Don't Call It a Comeback

Album: Johnny Cash, American Recordings, 1994

Acquired: I either bought this at the Little Creek Exchange around Christmas 1994, or I received it as a Christmas present that year. My money is on "present," but I'm a horrible gambler.

Best Track: "The Beast in Me"

Lasting Memory: The image of then-62-year-old Johnny Cash carrying the body of then-20-year-old Kate Moss to the grave during the video for this album's "Delia's Gone" is one that will be etched in my mind well after I've forgotten all ya'lls names. Creepy.

But also iconic and perfectly fitting for a song about an enraged former lover who ties his ex-girlfriend to chair and shoots her with a "submochine" set on single-fire. A romantic to the end, the killer notes, "Hurt to a watch her suffer/ But with the second shot she died."

I mentioned murder ballads in my previous post, and "Delia's Gone" is an excellent modern day American take on the traditional Scottish/English/Irish form. In fact, everything on American Recordings in an excellent take on a specific subgenre, not all of which Cash was known to explore.

"Thirteen" is a cover of a song by horror punk pioneer Glenn Danzig that tells the tale of an evil loner who was named and tattooed 13 and never had a chance to turn out good. "Bird on a Wire" is a Leonard Cohen song, which doesn't place it too far outside Cash's usual oeuvre. But when you realize that Cohen is Canadian ... I mean, why did Johnny hate America?

Cash didn't hate America, of course, but he had plenty of self-remorse. Always at heart a loving family man, a man of deep Christian faith, and a man who worked for equal justice and prosperity (including Native American land rights), Cash was also a booze-guzzling, pill-popping hell-raiser for much of his adult life. The two sides of himself -- allegorically pictured as the black dog with white markings and the white dog with black markings on American Recording's album cover -- were constantly at war.

Cash literally lived in a cave for several months in the late 1960s so he could go through his dark night of the soul in darkness and battle his twin demons of amphetamine and barbiturate addiction in a location where the pills couldn't summon reinforcements. The victory he won was temporary, however. He relapsed into drug addiction -- painkillers this time -- in the 1980s.

Finally clean and sober for good by the early 1990s, Cash found himself without a record contract and relegated to obscurity by a country radio industry that was busy creating stars such as [insert your own most insipid hat act here; my nod goes to Star Search champs Diamond Rio]. Fortunately for all of mankind, erstwhile Beastie Boys, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Public Enemy, and (hey!) Danzig producer Rick Rubin was smart enough to sit down with Cash, a guitar, and a microphone and produce American Recordings.

Cash had never totally gone away, so it is incorrect to call AR a comeback album. Also, rather than rejuvenated, Cash here sounds resigned and regretful. To my ears, AR is built around "The Beast in Me":

The beast in me
Is caged by frail and fragile bars
Restless by day
And by night rants and rages at the stars
God help the beast in me

The beast in me
Has had to learn to live with pain
And how to shelter from the rain
And in the twinkling of an eye
Might have to be restrained
God help the beast in me

Sometimes it tries to kid me
That it's just a teddy bear
And even somehow manage to vanish in the air
And that is when I must beware
Of the beast in me that everybody knows
They've seen him out dressed in my clothes

Patently unclear
If it's New York or New Year
God help the beast in me

The beast in me

Even though he refused to take pain medications after around 1988, Cash never believed he had fully defeated his beast. That must have been awful for him. For the rest of us, it meant he turned out some of his best work in his last decade of life.

Watch the video for "The Best in Me"

Up Next: Circle Jerks, Wönderful, 1994