Gob Iron: Death Songs for the Living

I’m relieved that Gob Iron is just a side project from alternative-country howlers Jay Farrar (of bands Son Volt and Uncle Tupelo) and Anders Parker (of Varnaline)… not because it’s bad, but because it’s intense. Never has an album lived up to its title so strongly. Death Songs for the Living hits hard, heavy, and slow with a handsome grin – like death. But (also like death) these songs still manage to demand both appreciation and deep respect.

Farrar’s voice is the essence of man, with deep, musky overtones coming from the stiff mouth of a cowboy. The instrumental accompaniment plumps each somber melody beautifully and feeds Farrar’s twang. Death Songs‘ 19 tracks shouldn’t scare anyone away – half are 15-second instrumentals, each of which have an individual charm, and the songs for the most part are brief, usually telling a story, like those a depressed ranchero would sing.

Recorded while Farrar and Parker locked themselves away in St. Louis, their updated twist of classic folk songs is remarkable in that it hits its mark so well that an additional album would tilt the whole death theme too far into Gob’s court. On opening track “Death’s Black Train,” Farrar’s vocals strike first, giving an immediate country feel soaked in vintage; but tender and slow, not the show-off, look-at-my-rhinestone-spurs country that would never fall from Gob Iron’s plate.

Most songs play out a story, and once you think you have them all down, one will pop up with lyrics you least expect. For instance, “Wayside Tavern” begins slowly, and sounds like an ode to a favorite watering hole. Of course the singer meets a pretty girl at the bar, and you might think the song will lead next into the familiar realm of country love, but instead you hear: “I felt her knife stick in my back / I turned and saw her lover on it / She said his name is Barney Jack… And now I sing beneath the ground.” Farrar’s voice never changes tempo from the slow-dripping shadows under a hat’s Western brim, which is what makes these lyrics so striking.

A few songs do jump from the Grapes of Wrath’s soft dustbowl settings – “Nicotine Blues” runs a tinge faster than usual, and an electric guitar chord slices through the song for the first time on the album (it’s song number 11), but Farrar’s voice is still there and still warm. “Buzz and Grind” brings about the everyday working man side that laces through the record strongly, and “Little Girl and Dreadful Snake”’s blatant symbolism warns parents never to let their children stray in more ways than one.

Death Songs for the Living plays more like a continuous stream of melancholy mourning coos lassoed out of Oklahoma than individual melodies from two wandering Midwestern musicians. With the instrumentals layered between songs, it might have been intended to have this globular effect, and I like it to an extent, but the huge block of down-and-out music makes it harder to pick up and listen to on a regular basis. Gob Iron’s album is great for a slow spin, but be forewarned, the more you listen to it, the more depressed you will become.

- Laura Misjak

Jay Farrar’s Official Site
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David & The Citizens: until the sadness is gone

Sometimes, before I review an album, I like to play a game. I like to stare at the cover and figure out what the record’s going to be about. There are moments when this game is surprisingly satisfying; for example, go to allmusic. Choose any Ted Nugent record and look at the cover. See?! You already know what the music is about! Now, look at the cover of David & The Citizens’ until the sadness is gone. While I stared at this record, I decided it was:

1. Going to be indie as fuck (I never said that my predictions were particularly insightful).
2. Perhaps influenced by Gulliver’s Travels.
3. Wistful, with an air of romance and sepia and postcards.

So was I right? Well, the “indie as fuck” was certainly right. David & The Citizens come off as a blend of the Decemberists, the Thermals (whose album is definitely in the running for my absolute favorite of the year) and – especially on “as you fall (i watch with love)” – Bright Eyes. The most delightful thing about until the sadness, though, is its restless energy. The sound of this album makes everything, even a Michigan November, seem a little perkier. Listen to “let’s not fall apart”; despite its melancholy lyrical themes, the song sounds bright and rosy yellow. Also on the plus side is the fact that the Citizens employ a horn section. On songs such as “silverjacketgirl,” David & The Citizens throw in a thrashy bit of ska which gives their incredibly indie nature a bit of stand up, punch your fist in the air, and remember when you were young enough to think that going to Warped Tour was a good idea.

