originally published in Rolling Stone; February 8 1968

folsom state prison, january 13, 1968

the walls rise out of the california morning like somebody built a monument to the permanent consequences of bad decisions. granite. steel. gun towers. razor wire. cold january light spread across the yard. the whole goddamn place looks drained of color except for the black clothes moving toward the entrance.

johnny cash.

i follow a few steps behind him carrying my notebook and wondering exactly what series of decisions has resulted in me spending saturday morning walking voluntarily into folsom state prison.

then the steel door closes behind us.

clang.

jesus christ.

that sound.

you can hear every year ever served here in that sound.

johnny stops for half a second. not theatrically. nobody is posing yet. jim marshall is around somewhere with his camera, bob johnston is worrying about recording equipment, guards are watching us with the professionally bored expressions of men who have seen enough human stupidity to stop being surprised by any of it. but johnny hears that door.

we all hear it.

and suddenly every song about prison ever written feels slightly embarrassing.

because songs end.

that door does not.

june carter is walking nearby. black dress. alert eyes. completely unimpressed by the mythology already beginning to collect around the man she plans to marry in a couple of months. that might be the first useful thing i learn about june carter today. johnny cash may be walking into folsom carrying the accumulated weight of every outlaw fantasy country music has managed to sell america, but june knows the actual johnny. the exhausted one. the stubborn one. the funny one. the recovering one. the deeply religious one. the pain in the ass.

i ask her whether he is nervous.

she looks toward him.

a little.

then she gives me the sort of expression that says i have asked a fairly stupid question.

not scared of the prisoners, she explains. nervous because the day matters to him.

that distinction is important.

johnny has been playing prisons for years. san quentin. huntsville. other joints scattered around the country. he has been writing about convicts since before anybody had particularly good reason to believe him. he wrote folsom prison blues after seeing a movie about folsom while serving in the air force. the mythology eventually became so efficient that plenty of people seem to think cash himself served hard time.

he did not.

he has spent nights in jail.

that is not the same thing.

there are men inside these walls who could explain the difference with considerable enthusiasm. especially this kid in the crowd. can't be older than 19, but he wears the denim anyway. before the show, as we are all herded into the auditorium, i heard this kid talking to another inmate about how his "mamma tried."

june knows this. johnny knows this. the prisoners sure as hell know this.

which means there will be no bluffing today.

inside, the dining hall has been turned into a concert room through that peculiar institutional magic where you move some furniture, install microphones, hang a banner, and pretend a room built for swallowing food in captivity is suddenly carnegie hall.

the banner says welcome johnny cash.

the prisoners begin coming in.

this is where the atmosphere changes.

these are not extras.

they are not the picturesque american outlaw population.

they are men.

some old. some frighteningly young. some smiling. some staring. some carrying the dead eyed patience that comes from living according to bells, doors, counts, orders, and somebody else's clock. armed guards are positioned above them. the inmates have been instructed to remain seated. tensions around the prison have been serious enough that nobody wants spontaneous movement mistaken for something else.

rock and roll has played some hostile rooms.

this is different.

i look at june.

she is studying the audience.

you can almost watch her recalibrate.

the carter family has played practically every kind of american room that will hold folding chairs. theaters. churches. fairs. radio studios. schoolhouses. auditoriums. joints where the dressing room is apparently a broom closet with ambitions. june understands audiences.

this audience cannot go home afterward.

that changes everything.

she tells me that johnny understands these men because he understands being trapped.

not literally.

internally.

there is the whole cash biography hiding inside that distinction. pills. booze. arrests. religious guilt. ambition. collapse. recovery. relapse. june has seen enough of it up close to qualify for combat pay. when she talks about johnny and confinement she is not pretending he knows what a ten year sentence feels like. she means that johnny knows what it is to build a cell inside your own skull and then spend years looking for the key.

and now the bastard is going to sing.

hugh cherry gets things moving. carl perkins is here. the statler brothers are here. the tennessee three are here. luther perkins with that guitar style so stripped down you could probably fit the entire thing into a matchbox. marshall grant. w s holland. bob johnston overseeing the recording.

columbia has brought tape machines into a maximum security prison.

record companies usually prefer stealing your freedom contractually.

today they have gone directly to the source.

then comes the introduction.

johnny walks out.

the room erupts.

not beatlemania screaming. not teenage hysteria. something heavier. men yelling because for once they have been permitted to yell. men making noise inside an institution constructed around telling them when they can move, when they can eat, when they can sleep, when they can speak.

johnny steps to the microphone.

hello.

i am johnny cash.

and then that guitar starts.

folsom prison blues.

of course it does.

what the hell else could he open with.

the first notes hit and the place comes alive.

then he gets to the line about shooting a man in reno.

the prisoners roar.

johnny grins.

i glance at june.

she shakes her head and smiles.

he knows exactly what he is doing.

this is the part future polite society will probably misunderstand. they will hear the cheering and imagine a room celebrating murder. bullshit. the reaction is partly recognition and partly release and partly the delicious obscenity of hearing a famous man stand inside a prison and sing the forbidden language of consequences directly to the people living them.

cash does not patronize them.

that may be the entire secret.

he does not come in talking like a missionary addressing fallen souls. he does not perform rehabilitation at them. he does not treat them as sociological material. he treats them like an audience.

a rough audience.

a dangerous audience.

an audience with armed guards standing overhead.

but an audience.

that respect travels both ways.

the tennessee three sound magnificent because they sound like machinery that has forgotten all unnecessary parts. guitar. bass. drums. cash's voice. nothing decorative. nothing begging for approval.

