In the early 1980s, Johnny Cash was at a low ebb. The Man in Black – who once sang to an audience of prisoners that he “shot a man in Reno just to watch him die” – had become little more than a family entertainer. “He’d turned into a weird old grandpa and he didn’t like that,” says the guitarist Marty Stuart. Stuart had just joined Cash’s band and “expected to see that guy who made Folsom Prison Blues and San Quentin. Cash was living a lifestyle that called for a certain amount of money – but I think he knew that there was a cool guy buried back in there.”
But by the early 1990s, that cool guy still hadn’t re-emerged. Prior to being resurrected by a partnership with legendary producer Rick Rubin, Cash’s career looked like it might be over. In 1986, he had been dropped by Columbia, the label he had helped make one of the greats, and a spell with Mercury had not worked out. He had also spent the previous decade in and out of rehab, due to a longstanding addiction to amphetamines. At the start of 1993, a 61-year-old Cash and others went into LSI Studios in Nashville and began recording songs from across the previous four decades that Cash had kept in his back pocket. But since Cash didn’t have a record deal, the tracks never got released, and lay ignored and incomplete for years.