On the other hand, my main problem with this album is how close the songwriting sways toward Saddle Creek territory. Ten thousand pounds of feeling sad for sad’s sake, a million relationships shattered on the sidewalk, and of course, the inevitable references to getting drunk to drown away the worries of the world. For listeners with a taste for that sort of melodrama, David & The Citizens have probably made one of the best albums of the year. But for older listeners who no longer need their emotions spoonfed to them, just stick around for the instrumentals. And whatever side of the spectrum you fall upon, you should at least give until the sadness is gone a chance.

- Megan Giddings

David & The Citizens’ MySpace Page
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The Harry Smith Project Live

You might not think you know Harry Smith; but if you have even a passing familiarity with the last fifty years of traditional folk music, you certainly know his work. A fanatical record collector, archivist and ethnomusicologist (as well as an artist, filmmaker and all-around eccentric), Smith compiled the three-volume, six-disc Anthology of American Folk Music for Smithsonian Folkways in 1952, arguably the first such collection of obscure folk, blues and hillbilly 78s on LP and certainly the most influential. A mere glance at the songs brought to public attention by Smith’s Anthology is enough to prove its monumental impact on popular music as we know it: “John the Revelator,” “The House Carpenter,” “Single Girl, Married Girl,” “Frankie [and Johnny]“; the list goes on and on.

Hence The Harry Smith Project, the latest in record producer (and, like Smith, noted eccentric) Hal Willner’s seemingly endless stream of tribute albums and concerts, the goal of which is to shed more light on both the brilliance of the original Anthology and its lasting influence. And true to form – this is, after all, the guy who compiled a Mingus tribute with Vernon Reid, Keith Richards, Robert Quine and Chuck D – Willner has assembled a decidedly motley crew. The Harry Smith Project Live features performances by Lou Reed, Nick Cave, Van Dyke Parks, Beck, Sonic Youth, Elvis Costello, Todd Rundgren, David Thomas, and a hell of lot more besides. And the amazing thing is, all of it is good.

Or at least, about 95% of it is. The beauty of Willner’s approach here is that it’s often the combinations of artist and material which sound positively wince-worthy on paper that end up coming off best – like the shuddering version of “Dry Bones” performed by Sonic Youth and avant-garde jazz trombonist Roswell Rudd, or the eerie duet on “The House Carpenter” by Rundgren and Robin Holcomb. Most surprising of all is a Blind Lemon Jefferson cover by the man who once preclaimed that the only rule he made for the early Velvet Underground was “no blues licks”: Reed’s “See That My Grave is Kept Clean,” though admittedly mining the same old fuzzed-out noodling and phrasing gymnastics which have long gone from his stock in trade to a depressing self-parody, is somehow shockingly good.

Yet even The Harry Smith Project’s more “obvious” triumphs still make for some excellent music. Cave’s “John the Revelator” could have sat comfortably on the track lists of his mid-’80s classics The Firstborn is Dead or Kicking Against the Pricks; Costello’s “The Butcher’s Boy” finds the punk-era troubador in a cathartic British folk mode I wish he’d return to more often; and every time Kate and Anna McGarrigle take the stage, their haunting Carter Family-style harmonies command one’s complete and undivided attantion. Indeed, there are so many musical highlights to be experienced here, it seems more effective to point out those rare moments when the show falls flat: most problematically with the appearance by A Mighty Wind’s fictional folk trio “The Folksmen” ( a.k.a. Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer), which is funny enough but feels incongruous amongst the other performers, more like a live-action trailer for Guest’s movie than a tribute to Harry Smith – especially since the song they sing, “Old Joe’s Place,” bears a Guest/McKean/Shearer writing credit and has decidedly little to do with the Anthology of American Folk Music.

In a sense, though, that bizarre cameo by Guest and company does say something about Harry Smith, simply because the good-natured, gee-whiz folk festival schtick of the Folksmen is about as far from Smith’s vision of traditional American music as it got. Though it undeniably inspired ’50s and ’60s folk revival acts like the Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul & Mary, the Anthology of American Folk Music had much more in common with the “Old Weird America” enshrined by Greil Marcus and upheld by everyone from late ’60s Bob Dylan to Will Oldham, Lambchop, Captain Beefheart, and even Jandek. This is passionate, spectral, violent and often desperate Americana, and as such, it makes sense to cast idiosyncratic artists like those already mentioned in its reenactment; there’s even a good chance that Smith, far from a folk purist himself, would have preferred it.

