Cash sings ‘his heart out’ on 30-year-old tracks
‘Stars’ weren’t shining in 1984 for the Man in Black
When Johnny Cash recorded the material for Out Among the Stars, releasing it probably seemed pointless.
Though he had joined the Country Music Hall of Fame four years before, Cash was at the commercial nadir of his career in 1984. He’d had just one top 10 hit since his induction; most of his ’80s albums hadn’t even charted. The Man in Black had been relegated to releasing singles such as The Chicken in Black, about having his brain transplanted into the body of a farm bird.
Heard 30 years later, the dozen previously unreleased recordings on Out Among the Stars show an iconic voice in fine and sober form but struggling to find a creative direction.
“Here’s my father in his prime, shining vocally and physically, because inside, his spirit is alive,” says son John Carter Cash, who worked on the restoration of the recordings, originally cut in 1981 and 1984 with producer Billy Sherrill. “What I hear, what gets me so excited, is personal. I get to spend some time with my dad, remember him as he was at that time in my life.”
Out Among the Stars, out Tuesday, will probably get more attention now, 11 years after Cash’s death, than it would have if Columbia Records had released the album in 1984.
“He was singing his heart out at that time; nobody cared,” says Marty Stuart, who was part of Cash’s road band and played guitar and mandolin both on the original sessions and when instrumentation was added last year. “But it didn’t matter what he sang; he could still make a living being Johnny Cash. Let him put a black coat on and walk through the middle of Missouri, or an airport, and he would still lay the place to waste.”
The material includes darker tunes including She Used to Love Me a Lot and the title track, as well as more humorous tales, such as If I Told You Who It Was, about a surprising rendezvous with another of the era’s country celebrities, and the macabre I Drove Her Out of My Mind.
The album also contains a pair of duets with Cash’s wife, June Carter Cash, and a version of Hank Snow’s I’m Movin’ On, recorded on a day when Waylon Jennings dropped by the studio. It’s one of the album’s highlights.
“It’s one vocal take, pitch-perfect,” John Carter Cash says.
He says his father’s archives contain much more unreleased material. “The question is, what makes sense as a release? Did he believe in it? Was this something he wanted released? We always ask ourselves that.”
John Carter Cash sees Out Among the Stars as a missing link between his father’s commercial heyday and the recordings he made during the ’90s with producer Rick Rubin up until Cash’s death in 2003. “It’s a part of his career that even some of the fans, even those that really love him, don’t know as much about.”
Had the album been released when it was made, “it would not have changed a thing ” commercially, Stuart says. “When it’s not your turn, it ain’t gonna happen.”
But he believes Out Among the Stars points toward Cash’s later recordings with Rubin, which would bring a career resurgence and cement his reputation as one of the preeminent figures in American music.
“Till the day he died, he was looking for the next song,” Stuart says. “And he never let up.”