Johnny Cash by Robert Hilburn

Author:Robert Hilburn [Hilburn, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780316248693
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2013-10-28T16:00:00+00:00

III

Back in Nashville, Bob Johnston got a scare when he returned to the studio and listened to the Folsom tapes.

“I knew John had done a great show, but you never really know what you have on tape until you listen to it, and the one thing that bothered me was the high ceilings in the cafeteria,” Johnston recalls. “That could cause all sorts of problems—and sure enough there was this rumble in the tape that could have ruined the record if we didn’t get rid of it. We spent three weeks in the studio trying all sorts of things to get rid of that sound.

“Finally, I went into the studio with my engineer on a Saturday so we could go over every step to see if we could figure out what was causing the rumble. Just as we sat down, I saw him turn a knob on the speaker and I asked what he was doing. He said, ‘Nothing, man, just putting a little Nashville on it.’ Well, that was the problem. He was putting an echo on it. I walked over and turned it off and there went the rumble. I hadn’t noticed what he was doing until that day. With that fixed, I mixed the entire album that night.”

Johnston captured the spirit of the concert brilliantly, not only picking the final song list but also supplementing the music with actual sounds from the prison, including loudspeaker announcements to the convicts. Cash couldn’t have been happier.

One reason why New York was optimistic about the album’s pop potential was that the Los Angeles Times had devoted an entire page in its Sunday entertainment section to the Folsom concert—largely unprecedented attention from a mainstream newspaper for a Nashville project. The execs were further encouraged when other publications endorsed the album. In Cosmopolitan, noted jazz critic Nat Hentoff defined Cash’s new place in the music spectrum: “He started as a country-and-western storyteller, but he’s gone on to make so strong an impact on the folk and pop fields that now there’s no hemming Johnny Cash into any one category.”

Time magazine, the biggest national journalistic platform of all in the 1960s, added its own rave, calling the collection one of “the most original and compelling pop albums of the year.”

Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison was also embraced strongly by the underground rock radio and press, especially a new national rock journal named Rolling Stone. Aware of the biweekly magazine’s growing cultural impact on the careers of Dylan, Janis Joplin, and other Columbia rock acts, Clive Davis took out a flashy ad for the Folsom Prison album. More significantly, Rolling Stone co-founder Jann Wenner saluted Cash in a passionate and thoughtful essay praising the singer’s profound artistry and his role in the rapidly growing merger of country and rock. At the same time, Tom Donahue, a San Francisco FM disc jockey who helped pioneer underground rock radio in America, started playing the album, which led scores of other FM stations to follow suit.

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