On this day 30 years ago: Johnny Cash released American Recordings

Peter Murphy on American Recordings:

(Originally published in Hot Press in 2003, shortly after Johnny Cash's death)

Rick Rubin was well established in rock and rap circles as one half of the Def Jam team who discovered hip-hop pioneers Run-DMC, Public Enemy and the Beastie Boys, but he had also become a big money rock producer on the strength of his in-the-room and in-your-face production jobs for acts like The Cult and The Red Hot Chili Peppers (and latterly, System Of A Down and The Mars Volta). But crucially, Rubin also had a firm grasp of Americana by way of his association with The Jayhawks and Tom Petty.

When Johnny Cash met the younger man backstage in Los Angeles, he thought a partnership unlikely. Rubin, he would recall, looked like the ultimate hippie. Plus, the singer had no interest in being repackaged as some sort of rock act. Despite Rubin’s knowledge of his work, his enthusiastic pitch and the fact that he reminded Cash a little of Sam Phillips, he thought nothing more would come of it

But Rubin was dogged about signing Cash to his American Recordings label, and when they met up again a few dates down the line he impressed upon the singer how deadly serious he was about producing him. He proposed that Cash record alone, just himself and his guitar, playing every song he’d ever wanted to put on tape, plus originals, plus a couple of Rubin’s own suggestions. This got Cash’s attention. He’d long coveted the opportunity to make such a record, but got short shrift from major label executives.

Cash went to Rubin’s house and recorded over a hundred songs, with no effects, no overdubs, not even a pick. The result, American Recordings, went on to win a Grammy for best contemporary folk album and re-introduced Cash to an audience who favoured combat boots and body piercings over rhinestones and sequins, and who’d previously known him only as a shadowy image from their parents’ pasts.

The new material included songs by Tom Waits, Loudon Wainwright and Leonard Cohen. Cash had recorded songs by rock artists before (including the Rolling Stones’ ‘No Expectations’ and Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Johnny 99’ and ‘Highway Patrolman’) but their impact had been dissipated by somewhat staid arrangements.

American Recordings by contrast was astonishing in its sparseness and bleak power.

There was ‘Delia’s Gone’, a brutal death ballad part derived from a levee camp holler (“First time I shot her/I shot her in the side/ Hard to watch her suffer/But with the second shot she died”), with echoes of the folk standard ‘Delia’ recorded by Bob Dylan on his similarly bare-boned album World Gone Wrong the same year. A video directed by Anton Corbijn featured Kate Moss as the murdered child bride, borne aloft by the towering Cash looking like something out of Bela Lugosi’s worst morphine dreams.

The song proved remarkably in tune with the convulsive mood of the times. This was the era of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, Nick Cave’s Murder Ballads, Kurt Cobain’s death by suicide and creeping millennial dread. A live performance of the tune on David Letterman’s show reduced even the host to something like stunned silence.

Then there was a chilling cover of hardcore metaller Glen Danzig’s ‘Thirteen’ a death’s head tattoo of a song that united several generations of bad-ass ballads, from hobo blues to metal posturing (Cash once attended a Metallica concert with his son John and pronounced it “spectacular”) to the Death Row label.

Even better was a song that had been percolating in the imagination of British rocker Nick Lowe for some years. Lowe had once been married to Cash’s daughter Carlene, and the song, ‘The Beast In Me’, was tailor-cut for his ex father-in-law...

Nick Lowe (1994)

“Basically, I had the idea for ['The Beast In Me’] in 1979, and sang it to Cash rather drunkenly one night. It was one of those songs where you have a great title and a great couple of lines and you’ve basically said everything and can’t get any further. So I tried to bluff Johnny Cash, sang a load of whole tosh for him. Yet he knew I was on to something, and every time I’d run into him over the intervening years he’d always say, ‘How are ya doing with ‘The Beast In Me’,’ and I’d think he was taking the piss out of me for being a bit drunk!

"But he was right about the idea for the song. But then he knew I was writing about him in the end and felt I articulated those tensions between different sides of his nature, the beast and the softer side.”

U2's The Edge (2003)

"He was just about to start the first American Recordings album when we worked on ‘The Wanderer’. We were delighted that Rick [Rubin] had decided to make this series of records with Johnny and we understood exactly why he had – it was great that someone else had recognised that there was a lot more in Johnny as a singer and a performer. He really made some great recordings with Rick..."

Revisit American Recordings below: