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I myself happen
to be a little torn when thinking about, or even when feeling Cash’s «serious artistry» on an instinctive level. On one
hand, Johnny’s approach to «Americana» is an unquestionable step-up compared
to its representation in pop culture of the first half of the 20th century.
As a singer, a lyricist, an actor, he makes great strides in subtlety,
sincerity, and unpredictability — building upon the old folk tradition, but
adding new layers of personal introspection, taking great care to think in addition to observe. On the other hand, Johnny
always took care that his work be thoroughly accessible to the simplest out
of the simplest men out there — meticulously constructing his image as the
«man of the people», in ways far more traditional and crude than, for
instance, any of the subsequent mass-appeal rockers like Bruce Springsteen
(or even John Mellencamp, for that matter). This means that it’s usually a
50-50 chance of his subverting, dominating, and sophisticating some
traditionalist trope or cliché when he tackles it, or, on the
contrary, of his slipping into corny pathos or tired old sentimentality that
cannot be redeemed even with the power of his voice. And the line dividing creativity
and good taste, on one side, and pretentious cheesiness, on the other, is so
unbearably thin that even the most experienced and seasoned connoisseurs of
all things Americana will probably end up on different sides of the main
street, hands on their hips and ready to draw.
At least
there’s no arguing that with Ride This
Train, Cash tried to make something different:
a conceptual album where each song begins with a lengthy spoken monolog,
either telling us a story or giving us Johnny’s thoughts on the history and
sociology of the United States of America (often both) as he imagines himself
sitting at an open train window, gazing at all the famours — more usually,
not so famous — landmarks passing him by. While spoken word passages as such
were nothing new to the country-western genre, making them such an integral part
of the experience was an original and bold move on Johnny’s part, as he was
clearly trying to make the best of the artistic freedom granted to him by
Columbia while that good luck still lasted. But is it an experiment that could
really be evaluated as worthy of the risks taken?
Well, technically I would argue that it’s a
failure almost by definition. Music is music, and story-telling (when it is
not done in a musical form) is story-telling; the two things generally belong
in different dimensions, which is precisely why I’ve never been a big fan of
the VH1 Storytellers series, for
instance. For one thing, the concept obviously impacts the album’s factor of
replayability: you might want to
endure Johnny’s stories the first time around, but next time you will be more
likely to want to skip them and get straight to the songs, and there’s even
no way to do that easily, since stories and songs are woven together without
formal track separation. And given that the songs as such are not usually
counted among Johnny’s best (at least, they certainly do not display a lot of
«hit potential»), and that there’s
only eight of them, not counting the bonus tracks on CD editions, this makes
it quite tempting to forget about the album altogether.
For another
thing, the story-telling is... well, ambiguous. When Cash puts his mix of
«folkie simplicity» and «literary introspection» in the context of an actual
song, you can easily disregard the lyrically jarring moments if they are
delivered with sufficient energy, hook-power, and feeling. But when it is
arranged as a just-so-story, I find it pretty hard to tear up at his
stone-faced transformation into the son of a poor coal miner, or a struggling
lumberjack, or an unfortunate inmate put to work on levee construction, or
even John Wesley Hardin himself. It’s not that he doesn’t have enough authenticity to pull off all that
imagery — it’s simply that it isn’t very interesting
authenticity by itself. Had all of us been complete and utter strangers to
human suffering, living some pampered existence à la Paris Hilton, Cash’s stern portrayals of tough life
in ye olde America might have struck a deep chord (provided we’d even have a deep chord to be struck in the
first place). But on a purely verbal level, Johnny is no Dickens or Dostoyevsky
when it comes to describing human suffering; and as for his uniquely powerful
voice, well, in this particular case it just suffers from having the MADE IN PROFOUND WISDOM COUNTY logo
imprinted all over it in blindingly bright colors.
Modern
listeners with modern sensitivity might already be turned off the album in
the first few minutes, during which Cash finds himself obliged to — very
briefly — make a mention of "millions
of people living in teepees along the rivers" who were occupying the
land way before all the protagonists of the eight stories on the album.
"It’s with a little regret that I
think of how I pushed them back / And crowded them out to claim this land for
myself or for another country", Johnny admits before giving a little
phonetic praise to how "the
Indians’ hearts must have been full of music" for giving places
names like Kickapoo or Winnebago, and then leaving the Indian subject
altogether and moving on to describing the plight of white coal miners and
lumberjacks. For the standards of 1960, this was clearly quite a progressive
development, comparable to the contemporary gradual bits of «humanization» of
Native Americans in Western movies; more than half a century later, people
with no proper historical perspective will look at that "with a little regret" bit with
understandable, if somewhat misguided, indignation. But regardless of the
actual year in which we give the record another spin, it feels more likely
that the mention of the Indians is not so much due here to any pangs of social
justice as it is to provide Cash’s narrative with extra vastness and depth —
throw in an extra fifteen millennia or so just in order to flash the man’s
credentials as a certified history teacher, and a really special history teacher at that, as he leaves the
Indian subject with this twist: "But
let’s look a little at the heart and muscle of this land / A few things you
don’t read in books, things that aren’t taught in school". Oh boy...
this is where the cliché-spotting drinking game really begins, I guess.
