Music Review – New Releases from Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan

Though it dropped last week, Johnny Cash’s Out Among the Stars was recorded in 1981. The tracks were then shelved for 31 years, until Cash’s son came across them. The date of recording is important. By 1981 Cash’s career as a recording artist had stalled. His label was no longer publicizing his releases, and even though his last album, The Baron, had produced a top ten single the album failed to appear in the top 20 on the country charts. Country music had begun moving towards the pop-country hybridization that would define the next three decades of the genre, and Johnny Cash’s relevance (which had peaked a decade before) was fading fast.


The album displays all of the musical tricks of Cash’s early work. The pulsing train-track rhythms that made him famous are on full display in the title song, and it is impossible to listen to “Call Your Mother” without recalling “Flesh and Blood” or Cash’s cover of Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down.” There is a light-hearted duet with June Carter Cash (“Baby Ride Easy”), a dark outlaw ballad (“I Drove Her Out of My Mind”), and an ode to southern life (“Tennessee”). Each of the songs works as what they are, and if you are a fan of peak Cash you will undoubtedly enjoy them individually. If the tracks of this album are shuffled into a playlist, they will meld easily into Cash’s total body of work.

But taken as a whole (and this is how you should listen to it) the album reveals a different Johnny Cash than we’ve ever seen before. He was not yet the man who, along with Rick Rubin, made the American recordings, which are, perhaps, the greatest popular meditation on aging, suffering, and dying in the modern catalogue. He was no longer the wild young man who spent his nights riding high on amphetamines with Waylon Jennings, or the man whose hard won sobriety pushed his songwriting into meditations on the relationship between the singer and the song. The world around him was changing, and he knew it. In “Rock and Roll Shoes” he sings that “guitars and ringin’ tones are in my blood and in my bones…I don’t want to change.” In the first 11 tracks he tries to rediscover the magic that had established his career three decades before. But it doesn’t seem to work. In “Call Your Mother” he recognizes that “we all look funny in our 1950s clothes.” Finally, in “I Came to Believe” he is comes, like an addict confronting his addiction, to the realization that the flow of history is inexorable. For a man who struggled most of his adult life with addiction, it is one of the most personal glimpses of Cash we ever see. That alone is worth the 39 minutes it will take to run through the complete album.

Cash was 49 when he recorded these songs. His peak of popularity was behind him. His highest expressive peak was ahead. Out Among the Stars explores the valley of middle age, when the culture has shifted to a place that you can’t necessarily follow, through the eyes of one of country music’s legends.

On the same day that Out Among the Stars was released, and with much greater fanfare, ATO Records released Bob Dylan in the 80s volume one. An anthology album, Dylan features covers of Dylan’s early 80s catalogue performed by a variety of artists (Reggie Watts, Slash, and Glen Hansard are the most noteworthy). If Out Among the Stars presents the problem of creative relevance from the perspective of a figure whose fame was made playing to the conservative mass culture, Dylan in the 80s casts the same problem from the perspective of the aging counter-culture. At their early peaks it is hard to imagine two artists further apart in their sensibilities than Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan. But in the early 80s, they faced the same problem, how to transition into a new phase of creative life when the needs of the culture are no longer aligned with your expression. There is something almost frantic in Cash’s attempt to prop up the world where his success had been at highest ebb, while much of Dylan’s early 80s output has all the life of a balloon in the last stages of a slow leak. But there is love in the covers, and if your love for the music of Bob Dylan is unconditional you may find some pleasure in them. I hope you do.

Ratings:

Out Among the Stars: 3/4

Dylan in the 80s: 2/4

This content appeared originally at Pop, Shop, and Troll