And let’s not forget that this is a tribute to Smith we’re dealing with, as much as it is a tribute to his legendary anthology; thus two of the most fascinating moments in The Harry Smith Project Live end up straying away from the topic of folk music and into the oddball personality of the archivist himself. There’s a recollection by the Fugs’ Ed Sanders of a visit from Smith which ended in the destruction of a few “learned journals,” coupled with some video footage from the 1980s of a wheedling, elderly Smith on the phone, complaining to a friend about the way the camera crew is making him look. Even more revelatory is Phillip Glass’ performance of his “Etude No. 10″ over footage taken from one of Smith’s various experimental film shorts: an abstract animation sequence in the tradition of Oskar Fischinger. It’s sequences like these which remind one that Harry Smith was more than just a footnote in folk music history – he was an influential artist in his own right, as well as a living, breathing person, with as many flaws and idiosyncrasies as the indelible records he compiled.

Frankly, the only real misgiving I have about the stand-alone Harry Smith Project DVD is that it’s almost too tempting a preview of Shout! Factory’s full-length four-disc box set to be justified. If you’re a fan of more than a handful of the artists above and want to see what they can do with one of popular music’s most beloved songbooks, or even if you just love American roots music and aren’t afraid to see some daring modern interpretations, you’ll want the extended version; especially since it features a smattering of tracks which the DVD does not, including appearances by Wilco and Marianne Faithfull and additional tracks by Cave, Thomas, Sanders and others. Granted, the single-disc edition is a lot easier on the old pocketbook. But after getting a taste of The Harry Smith Project, I can say for certain that my Christmas list just got one item longer.

- Zach Hoskins

Harry Smith on Wikipedia
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The Nice Boys

The anti-retro brigadeers of Indieland must hate the Nice Boys. Here’s a band with absolutely zero illusions about the roots of their sound: namely, the plaid-trousered, platform-booted glam rock of the early ’70s. Their cover art comes straight out of the Every Picture Tells a Story reject pile, their logo suggests the Sweet’s, and on “Dugong Along” (sounds sorta like a Marc Bolan title, no?), they even brazenly cop the riff from Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll.” In short, the Nice Boys have “retro” written all over them, from their velvet jackets to their Faces shags. But you know what? I happen to like ‘em – and it’s precisely because when it comes to classicist glam rock, these guys are the real teenyboppin’ deal.

Now I know what you’re probably thinking. “Authentic glam,” like “soft metal” and “hip country,” is a glaring contradiction in terms; how could a band working in a genre whose greatest claim to fame involves grown men in patent leather and glitter on their cheeks (let alone one which actually tries to recreate said genre decades later) possibly be “real” in any way, shape or form? The answer is that the Nice Boys, unlike neo-glam fellow travelers like Louis XIV and the now-departed Darkness, aren’t an entertaining cliche or a tongue-in-cheek musical pastiche; they understand that glam, like any other style, has a history and a tradition, and they inhabit it with both skill and aplomb. Many of these tunes (“Johnny Guitar,” Another Girl”) borrow more from pre- and post-glam power pop than from Mott the Hoople or Slade; and even when the allusions to the glam era are more (ahem) direct, as on opening track “Teenage Nights,” the prodigious songwriting of guitarist Gabe Lageson, bassist Colin Jarrell, and lead singer Terry Six conjure images of pre-Beatles American pop music via Joey Ramone’s snotty delivery, and remind us that glam rock was, after all, as much about recapturing the thrill of unpretentious rock’n'roll radio as it was about hip thrusts and drag-queen posturing.

And that’s really what the Nice Boys’ appeal boils down to. Other groups may already have the groupie-fucking, lingerie-wearing “dirty sweet” side of glam nailed down; but how many of those other groups can turn out an exuberant mid-album Small Faces-via-Elephant 6 dead ringer like “Avenue 29,” or close the proceedings with a delicate psych-pop ballad turned stadium shaker like “Cheryl Anne (Carry On)”? The Nice Boys aren’t reinventing the wheel here – I’ll be the first to admit that. But leave your prejudices at the door, and what you’ve got is a fine debut record by a promising group, one which sums up the youthful passion and pop-art appeal of glam rock as succinctly as any other you might care to name…even if it did come about 35 years too late.

