Review: Johnny Cash - Ride This Train (1960)
Tracks: 1) Loading Coal; 2) Slow Rider; 3) Lumberjack; 4) Dorraine Of Ponchartrain; 5) Going To Memphis; 6) When Papa Played The Dobro; 7) Boss Jack; 8) Old Doc Brown; 9*) The Fable Of Willie Brown; 10*) Second Honeymoon; 11*) Ballad Of The Harp Weaver; 12*) Smiling Bill McCall.
REVIEW
At the exact same time while Cash’s old record label was busy with (non-consensual) sodomizing of his musical legacy, Johnny himself was busy making a new record for his new record label that would end up being one of the most divisive albums of his career. Anywhere you go, you’ll find a bunch of zealous fans waving Ride This Train around as a masterpiece of integrating music with the art of story-telling and the genuine American spirit, and another bunch of skeptical fans dismissing the record as a well-meaning, ambitious misfire, in which both the music and the story-telling end up diminishing, if not downright canceling out, each other. As usual, the truth is somewhere in between, or, rather, just shares the bed with the first or the second group depending on who was the first to ask her out on a date this morning.
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.
Only Solitaire reviews: Johnny Cash