David Cantwell writes:

Johnny Cash would have turned 78 last week, an anniversary that was marked, inevitably, by the release of a new Johnny Cash album. In The New Yorker, critic Ben Greenman wrote a brief review of the album that I thought was mostly on target but also a bit wide of the mark.

Greenman begins by praising the album, saying that “You couldn’t ask for a more dignified farewell.” Then:

“You could, however, ask for a more accurate one. This volume is a stark reminder of how the Rubin years have shifted our sense of Cash, and not for the better. Rubin’s Cash has become an indelible character, an aged seer given to stark pronouncements on faith, love, and mortality. But he is also a poor representative of all the other Johnny Cashes—the one who drove the Tennessee Two through the boom-chicka-boom Sun singles, the historian of American song, the sometimes goofy “Old Golden Throat,” the prison activist, the Man in Black, the Highwayman.”

“It’s that versatility that’s lost here,” Greenman continues. “[I]f the first few records in the series were more varied, later ones find Cash narrowed if not quite flattened. Accepting Rubin’s version of the man is like reducing Picasso to lickerish drawings of Jacqueline or Eliot to “Four Quartets.” Cash may now seem like a John Wayne figure, but he was closer in spirit to Robert Mitchum, always restless and always changing, and here each stark, lovely cover (Sheryl Crow’s “Redemption Day,” Tom Paxton’s “Can’t Help But Wonder Where I’m Bound”) begs for a “Dirty Old Egg-Sucking Dog” or “Put the Sugar to Bed.” Cash could always do solemnity, but he could also do comedy, character sketches, and cornpone philosophy. And he could do it in his own write: the Rubin reboot frames Cash primarily as an interpreter, but he was also a prolific songwriter. Here, the sole Cash original, “I Corinthians 15:55,” a gentle piece rooted in Scripture (“O, Death, where is thy sting?”), hits the same valedictory note as the rest of the collection. Rubin shouldn’t be blamed for leaving us with this Cash. But he shouldn’t be allowed to run away with the thing, either. Cash’s American period should go down in history as a triumph of record making and a cautionary tale about remaking image.”

I’ve been stressing a similar point to people since the release of Cash’s first Rubin-produced album in 1994. If you believe anything akin to Cash’s artistic essence can be distilled down to the psychic distress of “The Beast in Me,” or if you think Cash is cool only because he sometimes sings murder ballads like “Delia’s Gone,” then you are missing the whole man by quite a margin. You’d find it informative, perhaps even rewarding, to familiarize yourself with the life’s work of this particular country legend. There’s a great deal more to him than the dark and tortured icon of the Rubin-years.

So it is important to remember that the Cash presented to us on the six American albums is incomplete. But it is quite another thing to suggest that “Rubin’s Cash” is not only incomplete but somehow inaccurate. I’ve been sensing this overcorrection for a while now. The conventional wisdom with the Rubin records has shifted from a necessary caveat—careful; there’s more to Cash than this Cash—toward a denunciation—This Cash is not really Cash.

It really is. Cash sang darkly of life’s dark side throughout his career. The American albums are an incomplete picture of Cash, that’s true. Cash was all sorts of things. He was a brutal realist and a hopeless romantic. He was a drug addict, a lover of Americana, and a songwriter’s friend. He was a Bible scholar and a history buff, a political activist and a hyper-patriot. He was, famously, a husband and father (and, also famously, a father-in-law). He was cutting edge and traditional. Sometimes he was John Wayne and other times, as Greenman notes, he was a Robert Mitchum type. And also, I’d add, Billy Graham and Will Rogers and Jerry Lewis (seriously) and…you get the idea.

The albums Johnny Cash made with Rick Rubin are “a poor representative,” as Greenman writes, “of all those other Johnny Cashes,” but they are hardly an inaccurate representation of the particular Cash they present.

American VI is a beautiful album from its opening, chain-rattling title track (which is not so much defiant in the face of death as it is accepting; no grave can hold a man whose soul is bound for heaven) to the Cash original “1 Corinthians 15:55″ (the American sessions have consistently underscored the importance of country gospel music to CAsh) to its sweet Hawaiian farewell, “Aloha Oe.” It is a beautiful album and, yes, an album that doesn’t begin to encompass the variety of Cash’s catalogue. But which Cash album has done that? Johnny 99? Everybody Loves a Nut? The Fabulous Johnny Cash? That’s asking a lot from an album.

Bruce Springsteen’s stark and solemn Nebraska misses its Springsteenian “Ramrod” rave-up and soaring sax solo, but this is only a problem if we expect every Springsteen album to do every Springsteen thing. The potential pitfall, rather, as I’ve seen it, with Cash’s final, Rubin-esque recordings is not their necessarily partial presentation of a great artist but the tendency of some members of his audience, especially many young and new members who don’t know any better (but are wrong just the same), to mistake these concluding pieces for the whole. The American Recordings, even when taken together, explore incompletely Cash’s many sides. But we could as correctly note that Cash’s Americana series from his early Columbia years—1959’s Songs of the Soil, 1960’s Ride This Train, 1963’s Blood Sweat and Tears, 1964’s Bitter Tears (1963, Greenman says here that it’s being reissued. Yeah!), and 1965’s Ballads of the True West—are equally limited in their Cashian range, and in their arrangement choices. Ditto for Cash’s several gospel albums, and for his pair of live prison-centric prison albums. All individual art works are limited in this sense.

And even if you don’t buy want I’m selling above, there’s still the issue of responsibility. “Rubin’s Cash,” “Rubin’s version of the man,” “Rubin shouldn’t be blamed for leaving us with this Cash. But he shouldn’t be allowed to run away with the thing, either.” These sorts of phrases, representative of so many other recent reviews, seem to believe that Cash didn’t do this work; he had this work done to him. But if we’re going to beef that the American Recordings are inadequate as life summary, as of course they must be, Cash deserves at least as much of the blame as his producer. Personally, I think Rubin and Cash both deserve not blame but praise. The American coda saved Cash from obscurity, after all, and without it, I’m not sure we’d have gotten all these Cash reissues, Cash posthumous releases, Cash tributes, Cash books and films. Without it, I’m not sure nearly so many people today would even care about all of those other Cashes.

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