- Zach Hoskins

The Nice Boys’ MySpace Page
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Katamine: Lag

Brothers and Sisters, let me tell you this: FREAK FOLK LIVES. We might have been able to pretend that it had disappeared and died, between the lack of a new Devendra Banhart record this year and the continued presence of smarmy contemporary folk in the form of bands like the Shimmers. But with the release of Lag by Israeli indie-folkers (and Banhart opening act) Katamine, we can rest assured that long beards and woodland bops won’t be going out of style anytime soon.

The only thing is, Katamine is not your indie snob’s traditional freak folk. In fact, Lag would probably be better termed as your angsty goth younger sibling’s folk. Lyrics such as, “feel free to steal my pulse / with your electric corpse / a dead man loves to sing / about my sufferings,” are not what one might expect from such a quiet, simple, lovely album.

It’s through this tension between musical beauty and lyrical ugliness that Lag forces a listener to question their complicity in music. Katamine makes lovely, slow, melodic folk music. The lyrics generally crumple and fold upon themselves, so that only with intensity are they even acknowledged. But ignoring the lyrics is like ignoring the problem. There is a deep undercurrent of vivid, indigo trouble running throughout this album. There are moments when you even worry for lead singer/songwriter Assaf Tager’s safety and sanity: “we’ll get a Winchester gun /and shoot everyone / but that won’t get you through this / take off as far / as you can work out a plan / but that won’t get you through this.” It would be easy to accept lyrics like these with a layer of Nick Cave or Jeffrey Lee Pierce camp. But the slow silence of Katamine is worth thinking about. This album does not lend itself to easy recommendation, because the more one listens to it, the more it slows and folds itself over and over into an ominous amount of dust.

Overall, Lag is an album that lends itself more to discussion than to listening pleasure. I couldn’t imagine being locked in a hole with only this album to listen to: I would probably be reduced to an emotional slag of tears and no self-esteem. But the more I describe this record, the more I think about it, the more engaged I am with it. The problem is, I can’t tell if the album is good or if just the idea behind it is. There is an almost deafening dullness to the music which does repel a listener, but at the same time, it makes you want to engage with it. In the end, the consideration that must be made when buying this album can be summed up like this: do you like music for its sound? Or do you like music for its ideas?

- Megan Giddings

Katamine’s Official Site
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Norfolk & Western: The Unsung Colony

There are some bands who truly do deserve their name. A prime example of this is Norfolk & Western, with their moniker reminiscent of old-timey street corners and all the events that occur on said street corners. No, we’re not talking about prostitution here (we’ll get to prostitution whenever 2 Live Crew releases something again). We’re talking about the romantic movie street corners where lovers kiss in the rain, people wave heartbroken goodbyes out the back windows of taxi cabs, and Gene Kelly clips and rat-tat-tats and swings around streetlamps. There may never be direct homages to these events in the music of Norfolk & Western, but there is a feeling of some external, beautiful, cinematic supernatural.

Of course, besides its strong emotional resonance, The Unsung Colony also sports a bit of intellectualism that can be very off-putting. The lyrics often read more like shattered short fiction than choruses and verses, and this does not always lend itself to making Norfolk & Western very likable. When frontman Adam Selzer sings, “We were both reading Leviathan / Not necessarily your best seller” during “The Shortest Stare” (which is otherwise a very, very, very well-written song) it makes me want to run fast, fast, fast as I can towards my Stooges records. The problem is, Norfolk & Western is a very smart, literate, sensitive band; and while I am all for smart literacy (shit, y’all, I actually like modernism), there are moments when their smarts and talent come off as just a little too precious. Beneath all of these sweet songs lies a fear that while you’re listening to them you will drowse off, then wake up and suddenly look as if you are on the cover of Underachievers Please Try Harder.

Still, those moments don’t happen all of the time. In fact, there are far less precious moments here than on Sufjan Stevens’ records (although “Banish All Rock” could be considered some active competition – watch your back, Soof-yan), and last year he became a god among indie kids. What’s more, if you listen to “The New Rise of Labor” with its awesome marimba and ukulele, The Unsung Colony is also a reminder that cute can still fucking rock. Even when all you’re talking about is moving out west for a job.

- Megan Giddings

Norfolk & Western’s Official Site
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Fernando: Enter to Exit

On listening to Enter to Exit, the latest album by Portland-via-Argentina singer-songwriter Fernando Viciconte, my first thought was, “man, this guy must really like Elliott Smith.” Not only is there the coincidence of the two artists’ shared musical homebase, but all of the usual Smith hallmarks are present and accounted for: soft, plaintive vocals, lush Beatlesesque arrangements, etc. The second track, “One Trick Pony,” is even about heroin, with decidedly Smithian lyrics such as “I’d like to see what it’s like / when the needle meets the spike.” But as easy as it would be to just rubber stamp “File Under XO” on this review and move on with my life, the fact is, Enter to Exit is just too good an album to deserve that kind of a write-off.

