The classic albums Bob Dylan said ruined Johnny Cash: “It can’t hold a candle to the man”
Not every artist is meant to be making the same kind of music forever. It’s only natural for everyone to try and evolve on every album they make, but Bob Dylan knew that artists were better suited doing what they do best than trying to make bold new avenues for themselves in the studio.
Then again, Dylan was the last person to stay in one spot for too long. Although many of his best records could go under the ‘folk rock’ banner, there’s no reason why anyone thinks that Blood on the Tracks sounds the same as Blonde on Blonde. Both of them are equally brilliant, but when listening to the lyrics, Dylan was a totally different person every time he made a new record. It wasn’t simply another record; it was a completely different sonic identity every time he went into that studio.
Because if there’s one thing that Dylan cultivated during his early days, it was the idea of putting together a persona. He always remained cagey in interviews and made sure never to give away too much and let his music do the talking, but that only served to create more myth-making around him whenever he performed, which is probably why Self Portrait was such an intentional misdirection.
Even when he stopped having hits, Dylan wasn’t about to stop writing. That was his calling throughout every era of his life, and his later albums like Modern Times and Love and Theft are even deeper introspections into what made the best lyricist of the modern age tick. He was still switching things up, but when he looked around, he could have done without whatever the hell Johnny Cash was doing around the same time.
Which is insane, considering the track record Cash had in his later years. The American series of albums are among the finest that anyone has ever made during their twilight years, and while Rick Rubin helped ‘The Man in Black’ to firmly close the book on his career with dignity on his last official album released during his life, The Man Comes Around, Dylan only saw it as a cheap version of what he’d already seen.
According to Dylan, this was all a way to keep up Cash’s image instead of his songwriting, saying, “I tell people if they are interested that they should listen to Johnny on his Sun records and reject all that notorious low-grade stuff he did in his later years. It can’t hold a candlelight to the frightening depth of the man that you hear on his early records. That’s the only way he should be remembered.”
It’s a lot easier to see Dylan’s point when looking at Cash’s track record back in the day, but that’s hardly a reason to slight his recent material. A lot of the albums do feature a multitude of covers in the mix, but even when inhabiting songs by Depeche Mode or Nine Inch Nails, he still gave as much as he could to the tunes, all while singing lyrics that reflected that same dark persona that he had in his early days.
So while songs like ‘I Walk The Line’ may be a more pure version of what Cash could do, the American series is far from the most offensive thing he has ever put out or anything. If anything, it was a reminder to all of the people who forgot about him that he was still around and could sprinkle a piece of his country beauty across anything he got his hands on. And more often than not, he managed to outdo many artists at their own game.
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