The musician who deeply inspired a young Bob Dylan: ‘I his songs better than I knew my own’
If you’ve been around as long as Bob Dylan, it’s impossible to keep up with that amount of material. He may have glossed over every song until he thought it was in decent shape to put down on a record, but you have to have some sort of encyclopedic memory to be able to pull out every single line of ‘Desolation Row’ on a whim. For all the fantastic songs Dylan has in his repertoire, he admitted that he knew Johnny Cash’s music like the back of his hand.
Then again, Dylan has never been that far away from country. Since folk rock is basically just country music with a bit more attitude behind it, Dylan was already looking to shake up the world when he released his pure folk albums, usually going on rambling stories that felt closer to Woody Guthrie than they did to Cash’s brand of outlaw country.
The way Cash approached his celebrity wasn’t that far apart from what Dylan had been doing, either. Whereas Dylan left all his honesty in the songs, he would often be putting a persona and occasionally getting flippant with the questions he was being asked, akin to the kind of foreboding figure that Cash made when he became ‘The Man in Black’.
Since both men have written great fictional stories throughout their careers, they are also two of the greatest musical actors of all time. Cash probably didn’t actually shoot a man in Reno, and Dylan probably didn’t see Jack the Ripper leading the Chamber of Commerce, but when you hear them sing, you believe every word.
Cash already had a few more albums under his belt, though, and Dylan was transfixed by what he heard, recalling at Musicares, “Johnny Cash recorded some of my songs early on, too, up in about ‘63, when he was all skin and bones. He travelled long, he travelled hard, but he was a hero of mine. I heard many of his songs growing up. I knew them better than I knew my own”.
Although Dylan had to shake off his messianic complex when he got too big to fail, Cash remained a fixture of country music for a few more years before hitting a few rough patches in the 1980s. Dylan may have shed his skin first, but Cash may have been looking to Dylan for lessons on how to deal with fame.
When working with Rick Rubin, Cash found himself making versions of albums like Self Portrait that actually worked, taking favourites from his back catalogue and classics by other artists and channelling them through his own warped lens. If you really think about it, how come Cash’s version of this approach landed while Dylan’s felt apart at the seams?
Well, it might just come down to their delivery. Dylan could pull off a lot of emotions in his songs, but sometimes, it’s hard to know whether he’s being sincere or patronising from one line to the next. With Cash, there’s not a single disingenuous bone in his body, and whenever he stepped up to sing a song, it wasn’t going to be coming out of his mouth. It was coming from deep within his soul.
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