Album Review- Johnny Cash: American V1: Ain't No Grave

By Fiona Shepherd
The Scotsman
http://www.scotsman.com/
16 February 2010

JOHNNY CASH: AMERICAN VI: AIN'T NO GRAVE
****
LOST HIGHWAY, £13.99


THIS is your lot. Rick Rubin has absolutely, positively, definitely cleared out every last recording he made with the venerable Johnny Cash before his death in 2003. With the release of American VI: Ain't No Grave, the vault is now empty and he's out of here.

But these ten valedictory songs are far from barrel scrapings. Collectively, they last just a shade over half an hour and every second confirms, as if further confirmation were needed, that Cash was making some of his greatest music right up until he met his maker.

Rubin naturally deserves a portion of the credit. When he first started working with Cash in the 1990s, they were an unlikely pairing: the grand old man of country music and the hirsute alchemist behind the rock/rap crossover of the 1980s, who was as comfortable working with Run DMC as with Metallica. But this odd couple forged a very special relationship. Rubin sourced the songs, Cash put his stamp of ownership on them and Rubin simply captured the magic. There is no doubt that the music they made together revitalised Cash creatively and commercially in the twilight of his career. According to Rubin, it was the only thing that kept Cash going after the death of his beloved wife, June Carter.

Anyone who has dipped into any of the five preceding albums in the series knows the deal: here you will find sparse, stark, emotional, intimate renditions of songs from all over the musical map – most famously, a devastating interpretation of the Nine Inch Nails' track "Hurt" – delivered by one of the most fabulously evocative voices in the canon.

And so it is again on this final stage of the journey. American VI: Ain't No Grave is a companion piece to American V: A Hundred Highways, hewn from the same sessions in 2002 and 2003 and shot through with elegance, dignity, fragility, often exuding a hymnal quality. Mortality and the afterlife are prevalent themes; so is saying farewell.

There are no last-ditch stunt covers. Songs by Kris Kristofferson, Tom Paxton and Sheryl Crow are firmly in the Cash ballpark. The rest of the material comprises country and folk standards and one original written around the time of the recordings, which took place right up until Cash's death.

According to Rubin, Cash was calm and matter-of-fact about facing death – an impression borne out on the title track. "There ain't no grave can hold my body down," he testifies in a frail yet authoritative voice over a doomy arrangement of scraping, twanging guitar, tolling bells and an inexorable clanking beat, which contrasts with the upbeat faith of the lyric, written by the Pentecostal preacher brother, Claude Ely.

His own composition reprises the theme. "First Corinthians" is inspired by the Bible verse of 1 Corinthians 15:55 which asks: "Death, where is your victory?" From this, Cash spins a sweet and tender meditation about sailing to the other side and finding sanctuary.

Knowing with hindsight that Cash was about to make that journey adds an extra layer of sadness to many of the songs. He perfectly captures the plaintive soul-searching of Tom Paxton's "Can't Help But Wonder Where I'm Bound", tapping intuitively into the simple poetry of the lyrics. His version of Sheryl Crow's "Redemption Day" is mournful and elegiac, while its anti-war reflection on individual accountability is complemented by the peace anthem "Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream", a song which was sung as the Berlin Wall was being dismantled.

He leaves us with the wise words of a couple of country standards – Bob Nolan's "Cool Water", about temptation and deliverance, and the wonderful "A Satisfied Mind" with its evergreen counsel which the world's bankers would do well to heed: "How many times have you heard someone say, 'If I had his money I could do things my way', but little they know that it's so hard to find one rich man in ten with a satisfied mind". As for Johnny, he sounds sure that "when it comes my time, I'll leave this old world with a satisfied mind".

If you hate goodbyes, then this is maybe not the album for you. The Kris Kristofferson song "For The Good Times" is ostensibly about saying goodbye to a relationship, but Cash invests the opening line – "don't look so sad, I know it's over" – with such pathos that it feels like a heartbreaking reassurance to his listeners. When the end comes, it is with a soothing Polynesian twang. "Aloha Oe" was written by the Hawaiian queen Lili'uokalani. The title translates as "farewell to you", but the lyric crucially adds "until we meet again".

With Cash crooning in English and Hawaiian, it's a gorgeous, comforting way to sign off.

It's been a privilege, Mr Cash.



