San Quentin
Folsom it ain't.
Too bad Walk the Line leaves off there. The closing titles tell us that Johnny's live album, which the label thought was a ruinous idea, went on to be a huge success, but they leave off that like all successful albums, the label sought to repeat the formula. So, a year later, they packed him off to San Quentin to serenade felons for another live album, which actually was ten times the seller that its predecessor was.
Great news for the record label. Bad news for purists.
San Quentin is leaden and far less genuine an album. The Carter Family, The Statler Brothers, and Carl Perkins are all given room to shine, which is fine on a track like "Daddy Sang Bass", but near ruinous on the closing medley where each get their chance to sing one of Johnny's hits. It's a proto-Elvis-in-Vegas moment (Fine fodder for a second volume of a biopic there, in how Johnny escaped artistic bankruptcy), but even when they are just singing backup parts or mimicking trumpets in "Ring of Fire", their presence swells the material to an almost bloated state.
However, there are wonderful, irreproachable moments as well, and the album is nothing like Sony forcing a third set of duet partners on Santana. There's the Bob Dylan song "Wanted Man", and the album's breakout hit, Shel Silverstein's "A Boy Named Sue", and some of the abandon of the Folsom concert shines through on performances like "Big River" and "Wreck of the Old '97".
In his introduction to "I Walk the Line", Johnny hints at the over-production of the whole thing, but like the last artistic statement of his life, (the video for "Hurt"), even amidst production excesses he had the remarkable ability to cut through the bullshit and deliver something genuine. After all, the signature image from Johnny's tenure at San Quentin is a snapshot of him letting an intrusive photographer know just how he felt about his presence:
Too bad Walk the Line leaves off there. The closing titles tell us that Johnny's live album, which the label thought was a ruinous idea, went on to be a huge success, but they leave off that like all successful albums, the label sought to repeat the formula. So, a year later, they packed him off to San Quentin to serenade felons for another live album, which actually was ten times the seller that its predecessor was.
Great news for the record label. Bad news for purists.
San Quentin is leaden and far less genuine an album. The Carter Family, The Statler Brothers, and Carl Perkins are all given room to shine, which is fine on a track like "Daddy Sang Bass", but near ruinous on the closing medley where each get their chance to sing one of Johnny's hits. It's a proto-Elvis-in-Vegas moment (Fine fodder for a second volume of a biopic there, in how Johnny escaped artistic bankruptcy), but even when they are just singing backup parts or mimicking trumpets in "Ring of Fire", their presence swells the material to an almost bloated state.
However, there are wonderful, irreproachable moments as well, and the album is nothing like Sony forcing a third set of duet partners on Santana. There's the Bob Dylan song "Wanted Man", and the album's breakout hit, Shel Silverstein's "A Boy Named Sue", and some of the abandon of the Folsom concert shines through on performances like "Big River" and "Wreck of the Old '97".
In his introduction to "I Walk the Line", Johnny hints at the over-production of the whole thing, but like the last artistic statement of his life, (the video for "Hurt"), even amidst production excesses he had the remarkable ability to cut through the bullshit and deliver something genuine. After all, the signature image from Johnny's tenure at San Quentin is a snapshot of him letting an intrusive photographer know just how he felt about his presence:
Labels: jodru
posted by jodru at 21:48
3 Comments:
niiiice
jim marshall is hardly "an intrusive photographer" and this is how misinformation is born - marshall was at San Quinten as agreed by Cash and he asked Cash to give a pose for the warden - this phot is the result -
S, I fear you missed the forest for the trees, but moreover, you've got the wrong version of the story. Not that it's important, but here's what Johnny says about it in the liner notes to the repackaged version:
"During the show at San Quentin in 1969, it seemed that everybody that worked for Granda TV was on stage in front of me. At some point, I walked around my microphone and yelled "Clear the stage! I can't see my audience!" Nobody moved. So I gave them "the bird." Hence the picture."
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