Wilco: The band that reminded Johnny Cash of himself in the 1950s
A middle-aged Abe Simpson hollers at a teenage Homer, “I used to be with it, but then they changed what it was. Now what I’m with isn’t it, and what’s it seems weird and scary to me,” before the real kicker, levelling a finger at his boy and hissing “and it’ll happen to you, too.” As with most things, The Simpsons summed it up best. Seemingly as predictable as sunrise, those who were most on-trend found themselves at the back of the queue in time, but apparently, nobody thought to tell Johnny Cash.
Normally, nowhere is this more apparent than with music. Paul McCartney went from making ‘Helter Skelter’ to The Frog Chorus. Oasis have a support bill in 2024 that would have been lame in 1996. Snoop Dogg is now the kindly Unc supporting the US Olympic team with Martha Stewart. Not all of this is bad per se, especially that last one, but still a sign that times pass all of us by… right?
Look closely, and there are still folks getting on but remaining on the cutting edge of music, and no, I’m not talking about the six music dads taking their kids to see Sam Fender either. Damon Albarn still puts together an admirably on-trend list of collaborators every time he gets the Gorillaz itch. Nick Cave is making the most boundary-pushing music of his entire career while pushing 70. Before all of them, though, with a little help from Rick Rubin, Johnny Cash, of all people, was pioneering this in the mid-1990s.
It’s difficult to overstate just how good the ’90s were for Johnny Cash. The vision of Cash on that incredible American Recordings sleeves is era-defining. Austere in his monochrome, jet-black trench coat, dogs at his feet, guitar case clutched in his hands. It’s also the complete opposite of his image at the time: a gurning, drug-addled embarrassment peddling novelty records in rhinestones. A chance meeting with Rick Rubin later led to the idea for the American Recordings series being born.
Rubin was dead set on one thing. Letting Cash be Cash. Whatever Johnny wanted to do, Rubin would make it happen, and Cash decided to make the first genuine solo album of his career. Barely any other instrumentation than Cash’s voice and guitar. Suddenly, Cash, as the outlaw, was back. The man in black rode again, and as the project went on, Cash would cover songs by more current artists, leading to an appreciation for many acts that owed a debt to his inimitable style.
Musically, it began with covering Beck and Soundgarden on 1996’s album American II: Unchained. However, the year before, he had told Paul Gorman about his love of more recent music in Music Week. “I like Wilco a lot,” he says. “There’s a connection there because they are real country, but they can also be heavy rockabilly. That reminds me of myself in the ‘50s.” For the band that remains arguably the face of alt-country, this was heavy praise indeed.
This fascination with new music would culminate in the song that would become Cash’s crowning achievement. It’s not often you can call a single song by an artist as influential as Johnny Cash “legacy defining”, but that’s exactly what his superlative cover of Nine Inch Nails’ ‘Hurt’ is. A song it’s possible we wouldn’t have if he wasn’t so keen to keep listening to new music at all times.
