Why Neil Young was “petrified” to meet Johnny Cash
It was two different generations coming together when Neil Young found himself on the set of The Johnny Cash Show. The legendary country star was riding a redemptive high after staging his famous jail concerts at Folsom Prison and San Quentin a few years prior. Cash’s show only had a few more episodes before its end, but they were going out with a bang by featuring Neil Young playing ‘The Needle and the Damage Done’.
When Young found himself on Conan O’Brien’s radio show Team Coco Radio, he was asked what it was like meeting Cash. The reality was that Young was still a young singer-songwriter, and his nervousness caused him to be concerned with other matters apart from meeting the mastermind behind At Folsom Prison.
“I really like Johnny Cash. I hardly even got to speak to him, but that’s okay; he was busy. It was the Johnny Cash Show,” Young explained. “You got to realise in my eyes, doing this – I’m what, 23 years old, and I’m going on a television show. I was petrified, so I was thinking about the song I was going to sing and whether I was going to screw it up or not; that’s all I thought about, so I don’t remember much else about it.”
As a part of the interview, O’Brien asked Young to assemble a list of some of his favourite songs. One that made the cut was ‘Ballad of a Teenage Queen’, the Jack Clement song that Cash popularised through his 1958 recording, later featured on the album Johnny Cash Sings the Songs That Made Him Famous.
“They do sound good,” Young gushed once the song played. “That sounded like the record that I was remembering when I wrote it down. That’s what the sound is.” Young also was able to catch whether the songs had been remixed from their original sound, something that O’Brien marvels at.
“I’m different. I’m going, ‘When they did that, what else did they do?’ Things are different. They’ve got more room for the bass and more room to spread things around. So for me, it’s the feeling of the mix, the feeling of the song,” Young said. “The more immediate it was, the close [it was] to the original one. And then you feel the song and the essence of it, and when things get modified and changed, you get farther away from that.”
Watch Neil Young discuss Johnny Cash down below.
