Pop Music Review : Classic Cash and a Little Johnny Come Lately

Think of Johnny Cash’s concert Thursday as a feature presentation with a preview of coming attractions.

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It was two hours’ worth of the Man in Black’s business-almost-as-usual show with wife June Carter and the Carter Family at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, the first of two nights at the 1,600-seat facility.

But it is Cash’s new solo album, “American Recordings,” that has given his career its biggest artistic and sales boost in a decade or more. The combination made for an unusually diverse audience, with young and old, Hollywood hip and Middle America sitting side by side.

It also spiced up what is a strong country show to begin with. The major difference between Thursday’s show and the ones he and the Carter clan have been doing for years is that Cash included six of the 13 songs from the new album. They were performed as he recorded them: just his own acoustic guitar supporting that towering oak tree of a voice.

In the spoken “A Cowboy’s Prayer” that led into “Oh, Bury Me Not,” Cash neatly summed up his musical credo with the verse: “Let me be easy on the man that’s down/Let me be square and generous with all/I’m careless sometimes, Lord, when I’m in town/But never let them say I’m mean or small.”

In fact, humility and honesty are hallmarks of the Johnny Cash songbook, whether it’s an early song about losing a love (“I Still Miss Someone”) or a new one about a Vietnam vet getting on with his life (“Drive On”).

His songs frequently sketch the lives of killers, cheats and other assorted sinners--and never more consistently than on the new album. But unlike so many outcasts and outlaws who find their way into popular culture, Cash never lays the blame for their wrongs at any door but their own.

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Even the convicted murderer of “Folsom Prison Blues”--the one who “shot a man in Reno just to watch him die”--accepts responsibility for his action and feels the full weight of the regret that comes with it: “I know I had it coming, I know I can’t be free.”

The songs from the new album proved as riveting in concert as on record. Some tension, however, was dissipated by the revolving stage in the Cerritos Center’s in-the-round configuration, which made Cash a moving visual target rather than the fixed center of attention.

This show, however, was just a preview; works from his new album should get the full treatment at a theater near you--if you live near Los Angeles, that is--in December or January as part of Cash’s brief solo tour, according to a record company spokeswoman.

From the first song, the autobiographical 1971 “The Man in Black,” Cash provided a striking contrast to the lightweight country music that dominates the charts these days. He laid out his empathy with the luckless, the homeless, the loveless and otherwise downtrodden of the world. “Until things are better I’m the Man in Black.”

That’s the kind of song that has typified his 39-year recording career, which he generously surveyed during the rest of the 34-song show. He covered his ‘50s Sun Records work (“I Walk the Line,” “Get Rhythm,” “Big River”), duets with June (“Jackson,” “If I Were a Carpenter”) and offered a show-closing gospel set with the full entourage.

That finale included a rousing rendition of “The Fourth Man,” which merged Cash’s morality-based country with the Carter Family’s rave-up gospel harmonizing.

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A 30-minute mid-show segment featured June Carter, her sister Helen and June’s daughter Rosey, who belted a gutsy lead vocal on the Carter Family standard “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” The time June Carter squandered on silly chitchat with the audience, however, would have been better spent singing another song, especially if she had another up her sleeve like the poignant one about her days in New York studying acting.

Bassist David Roe and longtime Cash cohorts W. S. Holland (drums) and Bob Wootton (guitar) expertly supplied the stripped-to-the-bone country sound Cash created in the ‘50s with the Tennessee Two, then the Tennessee Three.

Keyboardist Earl Poole Ball, a legend among country piano players, usually stayed tastefully in the background, adding an atmospheric swell here, a tasteful turn there. More than once, though, he inexplicably elicited some of the most intrusive sounds possible from his synthesizer (such as the $49 Casio-quality pseudo-trumpet sounds for “Ring of Fire”) and frittered away a perfectly good three minutes tinkling his rendition of Frank Mills’ 1979 instrumental hit “Music Box Dancer.”

No wonder it was never the Tennessee Four.