Johnny Cash: A Night to Remember (CBS-Sony Entertainment, 1973)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last Saturday night, June 19, KPBS showed one of their usual pledge-break specials which turned out to be a lot more interesting than most of them: a recently discovered filmed live performance of Johnny Cash from the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles on May 5, 1973. If the concert had one flaw (aside from the usual problems with PBS concert specials – the endless begging sessions American public television, lacking the guaranteed revenue stream from license fees for TV sets that funds the British Broadcasting Corporation, including the frustrating boasts that what we’re seeing on air is just a fraction of the full concert and to see and hear the rest we’ll have to make a substantial contribution to the station to get the DVD), it’s that the original director kept the cameras focused on Cash throughout. We heard his backup musicians but didn’t get to see them – a real pity because he not only used his original bassist (Marshall Grant) and drummer (W. S. “Fluke” Holland) from his Sun Records days but had Carl Perkins, composer of “Blue Suede Shoes” and a giant of white rock ’n’ roll in his own right, as his lead guitarist. Cash’s original guitarist, Luther Perkins (no relation), had died in 1968 and Carl Perkins was already a member of Cash’s traveling troupe – he used both Carl Perkins and the then-current generation of his in-laws, the Carter Family, as opening acts – so it made sense for Cash to press him into service as an accompanist. Though it remained Cash’s show, Carl Perkins supplied searing lead guitar parts that expertly accompanied Cash and added to the music. The Cash concert was pretty much what you’d expect and want to hear from him, opening with the haunting “Big River” from his early days (1955-1958) at Sam Phillips’ legendary Sun Records label from Memphis, Tennessee.

Sun Records is legendary for all the major talents it launched; in its early days as a Black-oriented rhythm-and-blues label it helped start the careers of B. B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, Rufus Thomas and Rosco Gordon, and once Phillips shifted to signing white artists who could do credible R&B and soulful country music he signed Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, Charlie Rich (whom Phillips called the most natural talent he ever worked with) and Johnny Cash. The first song on Cash’s set in L.A. May 5, 1973 was “Big River,” one of his most haunting Sun recordings and a song he was inspired to write when he read a TV Guide article that began, “Johnny Cash has the big river blues in his voice … ”. Then he did Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down” – it was the tradition in country music then that you started your career by selling a song to an already established major artist, and if it hit you could get a label interested in recording you. (Willie Nelson’s career started when he sold “Pretty Paper” to Roy Orbison and “Hello, Walls” to Faron Young, and it really got going when he got Patsy Cline to record “Crazy.”) Kristofferson reportedly placed “Sunday Morning Coming Down” to Cash by flying a helicopter to Cash’s home and landing it on his lawn during a party (before he sought a career in music Kristofferson had been in the military and had trained as a helicopter pilot), and that and two other songs he placed with major stars – “Me and Bobby McGee” with Janis Joplin and “Help Me Make It Through the Night” with Sammi Smith – did the trick and established Kristofferson as a star.

The next song on Cash’s concert set was one he introduced as one he’d just written while on tour in Australia, “The Ballad of Barbara,” and it’s a quite beautiful ballad (reminiscent of the old Scottish folk song “Barbara Allen”) and somewhat surprising that it isn’t one of Cash’s better-known songs. After that Cash did the inevitable “A Boy Named Sue” (and oddly dodged the sensitive words that got drowned out by bleeps on the original record; as he had in his command performance for Richard Nixon at the White House three years before, he changed the last line to celebrate his own son, John Carter Cash). Then he did a number that started out quoting two classic chain-gang songs, “Another Man Done Gone” and “Sylvie,” before settling into a song called “Goin’ to Memphis.” Of course Johnny Cash had indeed gone to Memphis – not after being released from prison, like the character in the song, but after quitting a dead-end job in an auto factory to show up at Sam Phillips’ doorstep to see if he could get a record deal and make his career in music. After the inevitable pledge break, the next selection was another medley, this one involving trains: it began with “Hey, Porter” (the first song Cash ever recorded; it was based on a poem he’d written and published in Stars and Stripes while stationed in Germany with the U.S. Air Force – incidentally Cash’s birth certificate gave his name as “J. R. Cash” and he got “Johnny” not from his parents, but from the recruiting sergeant who signed him up for the Air Force and insisted that the “J.” had to stand for something) and then included “Folsom Prison Blues” (a Sun-era song inspired by the 1951 movie Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison, which Cash revived in 1968 when he did a live album at the real Folsom Prison and made a powerful recording that boosted him to a comeback), “The Wreck of the Old 97” (a song by Vernon Dalhart originally recorded for Edison in 1920 and remade for Victor in 1924 – the Victor version became the first country record to sell over a million copies, but for some strange reason Ken Burns’ mega-documentary on country music omitted Dalhart and his ground-breaking song completely) and ends with a hot version of “Orange Blossom Special” that’s a lot more exciting than Cash’s record. On it he plays two harmonicas, switching rapidly back and forth between them, presumably because they were in different keys, for a quite impressive and entertaining effect.

