Johnny Cash: "At San Quentin"

It comes as no surprise that the #1 top-charting album of Johnny Cash’s entire career was recorded live in concert at a maximum security prison, in front of a “captive crowd” of all-men, behind bars “for armed robbery, rape, pedophilia, arson, murder,” June Carter Cash told herself, as well as “a few innocent men.” Surrounded by tense, armed guards, this was an audience, Johnny’s manager Lou Robin understood, where “the most powerful inmates sat in the front row in their tailored uniforms with their ‘assist¬ants’ coming over to light their cigarettes and bring them drinks.”

It was a grim setting that rocked with dark humor, nostalgia, touches of regret for those left back home, grounded by a spiritual yearning for hope and redemption that was provided by the performing troupe who came to the prison that day in February 1969: Johnny (two days before his 37th birthday) and his wife June Carter Cash with the Tennessee Three, Carl Perkins, the Statler Brothers, and the Carter Family (Mother Maybelle and June’s sisters Anita and Helen).

After nearly four decades, their full-length, unedited hour-and-a-half concert is now officially available over-the-counter, as JOHNNY CASH – AT SAN QUENTIN: LEGACY EDITION, a deluxe three-disc display book box set package (a la the recent Bruce Springsteen Born To Run 30th Anniversary Edition) arrives in stores November 14th on Columbia/Legacy, a division of SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAIN¬MENT. The complete 31-track concert, the longest Johnny Cash live performance on record – containing 13 previously unissued tracks, four of them featuring Johnny – will be complemented by Johnny Cash – In San Quentin. This one-hour DVD documentary film, produced by England’s Granada TV, chronicled the event with numerous performances as well as graphic one-on-one inter¬views with prison guards and inmates discussing their experiences behind bars.

Johnny Cash At San Quentin was the follow-up to June 1968’s Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison, the enormously successful #1 country LP (for four weeks), his first major pop crossover success (#13), which went on to spend 92 weeks on the pop chart and 122 weeks on the country chart. The LP (recorded January 1968) included his remake of the 1955 Grammy Hall Of Famer “Folsom Prison Blues” – the ’68 version hit #1 on the country chart (for four weeks), Top 40 pop, and won the Best Country Male Vocal Grammy. It was followed by “Daddy Sang Bass” (written by Carl Perkins, with the Statler Brothers and the Carter Family on background vocals), a second #1 country (for six weeks) and Top 40 pop hit,. All the attention set the stage for Johnny’s ABC-TV variety series that premiered on June 7, 1969. In every way, it was Folsom Prison, his first CMA Album of the Year and first RIAA double-platinum LP that set off three and a half decades of iconic worldwide superstardom for Johnny Cash.

Johnny started performing at prisons in the ’50s, and always wanted to record a live LP at one of those dates, but Columbia would not hear of it. It was not until he hooked up with staff producer Bob Johnston that he found a sympathizer. But could it have gone another way? “I picked up the phone and called Folsom and San Quentin,” the producer relates. “The reason the Folsom album was made first is because the Folsom warden answered first, simple as that. I got the warden, Duffy, and I handed Johnny the telephone and left.”

Building upon the success of Folsom, San Quentin was released the last week of June 1969, just a few weeks into Johnny’s TV series. Where the former took five weeks to reach #1 on the country chart, the latter did it in four – and made #1 on the pop side three weeks later. San Quentin spun off an adventurous live single, Shel Silver¬stein’s “A Boy Named Sue” (#1 country for 5 weeks, #2 pop) – radio stations showed their mettle by playing the un- bleeped “sonuvabitch” version, or by toeing the line and airing the bleeped version. No matter, it won the Best Country Song Grammy for Shel, and Johnny’s second consecutive Best Country Male Vocal Grammy. The double-platinum LP stayed at #1 country for a record-setting 20 weeks, which made it the Top Country Album of the decade. In all, Johnny’s second CMA Album of the Year charted for 55 weeks at country and 70 weeks pop – which meant that for the better part of a year, he had two prison LPs selling tonnage off the shelf together.

San Quentin was an historic 10-song LP when it was first released in 1969 – and it was an historic occasion 31 years later when it was first remastered as an expanded edition CD. As part of Columbia/Legacy’s American Milestones country music series, the 2000 configuration included eight bonus tracks previously unreleased at the time, all of them featuring Johnny: “Big River,” “I Still Miss Someone,” “I Don’t Know Where I’m Bound,” “Ring Of Fire” (with the Carter Family), and the final four with the whole company – “He Turned the Water Into Wine,” “Daddy Sang Bass,” “This Old Account Was Settled Long Ago,” and the closing medley with the full company, “Folsom Prison Blues/ I Walk the Line/ Ring Of Fire/ The Rebel – Johnny Yuma.” The 2000 CD also resequenced the program according to the original show’s running order.

JOHNNY CASH – AT SAN QUENTIN: LEGACY EDITION ups the ante with another 13 previously unissued tracks that now complete the show in its entirety, starting with the first five tracks that introduced each of the show’s stars – Carl Perkins (“Blue Suede Shoes”), the Statler Brothers (“Flowers On The Wall”), the Carter Family (Tom Paxton’s “The Last Thing On My Mind), and June Carter Cash (who talked to the audience and then sang “Wildwood Flower”) – before Johnny took the stage with “Big River” and “I Still Miss Someone.”

During the course of this LEGACY EDITION, there are two more previously unissued tracks by Carl Perkins (“Restless,” “The Outside Looking In”), one more previously unissued track by the Carter Family (John D. Loudermilk’s “Break My Mind,” via George Hamilton IV), and one more previously unissued track by the Statler Brothers (Glen Campbell’s “Less Of Me”). The four previously unissued tracks by Johnny Cash comprise (in order of appearance) his medley of “The Long Black Veil/ Give My Love To Rose,” “Orange Blossom Special,” “Jackson” (with June), and Billy Edd Wheeler’s “Blistered.”