Come along and ride this train (Johnny Cash) (LP 2102)

Johnny Cash  The Johnny Cash Show (Vinyl, CBS Records, 197o) *** 

Genre: Country 

Places I remember: Little Red Bookstore (Hastings)

Fab, and all the other pimply hyperboles/ Gear costume: Sunday Morning Coming Down 

Active compensatory factors: The third live album (after the prison duo) - it's not got the save iconic status as the other two.

This one is recorded at the Grand Ole Opry House, Nashville Tennessee, and it's a Johnny Cash in transition as he starts the seventies. The tie in with the successful TV show is obvious with that cover, but this is Johnny linking himself to the working stiff - all those truckers' songs sound great!

He's a dab hand at creating those mythic American tropes and he endeared himself to the world's truckies with these routines. For me, though there is a bit too much talking in this show, and not enough good songs. But that's a minor quibble - Johnny Cash is almost beyond criticism - such is his legend.

The schmaltzy side emerges on These Hands and Here Was A Man. Safe to say that this is not my favourite side of the legend, never-the-less, that's part of the man, and his sincerity is never in doubt. So, it's good to have a slice or two of that side to Johnny Cash.

Where do they all belong? Nestled behind the Fulsom prison and San Quentin albums.

Wanted man (Bob Dylan) (LP 37-38)

 Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison (Vinyl - CBS, 1968) ****
Johnny Cash At San Quentin (Vinyl - CBS, 1969) *****

Genre: Country

Places I remember: Real Groovy and Lewis Eady's in Queen Street.

Fab, and all the other pimply hyperboles: San Quentin is an extraordinary document of a moment, and Darling Companion on SQ with June Carter is a definitive version.





Gear costume: Cocaine Blues, Jackson on Folsom.

Active compensatory factors: Ordinarily I would not go out of my way to buy a Johnny Cash album. Greatest hits, maybe, but not a regular release.  

Except...these two. If I had to keep one only - San Quentin gets the nod. His attitude is more in your face (the banter more pointed), the cover is better, the songs are tighter, better chosen for the album, more atmospheric and there are only 8 of them (16 on Folsom). Less is more, remember.

Not that Folsom is bad but the vibe is darker and the humour of Flushed from the bathroom/ Egg sucking dog is weak. A trimmed down version would have been better, I feel.

Where do they all belong? They are unique in and of themselves. Very much of the time. Love these? Try one of those Greatest Hits from the bargain bins.

Down the street the dogs are barking (Blind Boy Grunt)

I've always been interested in the way Dylan's songs have morphed over the years, depending on his band, his voice, his circumstances, the way the world changes, whatever.

Dylan's song One Too Many Mornings was first released on his The Times They Are A-Changin' album. It that context it was a strange, wistful reflection about two people who have, seemingly, drifted apart over one too many mornings.



The first focus in the song is on the sounds of the dogs barking as night approaches. Dylan is standing at his doorway. He's either leaving or considering leaving. Why else would he call it a crossroads?

He turns from the doorway and looks into the empty room (the woman's presence in the room is described in the past tense), his gaze returns to the street and those lonesome dog sounds.

It seems Dylan's unease at the situation with his lover is reciprocated - she is also at a crossroads and has maybe already vamoosed - We're both just too many mornings, an' a thousand miles behind.

I've included a couple of versions here - the David Gray one sticks pretty closely to the Dylan template and is more melancholy in its approach. The Dylan and Johnny Cash countrified one is plain weird in a good way.





The version I love the most though, and unfortunately it is not available on youtube, is the one on Hard Rain from the Rolling Thunder Revue tour.

Dylan's visceral live version is stripped of any wistful, lingering heartfelt feelings and becomes a dark brooding cathartic outpouring of emotion following the departure of Sara. It's wonderful.

The dogs in this version are apocalyptic, snarling, feral monsters that threaten the night. I love it!

I fell for you like a child, oh, but the fire went wild (Johnny Cash)

I was walking around the Oasis Sports resort while Jacky was at the Equestrian Centre, listening to my ipod on shuffle. I know I've said it before, but I'll say it again - I LOVE THE SHUFFLE MODE!

The next song starts up - a kind of distinctive country chicken scratch-shuffle and the words:

Don’t call my name out your window, I’m leavin'.

The voice is even more distinctive - like no other on the planet. That of Johnny Cash.

It seemed incredibly appropriate that Johnny Cash's drawl should form the soundtrack for my circumstances. A cement-mixer truck had just emerged out of the twilight murk and barrelled past me, on a closed to traffic part of the road, scraying me with so much dust that I had to lift my shirt up over my face to avoid choking. Yet all the heat and dust was batted away by Johnny and his fine fine song. So much so that I ended up with a big grin on my face. Meditate on it.

In truth, I've only been a sometime friend to J R Cash over the years. I own vinyl copies of the prison albums (San Quentin and Folsom) and that's it, apart from tracks on various samplers (where Understand Your Man on my ipod must have come from).

But he seems to have always been there in one form or another:

• a copy of his Ballad of a Teenage Queen 45 (produced the year I was born) lying around my cousin's bedroom when I was very young
• those prison albums
• The Johnny Cash Show in the early seventies
• the Levis advert using Ring of Fire
• Hurt and the renaissance years
• and now my own children are putting Ring Of Fire on compilations for me. Full circle.

Needless to say Jacky hates him. In Dubai on the weekend she saw me looking at the J Cash racks and was horrified. She calls it Hillbilly music and the thing is I can kind of understand where that comes from. It's music she heard growing up in her mother's house and it's therefore old and because her mother liked it it's tarred with a brush called annoying that, for her, has also touched Neil Diamond, Jim Reeves and Patsy Cline, among others.

Jacky made a remark to the salesman that was a kind of a laughed apology. But what she doesn't get is that Johnny has always been different to those other names, and that succeeding generations (like the shop assistant, and our own children) actually like the cool songs of Johnny Cash.

You hear me talkin' honey?