The 1994 album Johnny Cash called “the worst, evil side of me”
Even 40 years into his career, Johnny Cash managed to cut a defining record that captured all his outlaw country legend with a long-unseen vitality.
He was prolific. Up until his death in 2003, Cash counted a whopping 67 studio albums under his belt, alongside an extra bucketload of live albums and compilation packages. Yet, even the most hardcore fan will likely confess to having failed to listen to every nook and cranny of the ‘Man in Black’s’ exhaustive body of work.
The fact is, there are plenty of misfires among the rustic immortality. It wasn’t that long before his 1990s revival that the country veteran was donned in a superhero costume, penning novelty songs about swapping his brain with a chicken.
Across his lengthy career, there’d been plenty of opportunities to neuter his brooding persona in the country world. Misguided children’s songs, succumbing to Nashville-style overproduction and orchestral sap during the Columbia years, and cutting one too many Christian worship LPs began to sag heavily on his oeuvre as early as the 1970s.
All he needed was someone to reignite the essentially that burned on previous records like the live At Folsom Blues, the politically charged Man in Black, and even his debut back in the Sun Records days with With His Hot and Blue Guitar! On top of that, the moral ambiguity he wrote about with such weathered authority had been lost in the eyes of later generations who’d only been exposed to Cash’s low creative ebbs.
In came Rick Rubin. By 1994, the Def Jam co-founder was largely known as an artistic guru in the heavy metal and hip-hop world. But a chance catch of Cash’s performances at Bob Dylan’s 30th anniversary concert struck the production heavyweight as an artist unfairly left by the wayside in the music industry. While a little sceptical at first, the promise of creative control and a disregard for all the extra studio trends that had dated earlier LP efforts turned Cash around to working with Rubin, marking the first time in his entire career he’d simply cut a record with just his baritone croon and acoustic guitar, leaving the songs to do the talking.
American Recordings brought the magic back. Charged with his outlaw air, the 13 songs wander raw and pensive tales of Americana, with the lyrical help from old Highwayman comrade Kris Kristofferson, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, and even former Misfits frontman Glenn Danzig, lighting the old dark flame that fans had been missing for years. Such edge back into his work had been spotted by the man himself.
“The way I see this album, it’s like showing the worst, evil side of me,” he told Guitar Player at the time, “It’s showing the evil that the mind goes through from ‘hard to watch her suffer, but with the second shot she died’ in ‘Delia’s Gone’ all the way to redemption… Then there’s a prayer, ‘Why Me Lord?’ It’s got everything in it that I feel, that I can remember feeling, the emotions that I can remember going through.”
‘Delia’s Gone’ stands as a succinct track from American Recordings. Originally cut for 1962’s The Sound of Johnny Cash, the old murder tale’s re-record both pulls Cash back to the thematic terrain he knew how to mine so grippingly, as well as ward off the career nosedives that dogged his stature up until the grunge era. It was arguably the old country star’s most important album.
From then on, the American Recordings series would provide Cash with his most celebrated work, the fourth entry’s take on Nine Inch Nails’ ‘Hurt’ routinely praised as his finest hour, up there with his canonical ‘Ring of Fire’ and ‘I Walk the Line’ anthems.
