Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, July 12, 1994 TAG: 9408030002
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY CAMPBELL ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Now Johnny Cash has become, at 62, a senior musician discovered by a new generation, a success story like Tony Bennett's, whose manager-son took him to MTV.
Neither one of them is doing music that's ``in.'' What the young seem to respond to is a resilient man who has lived a life in show business and not become slick or jaded or lost his honesty.
Tony Bennett is fresh and enthusiastic, delighted when he's appreciated, still a little awkward on stage. Johnny Cash, who has pills and alcohol in his past, looks worn. Not reveling in that history nor hiding it, he sometimes sings about salvation. Kids see him as anti-establishment, an outsider and loner. They call him cool.
``Partly they're popular because of the broadening of the definition of rock 'n' roll, so that rock has come to once again embrace its country roots. What Tony does, standard pop jazz, has become accepted again by a larger and younger audience,'' says rock observer Ben Fong-Torres.
``They're in the right place at the right time.''
Asked why he thinks his new record, ``American Songs,'' is getting so much attention, Cash replies, ``It's the biggest hype I ever saw.''
Last December, Rick Rubin, president of American Recordings, put Cash in the intimate Viper Room in Los Angeles and made it an important, hard-to-get invitation. The room filled with celebrities, writers and industry biggies. It was scary, Cash says. But reactions were glowing.
In the spring, Rubin set a similar one-night gig at tiny Fez here. Despite laryngitis, Cash sang with estimable dignity and authority.
At a music conference in Austin, Texas, where 300 up-and-coming bands vie to be heard and everybody tries to divine the next hip thing, Rubin also made an event of putting Cash in the punk club Emo's, attendance via coveted passes or hours standing in line. Entertainment Weekly wrote, ``Best Performance: Hands down, Johnny Cash.''
One reviewer of the record described ``... the beauty of this stark voice, wily and weathered as an ancient oak'' but Cash quotes a reviewer who said his voice sounded like it was rumbling through a tunnel filled with coal smoke.
And what about those loyal country music followers whose thrill begins when the man in black intones, ``Hello ... I'm Johnny Cash''? ``I'm not sure if my old fans are going to buy this album or not,'' he says. ``It remains to be seen.''
Tired of overproduction, Cash had long wanted to make a solo album. ``I was just thrilled to death to get to do it,'' he says. ``I didn't expect anything.
``I don't think Rick thought this was going to be solo from the beginning. After a few sessions in his living room we went into a studio with musicians. We compared them later and liked the solo things a lot better.
``Rick said this might be the kind of thing young people might listen to from me. I didn't believe it. Now that it's happening a little bit I'm really enjoying it.
``I love to play those places where young people get so excited. I throw their energy back at them when my rhythm section joins me - `Folsom Prison Blues,' `Ring of Fire,' `I Walk the Line.'''
Cash recorded ``American Songs'' in Rubin's living room in Beverly Hills and in his cabin.
``Across from my house in Hendersonville, Tenn., I have 150 acres, half woods, half pasture,'' Cash says. ``I built this cabin in 1979. It's one of those pre-cut cabins, of white pine logs. There's a sleeping loft. I put recording equipment in there when I started making this album.
```Cowboy's Prayer' -`Oh Bury Me Not' is the first and only cut. Some of them I did over, to get the right emotional feel. My mistakes and flat notes were secondary to the feeling and the emotion in the song. Some of them are pretty primitive. I guess that's what the album is all about. Primitive.
``I picked songs I liked. A lot of them are very heavy and a lot are very dark. There's not a lot of laughs. I only had to sing a verse of something like `Delia's Gone' and Rick was ready for it. Maybe I shed a little more blood in this album than the average folk and country album.
``Troubadours used to go through the countryside of England. At a farmhouse they might be told a tragic story about a death. Before they'd leave, they would write a song and sing it and leave that song with the family, to be handed down generation after generation. That's true folk music. That's my heritage and that same thing is done today in my kind of music.''
The perception of him as an outsider, loner and rebel is largely correct, Cash says. ``I've always been outside of Nashville, physically, emotionally and spiritually. I come home from a tour and get in the Range Rover and go into the country and don't see anybody for a day or two. I am a loner. I've got a lot of good friends, too, I keep in touch with. Waylon Jennings is one of my best friends. I talk to him at least once a week.
``I haven't conformed to the traditional rules of Nashville, that is definitely true. Even when I was part of the music scene there, I wasn't part of the music scene there.''
This isn't just a comeback, Cash says. Like Tony Bennett, whose ``I Left My Heart in San Francisco'' rebuilt his career after rock had crushed it, it's a third time around.
``It feels really good,'' Cash says. ``My first was in the '50s and my second was 1968, '69 and '70, when I had my own network TV show and those double platinum (recorded live at Folson and San Quentin) prison albums.''
These days, Cash is in constant pain from a damaged nerve in his jaw. ``I had a cyst in the jaw,'' he says. ``It was growing really fast and looking bad so they took it out. They broke the jaw getting it out. Then I went on tour instead of going home and resting and got infection in it. That was 41/2 years ago.
``They haven't been able to stop the pain. I still hope there's something out there that might give me some relief sometime. With God's help I'm handling it without pain medication - which is really hard.''
Cash is booked solid until Christmas, including traditional country dates with the Carter Family, which includes his wife, June Carter Cash, their son, John Carter Cash, and her sisters, Helen and Anita.
``I'm enjoying it all. It'd be a shame not to enjoy it, to be blessed as I am to have another chance at it,'' he says.
by CNB