JOHNNY CASH : UNCHAINED IN A RUSTY CAGE

 

  1. Folsom Prison Blues
  2. Get Rhythm
  3. Sunday Morning Coming Down
  4. Ghost Riders In The Sky
  5. Oh, Bury Me Not (Introduction: A Cowboy's Prayer)
  6. I Never Picked Cotton
  7. Unchained
  8. Rowboat
  9. Rusty Cage
  10. Southern Accents
  11. Memories Are Made Of This
  12. Ring Of Fire
  13. I Walk The Line
  14. Big River
  15. I Still Miss Someone
  16. Orange Blossom Special
  17. Far Side Banks Of Jordan

Label : Zip City

Venue : Irving Plaza, New York City, New York, USA

Recording Date : July 9th, 1996

Release Date : February 12, 2016

Length : 64:25

Quality : FM recording (A+)

Review (Amazon) : Superb Live Broadcast recording from Johnny's 1990 Revival. After Columbia Records dropped Johnny Cash from his contract in 1986 - a record company with whom Johnny had recorded since 1957 - it may have appeared to many that the career of this legendary country performer and composer was all but over. Indeed, Cash had not made a successful album for the best part of a decade prior to this point and the trend continued when he signed a short deal with Mercury in 1987 - a label for whom he made a string of equally unsuccessful records between then and 1991. In 1996, Cash enlisted the accompaniment of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and released Unchained (also known as American Recordings II), which won the Best Country Album Grammy in 1998. The album was again produced by Rubin with Sylvia Massy and recorded at Sound City Studios, featuring guest appearances by Lindsey Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood and Marty Stuart. The recording on this CD comes from a show Cash gave at Irving Plaza in New York a few months before the release of Unchained, and features a number of cuts from the album mixed with many classic oldies. Delivering a dynamic performance, Cash was at this time at the high point of his rebooted career, and this recording proves that it was not Johnny who had lost any of the old magic, but merely that his old recording company had failed to properly promote or provide resources and that when a new man with bright ideas worked alongside Johnny Cash, The Man In Black was just as popular with 1990s audiences as he had been with music fans in the 50s, 60s and 70s.

Review (Amazon) : A New York radio concert recorded when Cash was getting hot again in his Rick Rubin renaissance years, recent Grammy aside, the program on this date is mostly a greatest hits set of oldies for an alt.audience at Irving Plaza revering him for being a gangsta for shooting a man in Reno, just to watch him die. The audio isn't all it could be, especially for a radio concert, but the man mountain that was Cash is all he could be, never stopping to phone it in as much as 40 years after the original facts. Certainly an artifactual valentine for the fans.