Album Reviews

You won’t be buying these two LPs for their sonics. Primitive television show soundtracks from a Compton, California based local program recorded before an appreciative live audience, provide listeners with a “way back machine” glimpse of another time, and seemingly another universe—especially when you consider the music for which Compton’s currently best known.

The first volume contains Cash and the Tennessee Two’s first live performance after moving to Southern California to be closer to their manager. The group’s spare style was not created by cutting away excess: it was as good as they could play and it helped create Cash’s spare, stripped down sound.

The performances showcase a young, ultra-confident Cash, freshly signed to Columbia, his distinctive musical personna fully formed. Cash shamelessly promotes his latest Sun single as well as his upcoming Columbia debut, no doubt coached to do so by his career handler.

The group tears through a curious combination of secular tunes and gospel hymns, not missing a beat switching between Cash’s new prison lament “I Walk the Line” and “It Was Jesus.” To city sophisticates weaned on big band, bop and classical, this raw, simple, frequently sentimental stuff was the musical cave drawings of primitives. Through the filter of time we can appreciate these performances both as wellsprings from which multitudes of musical styles emerged, and for their basic, inherently clean, crisp lines.

When the second disc was recorded, August of 1959, Cash’s sound had hardened, aided here by the inclusion of Mike Fury, the drummer from the Town Hall house band and Jimmie Wilson, who played piano on many of Cash’s Sun sides. The middle-aged crowd of seven months earlier had shifted to a younger demographic: the 27 year old Cash’s introduction had the teenaged girls in the audience squealing. Cash had recorded two more albums for Columbia in the interim.

For this appearance, the group reprised “I Walk the Line,” “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town,” the gospel tune “I Was There When It Happened,” and his then current single, “I Got Stripes,” which you’ll recognize if you know Ry Cooder’s take on the same Huttie Ledbetter song,“On a Monday.” The addition of electric guitar turbo-charges “I Walk the Line,” and at the end the little girls scream. They do likewise when Cash does an onstage combover and impersonates Elvis. It shows a funny side of Cash that would later be reigned in to enhance his stern “Man in Black” image.

These are short sided albums that play even shorter as you slip back in time and immerse yourself in the ambience of the late 1950’s. The sound is ultra-compressed and quite primitive, yet an immediacy and transparency into the event—almost like tunnel vision—enhances the feeling of peering back in time with appropriate reverence. Kind of like how you’d rather see WWII as old black and white footage instead of in color. It’s an eavesdropping experience, not a “you are there” one, and as such it works as a form of high fidelity, but not in the usual sense of the word.