AMERICANA SIN LÁGRIMAS PART THREE

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01.28.2021

AMERICANA SIN LÁGRIMAS PART THREE

Liverpool 1970.

In the 1960s, the dial and the needle had been tuned to The Beatles, Georgie Fame, The Small Faces and the Four Tops.

Country music was “Distant Drums”, sentimental songs and novelty tunes; Ringo acting naturally.

Then Byrds and the Burritos opened the vault. Inside there were undiscovered gems and deep soul and sorrow of Merle Haggard, The Louvin Brothers, even a song that Aretha sang.Then there was Johnny Cash, as sung by The International Submarine Band.

Then I understood.

London – 1979.

I never expected to meet Johnny Cash, let alone in a tall Victorian terrace house in Shepherd’s Bush.

He put out his hand to shake, said “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash” just like he did on stage.

Big as a door.

You might say Nick Lowe had married into the Carter Family, that is his bride was Carlene Carter, daughter of June Carter and the country singer, Carl Smith.

Johnny and June had come to visit at Christmas, as the in-laws do.

John called a recording session in the studio on the ground floor. He suggested Christmas Day but we settled on the Feast Of St. Stephen.

Deep and crisp and even.

The prize of the recording date was undoubtedly Nick’s song “Without Love”, which Johnny owned outright. My own contribution – a few feeble lines on a rare George Jones gospel song – is remarkable only for the thought I actually got to sing on a record with Johnny Cash.

1987 – Mercury.

After that unimaginable season of ingratitude in which Columbia Records contrived to let both Miles Davis and Johnny Cash leave the label, John opened his first Mercury Records release with my song, “The Big Light”. His next record, “Boom-Chicka-Boom” heard drummer, W.S. Holland propelling a song I’d written for Johnny called, “Hidden Shame”.

The song was about a man who carries a terrible secret all of his life in prison:

“They locked me up here for the ideas in my head. They never got me for the thing I really did”.

Johnny delivered the line just like I heard it in my head, the way he sang:

“I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die”

The way he asked Richard Nixon:

“What Is Truth?”

Nick Lowe got closer still with a song he wrote one other time that Johnny and June were staying with him and Carlene, a song eventually among the “American Recordings”:

“The beast in me is caged by frail and fragile bars”

2009 – NYC.

Rosanne Cash recorded an album, “The List” – country songs her father thought she should know. Rose has long since stepped beyond the long shadow of
other people’s expectations, cast by her father’s name.

Her songs are as deep as a river and rich as a ribbon, taking cues from literary prose and poetry as much as Lefty Frizzell.

Rosanne and her husband, John Leventhal are the kind of friends you need.

How could you not enjoy singing harmony on the old Ray Price hit “Heartaches By The Number”?, one of the songs Johnny had recommended to her.

We even wrote a song together for The Imposters and then formed a “supergroup” with Kris Kristofferson, that I always thought should be called “C.C.K”, like
some lost Soviet republic.

Our finest hour was “April 5th”, a song named for the day we recorded it, on which we take a verse each.

It ends with the thought:

“I’m not afraid and I refuse to be I can’t fall, there’s nothing to stop me”

When Johnny and June both passed, I thought of how generous they had been to welcome the pale, trembling young men to their house on the lake at Hendersonville, at the end of the nine-day tear that somehow yielded “Almost Blue”, in 1981.

In 2005, the Imposters and me, along with Larry Campbell on guitar and pedal steel did a run of dates with Emmylou Harris.

We sang songs she’d made timeless with Gram Parsons, we sang songs I’d written for us to sing together, like “Heart Shaped Bruise” and we sang Johnny Cash’s “I Still Miss Someone”.

2014 – NYC.

“Wise Up Ghost” co-producer Steven Mandel and I got to unravel a Billy Sherrill production from Johnny’s last unhappy Columbia Records sessions for a special one-off re-mix.

The accompaniment was a Nashville assembly line playing on a bad day; never less than polished, not quite inspired.

Mandel and I turned a few things upside down, back-to-front and inside out, I added a little baritone guitar through a tremolo amp and an off-beat bass line. We even dubbed-up a melodica line but after all was said and done, the most futuristic thing on the record remained Johnny’s original vocal performance.

2018 – NYC & Hollywood.

John and June’s son, John Carter Cash and co-producer, Steve Berkowitz asked me to write some music for “Forever Words” – settings of Johnny’s poetic writings.
The first, “I’ll Still Love You”, imagined Johnny’s words in an orchestral arrangement I wrote in echo of Willard Robison – the composer of “I Guess I’ll Go Back Home This Summer”, the second, “If You Love Me” was a first-take, rock and roll ballad with The Imposters.

1989 – The Royal Albert Hall, London.

I’d already sung “The Big Light” with Johnny at a little club in Harlesden and we’d each made a guest appearance that night, when he summoned Nick Lowe and I to join him and The Carter Family in the finale of a Royal Albert Hall show.

Several choruses into the closing song, June eased over to me, attempting to hide in the background.
She said, “You take the next verse”.

“I can’t”, I replied.

“Why not?”, June asked.

I answered, truthfully. “Because you’ve sung all the verses that I know”.

“Then make one up”, June said with a smile.

And I did, right there on the spot.

The name of the song was “Will The Circle Be Unbroken”.

To be continued……

1) OUR LITTLE ANGEL – Elvis Costello from “King Of America”

2) HEARTACHES BY THE NUMBER – Rosanne Cash with Elvis Costello from “The List”

3) SONG WITH ROSE – Elvis Costello & The Imposters from “Momofuku”

4) APRIL 5th – Rosanne Cash, Kris Kristofferson & Elvis Costello from “Unfaithful Music Soundtrack”