Lost Johnny Cash gig recorded by the Grateful Dead’s LSD man Owsley Stanley
In the late 1950s, Johnny Cash became a significant player on the famous Sun Records roster. His early singles ‘Hey Porter’ and ‘Cry! Cry! Cry!’, both released in 1955, gave him leverage in the burgeoning American country scene. This success was soon consolidated with the immortal hits ‘I Walk the Line’ and ‘Folsom Prison Blues’, which appeared on Cash’s 1957 debut album, With His Hot and Blue Guitar.
Cash joined the touring circuit as an established star, alongside familiar Sun Records alums like Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and his future wife, June Carter. As the ‘Man in Black’ and prison concert pioneer, Cash constructed an image as an outlaw. This impression was augmented by a hedonistic lifestyle of drug and alcohol abuse, which saw him arrested on a couple of occasions in the early 1960s.
An unsteady patch prevailed through most of the ’60s as Cash grappled with his failing marriage to Vivian Liberto and his elusive muse on the road, June Carter. In 1966, Cash finalised his divorce from Liberto, and two years later, he finally got remarried to Carter, who helped subdue Cash’s roguish tendencies.
On January 13th, 1968, Cash filmed his legendary live shows at Folsom State Prison, California, to an audience of convicted outlaws. The show was just one stop on what turned out to be one of his busiest and iconic years on the road. With stops across the US and Canada, Cash played many consecutive nights and finally returned to California for a concluding performance at San Francisco’s Carousel Ballroom on April 24th.
While the Folsom Prison gig would live on as one of Cash’s most famous live performances, thanks to the movie footage and LP, it wasn’t the only immortalised performance from 1968. On the final night in San Francisco, Cash Owsley “Bear” Stanley, the Grateful Dead’s famous engineer and also the man responsible for synthesising the purest LSD in the state, was present with his personal tape recorder.
Alongside his work with the Grateful Dead and his psychedelic ventures, Stanley enjoyed recording concerts for his private collection. When he passed away in 2011, more than 1,300 personal gig recordings were discovered in his stash. In 2022, the Oswald Stanley Foundation began selectively releasing recordings from the collection, exhuming long-lost shows for 21st-century ears.
Below, you can hear Johnny Cash’s performance of ‘Cocaine Blues’, the first track from the 28-episode catalogue of Owsley Stanley’s recording from The Carousel Ballroom.
