More on covers...

Johnny Cash went out in style. His fertile pairing in those last years with Rick Rubin tapped a rich vein of soulful performance, recorded in a way in tune with the moment, and yet that I think will prove timeless.

Johnny Cash is a commanding performer and a deep, historied , dark personality, a known symbol in an of himself in American culture.

Whether he or his management put together this pairing of Rubin and Cash, it’ll preserve his legacy, and it was an extended parting shot at extending his songbook, and cementing his name across generations in popular culture.

But I feel Rubin’s fingerprints all over these song choices, or at least the ones we’re looking at, and while the old man wasn’t exactly propped up and asked to sing songs he didn’t know at all, sometimes, well, it feels kinda close to that. That the commanding performer Cash was, and the personality he established across decades, it carried him gloriously doing those Danzig, Nice Cave, Depeche Mode, Soundgarden, Tom Petty, Neil Diamond, NiN, U2 songs. And while I wouldn’t change it, it doesn’t seem like the same achievement that creating the persona was. I want to hear the Folsom prison record over and over again still, and I’m dying to see his TV show if it ever comes out on DVD.

Lately I’ve been listening to the Rubin-produced Neil Diamond CD, and honestly there’s more original material on that one disc that I like and see merit in than in the whole American catalog of Cash.

So I agree, I See a Darkness, a great song and a great cover, among many covers he did then, chosen for him or by him. I like the original and listen to it often honestly, and in the context of an amazing record Will Oldham conceived. Cash actually gave me more insight into the lyrics with his delivery and made me revisit it. But it was already a song I saw carried a lot of meaning.

I listen with wonder to inventive covers like Joel Phelps (whose vocal style admittedly could be gated and trimmed about 10% of the time) and his piano version of Guns of Brixton by the Clash, as he pulls that song into a while new context and light. Or M Ward doing his sensually acoustic version of Bowie’s Let’s Dance. Man, those are glorious reinventions. I could listen to those over and over again.

Cash didn’t really make art with covers that way for me in those last days. He added good songs to his songbook of competency, and a couple times his authority and delivery really brought new life and fresh eyes to a song for me, like with U2’s “One”, and all this work late in life was probably the best he could do at the time, and it’s often enjoyable as hell to listen to, and it’s a dignified parting shot-- but not the meat of the matter of Johnny Cash, and it’s not the kind of art that a weird, cool, perceptive treatment in a cover can be.

That would be my two copper.

~Arum

currently listening to "Save Me a Saturday Night" by Neil Diamond