New Music from Johnny Cash & Paul McCartney
At this late date, it seems impossible that there could still be “lost” albums lingering in the vaults by musicians as important and successful as Johnny Cash and Paul McCartney. And yet Universal Music has just released “new” albums by both artists that significantly add to their already hallowed recording catalogs.
In 1993, just prior to meeting producer Rick Rubin, Johnny Cash, who was then between record label deals, tracked an album’s worth of demos in Nashville. Longtime Cash pal Waylon Jennings sang on two tracks. The idea was to shop all the recordings to record labels.
For Johnny Cash Songwriter, Cash’s son John Carter Cash and longtime engineer David “Fergie” Ferguson preserved Cash’s vocals from the original demos and added mostly low-key modern backing. Friends and admirers of Cash, including guitarist Marty Stuart, bassist David Roe, and drummer Pete Abbott, recorded new instrumental tracks. The guest list of contributors recorded elsewhere and flown in includes vocalist Vince Gill, guitarist Mark Howard, string player Matt Combs, and The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, whose guitar solo on “Spotlight” gives the new album a touch of modern cool.
What immediately jumps out from this collection is the quality of the songs and what The Man in Black’s crafty lyrics say about the man himself. While Cash’s songwriting modes are familiar, and some modern backing tracks (like “Poor Valley Girl”) work better than others, Cash’s delivery is fresh and energized, and his lyrics as always are beyond compare. In “Drive On,” one of Cash’s detailed song stories, a Vietnam veteran comes home with mental and emotional scars. With “Like a Soldier,” “Drive On” was later re-recorded for American Recordings, Cash’s first release for Rick Rubin’s eclectic label. Set to the sound of whirring helicopter blades, his still-elastic voice sings tough, artful rhymes: “I remember one night, Tex and me/Walked right up on 2 VC/But we had our 16’s on rock and roll/And we separated them from their souls.”
Marty Stuart reproduces Luther Perkins’s rockabilly Tennessee Two guitar part in “Well Alright,” as Cash sings astonishingly detailed and evocative lyrics of an everyday occurrence: “I met her at the laundromat/She was washing extra hot/I said, ‘Don’t you need a little help with that big load you got?’/She said ‘No,’ but did a double take/And then she smiled and said, ‘I might’/As I rolled up my sleeves/I said to myself, ‘Well alright.'”
Photo: David Litchfield
Either a living hell or an enlightening experiment, depending on which Beatle you asked, making a film about making an album is problematic at best, as we recently saw with Peter Jackson’s edgy reconstruction of Get Back. But five years after Get Back was filmed, and shortly after the success of Wings’ Band on the Run album, Paul McCartney decided to give the film-in-a-studio idea another go.
Recorded and filmed at Abbey Road Studios in the summer of 1974, the audio portion of One Hand Clapping has been mixed and released for the first time in its complete form. Repeatedly bootlegged, most of sides 1 and 2 on this new two-LP set (or half the new CD) also appeared officially in 2010’s Band on the Run (Archive Collection), but that still leaves 16 unreleased McCartney tracks. Instantly essential, this 30-track collection mixes such Wings hits as “Jet” and “Band on the Run” as well as neglected Wings tracks including “Tomorrow” (from Wild Life) and “Power Cut” (from Red Rose Speedway). Hearing McCartney’s liquid voice work its way through a slower “Blackbird” is fantastic. “Bluebird,” one of his best post-Beatles cuts, has never been recorded better. He wings his way through “Let It Be,” accompanying himself on harmonium before sitting at the piano for a few solemn bars of “The Long and Winding Road” that stop midway as if he’s had enough. Needing a mood change, he launches into a bouncy “Lady Madonna.”
It’s wonderful to hear the Beatle-turned–solo artist having fun, playing music live without any of the crowd noise that plagued his career or the airplane hangar sonics of 1976’s live triple-LP Wings Over America. This is prime McCartney, showcasing not only his incomparable gifts for singing but also his incredible, instinctive melodicism. Few earthlings can write hooks like Sir Paul.
What’s most newsworthy here is the reasonably high quality of both projects. In both cases, the sound is good verging on great: clear, reasonably detailed, projecting a very satisfying stereo image. The packaging of One Hand Clapping includes a repro of the brochure meant to hype the film and a six-song 7″ single recorded in the backyard of Abbey Road studios. The 180gm vinyl pressings are good enough. Songwriter was pressed in Canada at Precision (owned by GZ), and One Hand Clapping is the product of Optimal in Germany.
It’s no mystery why these recordings sat unreleased, and it goes far beyond the simple “They didn’t need the money.” McCartney jumped right into making his next studio album, 1975’s Venus and Mars. With Rick Rubin’s help, Cash soon embarked on the series of albums that would define his late-career legacy. Both artists had new ideas and were anxious to move on to their next projects. The albums left behind were snapshots of where the artist was at that moment, and both were quickly outdated. Vital art never rests. The pace of both men’s vision was relentless and unbounded.
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