The sad thing
is that there are quite a few decent songs on the album — not jaw-dropping
obscure highlights, perhaps, but certainly not any worse than the «average»
Cash content that he kept producing for Columbia; however, the fact that you
cannot properly extricate them from the narrative means that they are going
to be inevitably constricted and diminished by it. ‘Loading Coal’, for
instance, is a melancholic and sympathetic contribution from Merle Travis,
the man who wrote more songs about coal mining than Ted Nugent wrote about
pussy hunting — and, unlike all those Hank Williams howls-at-the-moon,
perfectly suited for Johnny’s hard-as-a-rock vocals. There’s a classic
«Hand-of-Doom» jump there to a minor chord on the "loadin’ coal"
conclusion to each verse, symbolizing the futility of any hopes and dreams to
break out of the vicious circle, which seems perfectly tailored for Cash —
Merle Travis himself could never go that low — but just because the song is
buried at the end of the opening trail monolog, it never even had the
slightest chance to compete with the likes of ‘Sixteen Tons’ and ‘Dark As A
Dungeon’ in popular conscience. It could
have been a lot bigger, though.
Another notable
track is ‘Going To Memphis’, which seems to have a rather complicated
history. On the record, it is credited to Alan Lomax, although Alan is much
better known as a «songhunter» than a songwriter — and, in fact, there is an
actual recording in the Lomax Digital Archive of a prison work song called ‘Going
To Memphis’ which he taped on September 16, 1959 at the infamous Parchman
Farm penitentiary. Other than the title, however, and the general chain gang atmosphere,
it has nothing in common with the recording on Ride This Train, which was most likely written by Cash himself,
but left credited to Lomax for some reason (inspiration?). The song uses work
grunts, chain rattle, and pickaxe swings in a fashion not unlike Floyd would
later arrange their cash registers for ‘Money’, but once the band comes into
full swing, acquires a slightly merrier barroom feel courtesy of Floyd
Cramer’s crystal-clear piano runs. As in all the best prison songs, this one
has no place for explicit self-pity; indeed, its nagging "I’m going to Memphis, yeah, going to
Memphis" refrain sounds more threatening than desperate, leaving you
quite in the dark as to the protagonist’s actual plans to take control of his
life back into his own hands.
I’m also pretty
doggone sure that Roy Wood must have been spoofing Cash’s ‘When Papa Played
The Dobro’ with his own ‘When
Gran’ma Plays The Banjo’ from 1973’s Boulders;
Johnny may have deserved it, what with all the melancholic pathos of the tune
outweighing its light humor, but perhaps the biggest irony of the song is
that the dobro parts, in this tune that is allegedly about an amateur
performer’s clumsy, but original approach to the instrument, were recorded by
Harold "Shot" Jackson, one of the country’s primary experts on
bluegrass dobro — try as he might to imitate an «amateur» approach, you
cannot help but discern the professional skill behind it. However, as long as
Johnny himself remains in charge, most of the «extras» on his songs usually
make them more interesting and efficient (as opposed to dreadfully
embarrassing when somebody else takes care of it, yes, I’m talkin’ ’bout you, Sun Records!).
Still, Ride This Train is constructed first
and foremost as a musical equivalent of a portrait gallery, and some of its
eight songs are little else other than rhythmic narratives of various
characters — some of whom jump out of really weird areas of the brain, e.g.
the «benevolent slave driver» stereotype in ‘Boss Jack’ (predated by a
fantastic tale of «Boss Jack» pardoning a slave for slacking in order to
compose ‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot’, no less!), or the heroine of ‘Dorraine Of
Pontchartrain’, whose only purpose seems to be to uphold the stereotype of
Louisiana ladies as overtly sensitive characters. Of all these songs, only
‘Going To Memphis’ was seen fit for single release — and then it became the
first of Cash’s Columbia singles to completely flop on the US Country charts,
which is kinda telling.
Digital
re-releases of the album often include a bunch of bonus tracks recorded at
the same sessions that yielded the LP, including two singles that did actually chart (‘Smiling Bill
McCall’, an educational fable of the danger of overrating and mythologizing
one’s unseen radio heroes; and ‘Second Honeymoon’, whose grim lyrics are a
rather poor match for its upbeat sentimentality) and an almost unbearably
pathetic «instrumental monolog», ‘Ballad Of The Harp Weaver’, which is
basically Johnny reciting a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay. If you like
Edna’s poetry, you might get a kick out of it, and the tale would actually
fit nicely into the Ride This Train
portrait gallery; but I am not a big fan (based on my own very limited
experience, I would tend to agree with those critics who thought there was
way too much 19th century in her 20th century verse — which, admittedly,
would very much agree with Johnny’s own style), and I can see how Cash
himself would have ultimately decided to keep the track off the finished
album for being much too maudlin compared to the general restrained
atmosphere of all the other songs.
Regardless, Ride This Train is still sort of
essential; it’s the first time that Johnny actually decides to
"cash" in (excuse the pun) on his own legend, taking all of us back
to school in a straightforward and explicit way, and it deserves at least to
be given a fair chance, whereupon you can decide for yourself if you want to
enroll in the class voluntarily, or prefer to remain proudly self-educated on
the issues. Personally, I had fun riding the train with Mr. Cash this once,
yet I’m also sure I won’t be signing up for the same tour anytime soon.
There’s just a bit too much tour guide talking for my preferences, and the
landmarks, with a couple notable exceptions, are not quite up to par with the
Grand Canyon.
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