylan remembers little of the song.
I'm not sure who plays in the band. I'm virtually certain it's Carl Perkins on guitar, both because of the sound and because Cash calls out his name any number of times. Although when I asked Johnston about this, he couldn't remember.
Any story involving either Bob Dylan or Johnny Cash comes in so many versions that it's nearly impossible to separate myth from reality. Adding them together just generates more fog while adding no clarity. Cash (accompanied by June Carter Cash) first met Dylan (accompanied by Joan Baez) in the early Sixties at the Newport Folk Festival. Listening to Johnston's story, one gets the impression that Cash was a bit in awe of Dylan, especially as a writer. Although they clearly perform as equals, the recording sounds very much as though Dylan is acquiescing to Cash. This could all be in my head, but it sure does sound like Dylan is working at it a lot more than Cash – which detracts not a whit from Cash's performance.
The great Richie Unterberger, in the All Music Guide (www.allmusic.com), observes that, "the pair run through easygoing, rockabilly-tinged versions of Dylan songs, Cash songs, old Sun rockabilly chestnuts ('That's All Right Mama' and 'Matchbox'), and a bit of country gospel. Cash, in fact, dominates the proceedings: He sings lead more often, and the mere two Dylan tunes ('Girl from the North Country' and 'One Too Many Mornings') are outweighed by a larger heaping of Cash classics ('Big River,' 'I Walk the Line,' 'I Still Miss Someone,' 'Ring of Fire,' 'Guess Things Happen That Way'). The CD might even appeal more to Cash fans than Dylan ones, especially as Dylan's singing is not up to scratch: his timing is off, he often sings on one note, and he even needs to be occasionally cued by Johnny for the right words."
Unterberger underestimates the charms of this record. Dylan's often in fine voice, trying out different tones and even yodeling.
These recordings came about, as Bob Johnston recalls, when he was producing both Cash and Dylan: "Dylan and Cash together was quite remarkable. Once while Dylan was in town, I remember I was recording Dylan, I think, in the daytime, and Cash at night, if I'm not mistaken. Cash came in or Dylan came in to ask me, 'What are you doing?'
"'What are you doing?' was my response.
"'Recording,' they said.
"'Well, I am, too.' I went back to work. I think they went to get something to eat. They asked if I wanted to come. 'No, I'm going to stay here,' I answered.
"While they were gone, I put lights in the studio, made it look like a damn nightclub. Set up all the microphones out there, guitars, all of that. When they came back, they looked out there and saw it. Looked at me and never said a word. They went outside into the studio, sat down, and we started recording songs. And, after about 2 hours and 30 songs later, I said, 'Well, what about this?'
"'We're finished,' Dylan said.
"CBS never would release it, because they said it wasn't exactly together. Cash said, 'Well, look at my 45,' and Dylan said, 'I've got my 45,' and he said they've got to say the same words. It's the most fucking amazing, asinine thing I've ever heard in my life. But one day, there are 30 or 32 sides there. They'll release it, and when it does, it'll be a triple platinum album like it was supposed to have been."
When one listens, it is apparent why these tracks were not released by Columbia at the time. Even Cash said, "The songs had no starting place and no stopping; we'd get into them and everyone would join in. ... Bob and I did 'Careless Love,' whatever we might know the words to. ... There's a song or two that's good enough to put out, but there's not an album there." What doesn't make sense is that they have never been released.
In a previous "Page Two" about this recording, I wrote, "Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan cut in Nashville a couple of decades back. Rather than a focused recording session, this was more in the vein of sitting around, playing together, and enjoying each other while producer Bob Johnston ran tape. Although they recorded more than 30 cuts, only 'Girl From the North Country' has ever escaped from the vaults. Columbia decided that the recordings were too crude and unprofessional to release.
"The very awkwardness of this casual, friendly, back-porch type of performance is a significant part of what makes it so enjoyable. Compared to the professional composition and cohesive presentation of most serious artists' music as released by major labels, the relaxed sloppiness found here is both foreign and friendly. The sheer fun the two are having playing together is intoxicating. They both forget lyrics (though Cash seems to need to cue Dylan more than vice versa) and, as they are playing, discuss who should take the first verse. They do an overly long version of 'Careless Love' that could have kept on keeping on even longer without raising any complaints from me. The song is traditional, with authorship of various versions claimed by everyone from W.C. Handy, Lonnie Johnson, and Bessie Smith to Fats Domino, Dock Boggs, and Janis Joplin. One of the lines refers to a gun that Cash identifies first as a .44 caliber, then Dylan labels it a .38, and then a .45. By the end of the song, Cash has identified it as a .30-ought-6 (a rifle rather than a pistol). At one point, however, in order to hit a rhyme, Cash calls it a .41 (which doesn't exist). He's so pleased with this that, just a bit later, he again refers to a .41, and you can hear the absolute delight at this silliness in his voice.
"Especially noticeable throughout the recordings is just how sweet and lovely Dylan's singing and harmonies with Cash are. Someone once asked Bob Johnston how much of an influence Cash had on Dylan's singing. In particular, they pointed to Nashville Skyline, the first Dylan album recorded in Nashville that was clearly rooted in traditional country. Dylan had already recorded Blonde on Blonde and John Wesley Harding with Johnston in Nashville, but it's hard to think of the former as rooted – it's so of American music while being completely transcendent – and the second is so generously eccentric. Johnston pointed out how Dylan was always experimenting and had significantly changed his vocal style and tone on each of four albums in a row: Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, John Wesley Harding, and Nashville Skyline. Still, Dylan's singing on the bootleg offers a fullness and clarity of tone that complements Cash's singing while strongly reminding one of Nashville Skyline."
Everything I liked about this recording the first times I listened to it, I've come to grow even fonder of with each repeated play. The line in bold up above is evidence of just how much damage lazy research can do to a piece. When I wrote that, I was not even really thinking about guns. Instead, I was trying to convey how sweet, funny, and human these recordings are. Most of the response to the piece was letters from gun experts assuring me that there is indeed a .41.
The very best music, for me at least, is genuine, created because it's absolutely necessary to the artist's life to create it. To create is to live; not to create is worse than death. I truly believe if Neil Young hadn't made it in the music business, he'd still be playing every night at some local bar.
In these times of lazy sarcasm and casual cynicism, too many regard enthusiasm and affections as bourgeois pabulum – the milky, meaningless cream of wheat of dominant ideology. Sincerity exposes one, leaving him or her vulnerable to being mocked. Passion insists on its own integrity, leaving little room for maneuvering socially. In these terms, if art doesn't offend, then it is empty. Displays of passion, humanistic joy, and blind love for anything leaves one embarrassed and vulnerable. Sentiment is the heroin of complacency. Even worse, one's peers might find that one lacks both the proper distance and contemptuous attitude toward sincerity so necessary to sneer at the world.
In the midst of the most cold-blooded nihilism being trumpeted, wherein hatred is prized and vicious dismissal of culture is the critical currency, two men sat down with their friends to make some music. Their affection for each other, as well as their passion for the music, allows them the purity of the naive while establishing their greatness as artists. This was music being made for the love of making music. If you can find these recordings, you'll discover the driving force was not to make money or score more chart hits; it was to make music, just as they had always done, that was of and about life.
