REVIEW: Johnny Cash: The Legend Disc 2 of 4 - Old Favorites and New - Page 3

Come on you've gotta listen unto me
Lay off that whiskey and let that cocaine be

The third in this anti-triumphant crime triumvirate is the 4 minute, 51 second "Doin' My Time" the first of the seven unreleased songs in this release and one of the longest.

It fits right in. The other two new releases, "I'm Never Gonna Roam Again" and "When I'm Gray" also sound like they deserve to be a part of the Cash legacy. However "...Gray" does seem like a muted "When I'm 64." Rodney Crowell, a singer-songwriter behind Emmylou Harris' "Til I Can Gain Control Again" and "Bluebird Wine" also wrote "... Roam Again," in 1980.

"I Will Rock and Roll With You" breaks us out of the routine, crime Americana, with a run through of Cash's musical world at the time (1978):

"They used to call me rockabilly. All of us ran through. When Elvis opened up the door, boo-bop-bebop bam boo."

It's odd to hear Cash give a nod to Elvis Presley, but maybe more he's just stating the reality.

Elvis Costello ("The Big Light"), Bob Dylan ("Forever Young"), Nick Lowe ("Without Love") and others don't add anything to Cash's skills. I'm not such a fan of these precursors to the American Recordings (And I'm not overly fond of them, either) because the songs themselves are not constructed around Cash. They certainly work as songs. But rather than attract they detract from the core of Cash.

However, certainly Cash was happy to break out and try something different; especially so late in life. From the American III liner notes, he writes: "The song is the thing that matters. Before I can record, I have to hear it, and know that I can make it feel like my own, or it won’t work. I worked on those songs until it felt like they were my own."

The shiny exception to the pre-American Recording covers is the Bruce Springsteen penned Highway Patrolman (1983), from the "Johnny 99" album, which brings the best out of both of them; a slice of America caught in the headlights down any rural road. "...Roam Again." achieves the same thing.

Dylan's "Forever Young" from 1994's Red, Hot and Country fundraising album starts out sounding like Lee Greenwood's, "Proud To Be An American." It also sounds like a Desmond Child production. And with the two Giant Talents, mixing, you'd think they would have been more JD and Coke, instead of the cloying, icing sugar on whipping cream on Turbinado brown sugar effect that exists.

Article Author: Temple Stark

A graphic designing wordsmith, with a decade-plus career in community journalism behind me. Take a mean photo, have a new camera, and have been riding the wave of Twitter for more than a year.

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