Customer Reviews

American Recordings

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For those who think that you've got to be borned with a beautiful voice or play skillful guitar to make it, Cash proves that you don't. All you need is expression and honesty in your performance, and the result will be an album like this.

"Who has Desecrated "MY" Delia?", I thought the first time that I heard this recording.
Only recently did I order this and after listening to this both yesterday and today did I come to the realization that it was not "MY" Delia but Cash's. He was always ready to change with the times, (Remember when he had Dylan on his television program in the 1960's?) and in this recording he has proven that change is indeed good.
Tracks two (02) and three (03) are both, dare I say brilliant.

It is hard to believe that this was recorded in a living room with just Cash and his guitar.
The thirteenth (13) track, "The Man Who Wouldn't Cry", was recorded at a place called Vipers before a live audience and Comes highly reccomended. Reminisant of his earlier recordings
Like his "Everybody Loves a Nut" Album, you can tell that he had to have enjoyed not only performing this number but had to have had a hell of a fun time composing it as well.
Now quit reading everyone else's opinion about this. Buy the damn thing and listen to it yourself. I look forward to reading your comments concerning this masterpiece in the near future.

The other reviewers on this site have done a good job of delineating the contents of this cd, so I will just add my comments. I will begin by saying that I am not particularly fond of country music, but I greatly admire this disc. It has a cross-genre appeal that is primal in power.Moreover, it is just plain cool. Buy it today.

My parents always listened to music by Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Patsy Cline, David Allan Coe, and Waylon Jennings and when I hear their music it always brings back memories. Johnny's older songs like Boy Named Sue are my favorites because I grew up on them and now my kids know them by heart, but there are good songs on this CD too like Bird On A Wire and Why Me Lord. It isn't going to be the same without Johnny Cash, but we still have his music and now he's with June.

As you can tell by checking the other CDs I reviewed, I love hard edged Country. Cash's edge makes these cuts go deep.

If you believe Simplicity is Genius than this CD is for YOU. A beautiful record. One word best describes this CD "Timeless". Do yourself a favor and buy this CD. Thank you Rick Rubin and Johnny Cash.

This 1994 album was Johnny Cash's "comeback" album. After spending the 80s producing some uneven albums, Cash signed with American Records and recorded a string of terrific albums. This was his first album for the label. Rick Rubin made the decision to have the album feature just Johnny singing and playing his guitar with no additional accompaniment. The result was probably the best Johnny Cash album since Johnny Cash at San Quentin. Cash sings songs from a wide variety of sources, and makes them his own. It's hard to single out any particular songs, because they are all so good. Just but the album, already.

It was a completely unexpected move. In 1994, country music legend Johnny Cash agrees to cut an album produced by rap producer Rick Rubin for Rubin's American Recordings label. The result: The first of four priceless recordings that rival anything else from Cash's outstanding body of work.

The collection includes old songs, new songs, songs written by Cash, and songs written by others. Cash's music has always been marked by great storytelling and honesty, but this recording takes the Man in Black's storytelling and honesty to a whole other level. When you listen to "The Beast in Me," you hear the raw honesty in Cash's voice and you know that he's lived every word of Nick Lowe's lyrics. "Drive On" addresses one of Cash's most passionate topics: the trails and tribulations of Vietnam veterans returning home and the people who don't understand them. "Thirteen" is a dark, brutally exposed portrayal of a life gone wrong, one that has never been on track and never will be. Who else but Cash can convincingly sing the lyric "I pray you don't look at me/I pray I don't look back"?

It took a lot of courage for Cash to do this album. Think about it: Columbia Records had dropped him years before. Now here he was, making a recording not with his band, but with only his voice and his guitar. With one man and one guitar, there's not much you can hide. If the music is true and honest, it'll come through. If it's not, that'll come through too. But the result is true, naked, honest, courageous music. It doesn't get any better than this. Johnny Cash lays it all on the line like no one else ever has...and probably never will.

DISC TIME: 41:52

I first bought this album when I was 14 years old, shortly after it was released. I was at the age when I was starting to develop my own musical tastes, and this album fell right in. Even after almost a decade, it's still the best album I own. I fell completely in love with Cash's music after I devoured this record, and subsequently went back and discovered his rich musical history. My favorite parts of his career are his days on the American Recordings label and his old Sun Records days back in the mid/late 50's with the Tennessee Two. I've since bought this album and other Cash albums for friends and loved ones, all of whom know I'm a Cash fanatic. Honestly, this album couldn't be any better.

Facing a landing in the balcony staircase in the Roxy Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia, there is (or was, i haven't been there in a while) an almost life-size, autographed poster of the cover of this album, an amazing photo which has always reminded me of one of the less amiable prophets from the Old Testament just before he told some particularly egregious sinners where to head in.

And the "prophet" image is appropriate for Cash; sometimes in the sense of "a prophet without honour in his own country", as Cash has fallen from favour with the country music establishment more than once...

On their CD "Old Dogs", Waylon, Mel Tillis, Jerry Reed and Bobby Bare engaged in a joyful chomp at the hand that doesn't feed older country stars so well any more in a song by Shel Silverstein called "(Nashville is) Rough on the Livin' (But Surely Speaks Well of the Dead)", an indictment of the way in which the country music industry has tended to cast aside the older acts who created it in favour of the Hat of the Day, remembering them only in time for a hypocritical display when they die.

For a while, a few years ago, it looked as if that was going to be the way that Johnny Cash was going -- the majors seemed less and less interested in him, and he pretty much only got airplay on nostalgia-oriented programs.

And then he and Rick Rubin electrified the music world with this album, which cut a swathe across all genres and brought Cash back to the forefront.

This album was incredible when released, and it's still amazing now.

The weakest tracks on it are "Bird on a Wire" and "Man Who Couldn't Cry", which don't really suit Cash's delivery -- and they are Very Good.

"Le the Train Blow the Whistle (When I'm Gone)" and "Down by the Train", both using the classic mataphor of the train as a transition, are both strong meditations on life, death and redemption.

But it's "Drive On" that i find myself coming back to, and it's "Drive On" to which i had the entire lyric memorised without trying within a few days of buying the CD; a song that speaks to me as strongly as Richard Thompson's "Wall of Death", that resonates so strongly with my own memories and emotions.

Cash got himself in trouble with the Country Establishment in the latter 60's/early 70's for daring to suggest that, perhaps, the war in Viet Nam might not be the best idea. But it was Cash (and June Carter Cash), not the Nashville Hawks who were all for the war from the safety of a recording studio, who went to 'Nam on their own dime and lived there in a trailer on an American base and entertained the troops on their way to the front and visited them in thehospital on their way back...

And twenty-five years later, Cash distilled what he saw and heard from those grunts into this one song, with its chilling repetition of the front-line soldier's mantra - "It don't mean nothin'." -- in a song that speaks to the ambivalence that America still feels toward that war and toward those of us (even REMFs like myself) who served in it.

It's The Man In Black still acting as our conscience, still reminding us that there are things that aren't right that we need to fix.

And still looking forward to that day that his faith told him was coming -- that day, maybe far far away, when "things are brighter"...

I hope angel wings come in black, though.