Pop Notes

Cashed Out

by Ben Greenman
The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/arts
March 1, 2010


There are several good things about “American VI: Ain’t No Grave” (American Recordings), the second posthumous release from Johnny Cash and the final page in Rick Rubin’s final-chapter reclamation project. The title song demonstrates admirable defiance in the face of death. Cash’s heartbreaking cover of Kris Kristofferson’s “For the Good Times” both recalls the passing of Cash’s wife, June Carter, and forecasts his own impending end. Cash is frail in voice, but strong in spirit. You couldn’t ask for a more dignified farewell.


Singer Johnny Cash is shown in producer Rick Rubin's Los Angeles studio in this 2002 publicity photo released to Reuters February 18, 2010.
REUTERS/Martyn Atkins/American Recordings/Handout

You could, however, ask for a more accurate one. This volume is a stark reminder of how the Rubin years have shifted our sense of Cash, and not for the better. Rubin’s Cash has become an indelible character, an aged seer given to stark pronouncements on faith, love, and mortality. But he is also a poor representative of all the other Johnny Cashes—the one who drove the Tennessee Two through the boom-chicka-boom Sun singles, the historian of American song, the sometimes goofy “Old Golden Throat,” the prison activist, the Man in Black, the Highwayman.

It’s that versatility that’s lost here; if the first few records in the series were more varied, later ones find Cash narrowed if not quite flattened. Accepting Rubin’s version of the man is like reducing Picasso to lickerish drawings of Jacqueline or Eliot to “Four Quartets.” Cash may now seem like a John Wayne figure, but he was closer in spirit to Robert Mitchum, always restless and always changing, and here each stark, lovely cover (Sheryl Crow’s “Redemption Day,” Tom Paxton’s “Can’t Help But Wonder Where I’m Bound”) begs for a “Dirty Old Egg-Sucking Dog” or “Put the Sugar to Bed.” Cash could always do solemnity, but he could also do comedy, character sketches, and cornpone philosophy. And he could do it in his own write: the Rubin reboot frames Cash primarily as an interpreter, but he was also a prolific songwriter. Here, the sole Cash original, “I Corinthians 15:55,” a gentle piece rooted in Scripture (“O, Death, where is thy sting?”), hits the same valedictory note as the rest of the collection. Rubin shouldn’t be blamed for leaving us with this Cash. But he shouldn’t be allowed to run away with the thing, either. Cash’s American period should go down in history as a triumph of record making and a cautionary tale about remaking image.


Johnny Cash album holds final works with Rick Rubin

By Greg Kot / Chicago Tribune
Monday, February 22, 2010

In the final decade of his life, Johnny Cash revived his career by collaborating with producer Rick Rubin on a series of recordings that yielded five studio albums and a box set — one of the great final chapters authored by any pop icon in the last half-century.


Photo by AP file

Now, more than six years after Cash’s death in 2003, 10 additional songs from those sessions have been collected on "American VI: Ain’t No Grave" (American Recordings/Lost Highway, 3 ½ stars). Skepticism would be in order, given that the legacies of artists from Elvis Presley to Tupac Shakur have been marred by countless ill-considered posthumous releases.

That is not the case with "VI." Cash was determined to record as much as possible soon after the love of his life, June Carter Cash, died in May 2003.

Over the next four months until his death in September, the singer hunkered down with Rubin at Cash’s home studio in Tennessee, working against time and his own declining health. Rubin helped make Cash relevant again in the ’90s by serving as a low-key cheerleader and facilitator; he helped pick the songs and the musicians for each of Cash’s "American" recordings. He recorded Cash in small-group settings, an approach that only enhanced the singer’s gravelly conviction.

On his last recordings, Cash wore his mortality like one of his black suits, with a comfortable dignity.

In the traditions he grew up with — country, gospel, blues — death was a subject that came up frequently, serious yet matter of fact. It cloaked Cash’s first posthumous studio album, the 2006 release "American V: A Hundred Highways." That record was a difficult listen; his voice sounded like a shipwreck, echoing Billie Holiday’s audible deterioration on her penultimate album, "Lady in Satin," or the ravaged croon of jazz trumpeter Chet Baker in his final years.

Death remains the big subject on "VI," and Rubin magnifies the drama. The music casts long shadows, packed with foreboding.

But Cash’s voice isn’t particularly morbid or self-pitying. Instead, it’s tinged by longing — not for what he’s leaving behind, but for what’s next. Just as he explored new sounds until the day he died, Cash paints death not as an end, but as the start of his next road trip.