The next two songs were classic hits Cash had recorded with his second wife, June Carter, “Jackson” (ironically a song about divorce!) and their cover of folksinger Tim Hardin’s “If I Were a Carpenter.” The concert – or at least that part of it PBS presented to non-contributors – ended abruptly with “Lord, Is It I?” from one of the most peculiar projects of Cash’s career: The Gospel Road: A Story of Jesus, a 1973 film directed by Swedish documentarian Robert Elfstrom, who had previously (1969) made a “straight” documentary called Johnny Cash: The Man, His World, His Music, and now collaborated on a strange-sounding film in which Elfstrom directed and played Jesus (silently, since all Jesus’s thoughts and statements were reflected in songs), Cash co-wrote and did the soundtrack score, and June Carter played Mary Magdalene. Cash strolls through the production, dressed in his trademark black and serving much like the narrator, “The Evangelist,” in Bach’s Passions, giving a running account in song of what’s going on. The song from the film Cash performed at the Ahmanson Theatre is called “Lord, Is It I?” – in their book The Golden Turkey Awards Harry and Michael Medved ridiculed the title, but it’s actually grammatically correct (“Lord, is it me?” is more common but technically wrong) – and the song, which sets the scene at the Last Supper when Jesus tells his disciples, “One of you will betray me, and one of you will deny me,” is powerful enough it makes me curious to see the entire film, which is apparently available on YouTube.

It’s impossible for me to avoid comparing Johnny Cash to the one Sun star who had a subsequent career as big or bigger than his, Elvis Presley. Elvis may have been hunkier (at least until years of Southern-fried cooking ballooned his weight past what his diet of amphetamines and opiates could control) and had a more flexible voice – Cash himself admitted that he couldn’t sing faster than medium tempi or do rock ’n’ roll (what he called “frantic chanting”) – but Cash seems a far more interesting person, a man of much greater personal strength and integrity. Both Elvis and Cash succumbed to prescription drug addiction, but Elvis ultimately died from it while Cash recovered (albeit after what amounted to an intervention by his wife and their friends, who warned him that the path he was traveling could have led him to end up like Hank Williams, who died of an overdose while he was being taken to a concert date). What’s amazing about Cash’s career is how much he was able to accomplish despite only rarely deviating from the simple chunk-a-chunk rhythms he used from the early days at Sun. A man who began hanging out with Elvis at Sun Records ended by making a shattering cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt” – and after 25 years at Columbia and an unhappy period at Mercury (where he got signed to the sort of contract that seeks to suck the last marrow of the bones of a great but fallen star’s previous popularity), he ended his record career much the way he’d begun it: working for a visionary producer (Rick Rubin at American Recordings) and doing a wide variety of material that reflected a personal vision rather than an attempt to follow some banal conception of “what the public wants.”

Johnny Cash became an American monument, and even now, 18 years after his death, in a way he seems alive as ever, an eternal American voice. The PBS special on him not only included 45 minutes of his 1973 L.A. concert but also an oddball documentary on his relationship to Britain – where most of his ancestors had come from (he was a descendant of King Malcolm IV of Scotland – son of the rightful heir who replaced the usurper and murderer Macbeth at the end of Shakespeare’s play, which Cash read aloud to his family when they traveled in Scotland – and the show displayed at least two castles with the name “Cash” on them) and where he had some curious connections, including British New Wave rock stars Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe (who was briefly married to Carlene Carter, June Carter’s daughter by her first husband). This film was made to promote a really peculiar album released in 2018 called Johnny Cash and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, in which the original accompaniments to 12 of Cash’s best-known songs were filtered out and the Royal Philharmonic dubbed in. The arranger was Don Reedman, and he stated that his idea was to keep the symphony as much out of the way as possible – which makes one wonder what the point of the album was in the first place.

It’s especially weird when you remember that when Johnny Cash started recording, the big sound in country music was the sort of thing called “countrypolitan,” in which singers like Eddy Arnold and Hank Snow recorded with large orchestras, including string sections, and tried to sound as much as they could like the era’s mainstream crooners: Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Eddie Fisher. Cash became popular in the first place because country music audiences heard him as a return to the music’s roots – indeed, by omitting bluegrass-style violin and pedal steel guitar, he had an even more spare lineup than his great predecessor, Hank Williams, had used. So giving Johnny Cash’s voice the big-orchestra treatment 15 years after his death seems strange, to say the least – despite the claims of his son, John Carter Cash, that he would have liked it because he always liked to do new things – though you can’t argue with it commercially; the Wikipedia page on it calls it Cash’s “first charting album” since Out Among the Stars, a 2014 release of an album Cash had recorded for Columbia in 1981 – only the “suits” at the label regarded him as over-the-hill and not only rejected the record, they cut him from the label. Little did they know that he had 22 years left to live, and in those years (especially after his first album for Rick Rubin’s American Recordings in 1994) he’d make some of the most powerful music of his life!