For one thing, Viciconte has been doing this shit for at least as long as Elliott had – his debut album Season in Hell came out in 1996, just two years after Smith’s Roman Candle, and like Smith, he did time in a harder rock band before branching into hushed pop territory, in his case as frontman for the Los Angeles group Monkey Paw. More to the point, Fernando’s musical territory is both broader and richer than most indie songwriters could even hope to achieve; aside from the Smith-alikes “Pony” and opener “Howard Hughes,” Enter to Exit also features trumpet-laden torch balladry (“Mariana”), manic music-hall pop (“The Reluctant Deity”), and – probably best of all – an absolute dead-ringer for ‘67-era Lennon called “From Now On.” And those are but a few examples.

Granted, not everything works – or at least not quite as well as in the aforementioned examples. “From Now On” is pretty solidly positioned as the “climax” of this record; the following four tracks, from the alt-country weeper “The Devil’s in the Sky” to the mournful (and occasionally monotonous) closer “Waiting,” take a little more work to unpack. But then, if the best criticism I can come up with is that Fernando has delivered an album one third of which isn’t as immediately lovable as the rest, then I should think he’s done a pretty decent job. Give Enter to Exit a spin, and I think you’ll agree.

- Zach Hoskins

Fernando’s Official Site
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Johnny Cash At San Quentin

“God, I’ve never seen anything like it,” producer Bob Johnston recalls in the liner notes to Columbia/Legacy’s deluxe reissue of Johnny Cash At San Quentin. “When Cash sang ‘San Quentin, may you rot and burn in hell,’ they were on the tables yelling. A lot of the guards were up on the runways with loaded guns, backing up the doors, and I’m backed up to the door with all these guards with guns, and I’m thinking, ‘Man! I should have brought Tammy Wynette and George Jones – anybody but Johnny Cash!”

When Johnny Cash walked through the gates of the California State Pentitentiary at San Quentin on February 24, 1969, he was undeniably one of country music’s greatest stars. But he was also one of the edgiest. Since the beginning of his career on Sun Records in the late 1950s, Cash had spent the night in jail on seven separate occasions, including a run-in with Texas narcotic officers for smuggling amphetamines over the Mexican border. He was banned from the Grand Ole Opry in the early ’60s after kicking out the footlights of the Ryman Auditorium in a drug-fuelled rage. Simply put, Johnny Cash was a badass; a naturally born rebel who drew from the energy and attitude of rock’n'roll along with classic country and western, who had been riling up incarcerated audiences in prison performances for nearly as long as he’d been playing music, and who on that fateful day at San Quentin, as Johnston notes, very nearly incited a prison riot.

That rebellious attitude accounts for much of the enduring popularity of At San Quentin: a document of the 1969 show which, listened to in the right context, can hold the same amount of visceral impact as the Stooges’ Metallic K.O. No, there aren’t any bottles being thrown – just tin prison cups, in a moment one might recall from the brilliant if anachronistic “Folsom Prison” sequence in James Mangold’s Walk the Line - but as on the previous year’s “brother album” At Folsom Prison, the interplay between Cash and his “captive audience” (as well as the tension between Cash, the inmates, and the guards) is palpable.

And, even more than at Folsom, Cash himself is on fire for much of the show: he bellows his way through his performance, making even much-derided novelty material like “A Boy Named Sue” sound positively dangerous, and rides his trademark “steady like a train, sharp like a razor” sound right off the rails with a breakneck version of “Wreck of the Old 97,” howling like an engine whistle as he goes down. Even from a distance of almost three decades, it’s thrilling stuff.