The title track that opens "Ain’t No Grave" was originally a gospel rave-up recorded by the Pentecostal preacher Claude Ely in 1953. In Cash’s version, a spectral organ hovers and a bell tolls, as if announcing the violent climax of a Sergio Leone Western, and the drums trudge like a dead man walking. It’s all meant to suggest that for Cash, the term "eternal rest" will be anything but.

In songs such as Tom Paxton’s "Where I’m Bound" and especially Sheryl Crow’s "Redemption Day," Cash amplifies his restlessness. The chug of Crow’s original is cut to a crawl, with earthly turmoil juxtaposed with what’s in store at "heaven’s gate.’ "Freedom ... freedom ... freedom," Cash mutters as the song fades, as if removing unseen shackles.

As the album winds down, Cash turns positively psychedelic: His music sounds like it was made in a semiconscious state, blurring the lines between the temporal and spiritual. He drifts into reveries such as Ed McCurdy’s protest classic "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream," transformed into a twinkling, narcotized lullaby that imagines a world without war. The old country hit "Cool Water" centers on a mirage, the narrator stumbling through the desert with a thirst that can’t be quenched. The sole original, Cash’s chamber-pop interpretation of the biblical passage "I Corinthians 15:55," finds him tracing a path through darkness toward the white light of redemption.

He bids farewell with a 19th century Hawaiian song, "Aloha Oe." Elvis Presley recorded a souped-up version of it for his 1961 movie "Blue Hawaii." But Cash just rides the gentle melody over a bottleneck guitar, as if he were swinging in a hammock with a bottle of rum, biding his time until the next great adventure comes along.

What a way to go.

___

Visit the Chicago Tribune on the Internet at http://www.chicagotribune.com/


Cash, delivered

By LARRY GETLEN
New York Post
http://www.nypost.com/
February 21, 2010

By 2003, Johnny Cash had already suffered a lifetime of pain and loss. As a boy, he’d witnessed the suffering of his brother Jack after a gruesome table-saw accident, and later saw his life and marriage whirl out of control due to drug addiction and infidelity. But the legendary Man in Black never felt deeper despair than when his soul mate, June Carter Cash, died that May.

In the hours following June’s death, Cash spoke to producer Rick Rubin, who had been recording him for 10 years. In discussing his agony, his message to Rubin was clear: Keep me working. Keep me recording and singing and making music. Because if I sit around dwelling on June’s death, I will die.

In those awful hours following June Carter Cash’s death, Rubin asked Cash if he thought he’d be able to find his faith.

The producer has compared that moment — Cash’s answer — to the flick of a switch. In a voice as willful and steady as if answering to the Lord himself, the singer declared his faith “unshakable.” From then on, the Man in Black, confined to a wheelchair and nearly devoid of sight, proceeded with a steady hand and a willful heart.

Cash’s vocal frailty, combined with his unmistakable optimism and faith, make his final album with Rubin, “American VI: Ain’t No Grave,” not just a collection of songs but a brilliant, heart-wrenching act of defiance and humanity.

“He had good days and bad days, mainly based on his level of physical pain and his ability to sing,” Rubin tells The Post. “But when he sang well, he felt purposeful. He seemed to feel good after feeling he made progress with his art.”

The album, out on Friday — which would have been Cash’s 78th birthday — hangs heavy with the weight of the troubadour’s personal troubles. The title track opens the collection with an ominous, finger-picked acoustic guitar and Cash’s weary baritone. When the beat kicks in, it’s courtesy of a wooden box with a chain inside.

“Gabriel don’t you blow your trumpet until you hear from me,” he sings. “There ain’t no grave can hold my body down.”

Rubin and Cash met backstage at a concert in 1992. As Cash told “Fresh Air” in 1997, Rubin invited the singer to sit in his living room with just a guitar and two microphones, and “sing to your heart’s content everything you ever wanted to record.”

Their first album, 1994’s “American Recordings,” took shape over three weeks. With songs by writers as diverse as Kris Kristofferson, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits and Nick Lowe, and a video starring Kate Moss, “American Recordings” won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album and opened a surprising new chapter in Cash’s storied career.

Over the next decade, the pair recorded anywhere from 30 to 80 songs each for five more albums, including some 60 tunes during the final year of Cash’s life. Never starting with a plan, they experimented with unexpected songs choices. For 1996’s “Unchained,” Rubin suggested Soundgarden’s “Rusty Cage,” but Cash was unable to get past singer Chris Cornell’s howling heavy metal vocals. But the famed producer eventually persuaded Cash to focus on the lyrics, and his version dripped with a whiskey-soaked, hard-driving brand of countrified, don’t-tread-on-me attitude.