But what the Legacy reissue reveals, and what wasn’t readily apparent either on the original ten-track LP or on the expanded 18-track reissue in 2000, is that the Cash of San Quentin is more than just a wildman or an outlaw; he’s a seasoned pro, both in terms of pure showmanship and in the skill with which he “walks the line” between wholesome entertainment and subversion. When the Man in Black, after anticipation-building sets by Carl Perkins, the Statler Brothers and the Carter Family, takes the stage to the strains of “Big River,” his usual introduction of “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash” is delivered with the smug tone of a returning hero, a marked difference from the almost paternal greeting which opened At Folsom Prison. And though it would be out of the question to suggest that Cash gave any less than his all at the San Quentin performance, the medley he plays of “The Long Black Veil” and “Give My Love to Rose” comes off as a little rote, a veteran entertainer knocking a couple of chestnuts out of the way so he can get to the good stuff.

Of course, when he does get to the good stuff, it’s arguably never been better. The moment – preserved on all three versions of the album – when a defiant Cash debuts his song “San Quentin” to violent applause, then turns around and plays it all over again, is arguably one of the most emotionally overwhelming moments in the history of recorded music. And while much has been made of the naivete in playing “Starkville City Jail” (a humorous little ditty about being arrested for picking flowers) in front of a bunch of convicted murderers and rapists, the warmth and empathy with which Cash delivers his prison narrative and its accompanying anecdote helps to make it a modest and effective parable about the futility of American justice.

But then, the quality of the music was never really in question; chances are, most longtime fans of Johnny Cash have already heard it (albeit in somewhat truncated form) and know how great it is. Instead, the question on many of these fans’ lips is undoubtedly whether a three-disc reissue of the set is worth the extra (if you’ll pardon the pun) cash.

The answer to that question largely depends on the individual listener, and their impressions of Johnny Cash himself. Strictly speaking, the additional music on this set adds very little to At San Quentin’s badass reputation; whereas the “classic” incarnation of the album, and even the 2000 expanded edition, made the best of their conciseness, coming off to many listeners as one sustained adrenaline rush, this version captures a “Johnny Cash Show” whose showbiz package mentality and Vegas-style instrumental transitions between acts sound bizarrely incongruous in the middle of a maximum security penitentiary.

Don’t get me wrong, the supporting cast is great: Perkins sounds barely a day older than his own Sun Records peak on both “Blue Suede Shoes” and the latter-day “Restless”; the Carter Family is unimpeachable as always; and though the Statler Brothers are clearly the most dated-sounding act on the bill, their psych-country hit “Flowers on the Wall” (best known today for its use on the Pulp Fiction soundtrack) is charming and well-performed. But in terms of actual unearthed Cash material, only the aforementioned “Long Black Veil” medley, a cover of Billy Edd Wheeler’s “Blistered,” and versions of “Orange Blossom Special” and “Jackson” (both inferior to their counterparts on At Folsom Prison) make their debut here. And while that “Blistered” cover is both hard-rocking and appealingly horny (and, with its backing vocals by Cash’s mother- and sisters-in-law, more than a little bizarre), its two-minute running time is hardly enough to justify another purchase by those who merely want to relive the outlaw panache of this classic album.

Perhaps, though, the fact that the expanded Johnny Cash At San Quentin isn’t quite the vicarious thrill as its previous editions isn’t such a bad thing. Like many of the recent Cash collections from Legacy (Personal File, the reissued Children’s Album), this San Quentin is more of a historical document than an addition to the storied Legend of Johnny Cash. It presents to us a truly complete and well-rounded portrait of both the performer and the man himself, from the snarling Man in Black bravado of “Wanted Man” to the sentimental family nostalgia of “Daddy Sang Bass.” And it leads one to the conclusion that, while stories like Johnston’s sure paint a hell of a picture – what if Cash had gone just an inch too far and provoked violence in the audience? – in the end, the man who closes his show with a series of gospel ballads just doesn’t have it in him to start a prison uprising. His heart, however troubled, is much too big for that.

Some people might not like that realization, just like plenty of people didn’t like previous attempts at “softening” Cash, from the aforementioned Walk the Line biopic to the collection of traditional hymns which marked the final release of his lifetime. Those people are advised to stay away from the expanded At San Quentin and just stick to the original, along with the American Recordings series, the Murder compilation, and any number of other releases which cement the classic image of Cash the rebel. But in an era when shrill, one-dimensional caricatures of country hellraising like Hank III are elevated as “the real deal,” in my eyes, it’s always good to look back at a giant of American music who was as three-dimensional as they came. To quote a song made famous by Cash himself, Here Was a Man. And here, now in its complete and unexpurgated form, is one of his greatest moments.

- Zach Hoskins

Johnny Cash’s Official Site
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