It was during the recording of this album that Cash began feeling dizzy, or would sometimes be too tired to work. Thus began the battle with diabetes that would lead to his death just four months after June.

“Faith made him strong. It was inspiring,” says Rubin. “We were friends and I loved him. It’s sad to see this chapter close, but it feels good to know the music lives on.”



Johnny Cash sings one more time, from the "Grave"

By Dean Goodman
Reuters
Thu Feb 18, 5:50 pm ET

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – When producer Rick Rubin awkwardly describes Johnny Cash's latest album as "otherworldly," he's not kidding.

The country titan has been dead for almost seven years, and Rubin's American Recordings label will mark the 78th anniversary of Cash's birth on Friday next week by releasing a second posthumous album of new material.

"American VI: Ain't No Grave" is the sixth and final installment in a series of acoustic-oriented albums that sparked one of the unlikeliest comebacks in living memory.

Rubin, the hirsute tastemaker who worked with speed-metal band Slayer and rap trio the Beastie Boys, rescued Cash from a creative and commercial slump in 1993. Together they pored over hundreds of spirituals, folk tunes and challenging rock material by Soundgarden and Nine Inch Nails.

Cash, suffering from a range of ailments, instantly became the darling of hipster rockers who reveled in his well-deserved outlaw image. The pop-leaning country music establishment, meanwhile, looked down on his critical success. The albums were not huge sellers, but yielded a total of six Grammys,

The new album comes from the same sessions as "American V: A Hundred Highways," which was released in 2006 and became Cash's first pop chart-topper in 37 years. They were recorded at Cash's lakeside house near Nashville right up until his death in September 2003, aged 71.

"PHOENIX RISING FROM THE ASHES"

"I feel like 'V' is a little more depressing or a little more about death, and 'VI' seems to be more of a phoenix rising from the ashes," Rubin told Reuters in a recent interview.

"After having not listened to this material for a long time, and hearing it fresh and hearing his voice and his commanding presence and knowing that people haven't heard this material before, it does seem like a voice coming from another place. I don't know if I'm explaining it well! It feels otherworldly."

Rubin held back the release of "VI" so that it would not have to compete with all the Cash reissues in the marketplace.

The new album features the Cash original "1 Corinthians: 15:55," whose opening lines are derived from the titular bible verse: "Oh death, where is thy sting? Oh grave, where is thy victory?"

Knowing that Cash was physically enfeebled if still mentally agile in his last months, it's tempting to read deathly premonitions into the songs -- even if they do not exist. Like the title of "I Don't Hurt Anymore," or the line "Life goes on and this whole world will keep turning" in Kris Kristofferson's "For the Good Times."

Both of those were chosen by Cash, while Rubin suggested to him the title track, a traditional field holler piece. Other tunes include Sheryl Crow's "Redemption Day."

Crow said Cash frequently called her on the phone to gain insights into the lyrics, an experience she described as one of the greatest of her life.

"If he was going to sing a song, it was going to be a part of his molecular makeup," she told Reuters. "He was going to deliver it as if he wrote it. The questions that he asked and his concern for whether I would like what he was doing, it was just really humbling."

While Cash's recordings with Rubin achieved glowing praise at the time, there has been some contrarian grumbling recently. Bob Dylan last year told Rolling Stone the series was "notorious low-grade stuff."

"Interesting," said Rubin, who is nominally Dylan's boss as co-chairman of Columbia Records. "I had not seen that. Wow, interesting!"

The albums also depicted Cash in a Gothic, dark fashion, perhaps most notably with his grim remake of Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt" and the accompanying Grammy-winning video. Cash's friends said this was not a true representation of his fun personality.

Rubin pleads guilty as charged, saying he wanted to perpetuate Cash's image as the stern "Man in Black" who saves mankind, rather than as the goofball behind "A Boy Named Sue" and "Everybody Loves a Nut."

"I really thought of him more as a mythological figure than as the flesh-and-blood funny guy," Rubin said.

A new image for fans to consider is the one on the cover: a boyhood photo of a smiling Cash, years before Sun Records owner Sam Phillips first called him Johnny.

"I feel like this album is a rebirth in some ways because I don't think anyone's expecting a great new Johnny Cash record at this point," Rubin said. "But to see that image, it just seems like a great bookend for his career. It's like an end and a new beginning."

(Editing by Jill Serjeant)