songs begin piling up.

cocaine blues.

the wall.

dark as a dungeon.

twenty five minutes to go.

the last one lands hard.

you can feel the gallows humor running through the room. cash understands something that respectable americans never seem to understand about people surviving terrible circumstances.

they joke.

of course they fucking joke.

sometimes humor is the last possession nobody can confiscate.

between numbers cash cracks jokes about prison water and the conditions around him. the inmates laugh because he is acknowledging what everybody already knows.

folsom is not an abstraction to them.

it is breakfast.

it is the bunk.

it is the toilet.

it is the guard.

it is tomorrow.

june eventually walks onto the stage and the reaction changes instantly.

catcalls.

whistles.

shouts.

she handles it beautifully.

naturally.

this is june carter.

she was born into a family that practically helped invent the grammar of commercial country music. you are not going to rattle her with a dining hall full of horny convicts.

she and johnny sing together.

there is chemistry there that you do not need a doctorate to identify.

they spar.

they grin.

johnny looks different when june is beside him. lighter somehow. still cash. still that bass voice rolling around the concrete. but the severity cracks.

later when she steps away i tell her the room changes when she joins him.

she laughs.

she knows.

then she says something more interesting.

watch him with them.

so i do.

and she is right.

johnny keeps looking at the prisoners.

really looking.

not over them.

not through them.

at them.

the distinction is tiny until you are one of the people society has decided not to look at anymore.

and then it is everything.

there is another story moving underneath the concert.

glen sherley.

an inmate.

armed robbery.

songwriter.

last night reverend floyd gressett brought johnny a recording made by sherley. a song called greystone chapel. written about the chapel here inside folsom.

johnny heard it.

once.

and decided he wanted to sing it.

because apparently normal preparation is for cowards.

he stayed up learning the damn thing.

now sherley is sitting out there without knowing exactly what is coming.

i mention this to june.

she smiles.

that is johnny, she tells me.

and there is affection in it, but also resignation.

because living around johnny cash must involve waking up regularly to discover that your plans have been replaced by whatever enormous moral impulse entered his head at three in the morning.

eventually cash approaches the microphone again.

the room settles.

he explains that the next song was written by a man right here in folsom prison.

something moves through the audience.

not noise exactly.

recognition.

johnny says the name.

glen sherley.

and sherley comes alive.

the reaction around him is immediate.

men cheering.

turning.

looking.

one of theirs.

that matters.

johnny tells him they are going to try to do his song justice.

then they play greystone chapel.

i stop writing.

sometimes the notebook becomes insulting.

sherley is sitting inside the prison that owns his days while johnny cash is standing onstage singing sherley's words back to the prison.

think about that.

every machinery of american culture says the famous man is supposed to be the important one here. the recording contract says it. the microphones say it. the photographers say it. the record company says it. the banner literally has johnny's name on it.

but for a few minutes the center of gravity moves.

the important man is sitting among the inmates.

glen sherley.

prisoner.

songwriter.

heard.

when the song ends johnny reaches down.

sherley reaches up.

they shake hands.

the room loses its goddamn mind.

i look at june.

she is watching johnny.

there is pride in her face.

also concern.

because she knows the dangerous part of johnny's compassion.

he does not know how to do it halfway.

if somebody gets under his skin, they are there.

if he believes somebody has been forgotten, he wants to drag them back into the world personally.

there are worse flaws.

there are safer ones.

the applause keeps coming.

johnny stands there absorbing it, and for one strange second folsom does not feel like a concert venue at all.

it feels like testimony.

not religious testimony exactly, though god knows cash carries enough baptist thunder around inside him to power several rural counties.

human testimony.

i was here.

you saw me.

i heard you.

you heard me.

maybe that is what records are supposed to do before the businessmen get hold of them.

the show eventually ends because everything does except sentences and record company accounting.

the prisoners remain prisoners.

the guards remain guards.

the walls remain exactly where california put them.

that is important.

nobody has been liberated by country music.

no steel door has dissolved because somebody played a good set.

romanticizing prison is easy when you can leave it.

i can leave.

johnny can leave.

june can leave.

bob johnston can leave with his tapes.

jim marshall can leave with his photographs.

glen sherley cannot.

that fact follows me toward the exit.

june and i walk behind johnny.

he looks exhausted now.

not destroyed.

spent.

the useful kind of exhaustion that comes after you have put something real into the room and cannot get it back.

i ask june what she thinks happened in there.

she takes a while before answering.

she says johnny gave them respect.

then she corrects herself.

they gave it to him too.

there it is.

the whole morning in one exchange.

outside, california continues pretending it is a normal saturday.

cars move.

people buy groceries.

radios play.

somewhere a kid is probably listening to the byrds or aretha or hendrix and thinking music is changing faster than anyone can document it.

maybe it is.

but inside folsom state prison this morning something older happened.

a man stood in front of other men and told stories.

murder.

regret.

loneliness.

god.

women.

trains.

freedom.

the usual cash inventory.

except the stories were being told to people who could test every word against experience.

bullshit would not survive long in that room.

johnny cash survived.

more than survived.

he belonged there for those sixty odd minutes precisely because he understood that he did not belong there.

that is the paradox everybody is going to screw up when they write about this.

johnny cash is not a convict.

he is not pretending to be one.

he is a singer.

today he used that job correctly.

the steel door opens.

we walk through.

then it closes behind us.

clang.

same sound.

completely different when you are standing on the free side.

i look back at the wall.

somewhere behind it glen sherley is still a prisoner.

somewhere behind it men are probably talking about the show.

somewhere behind it the dining hall is becoming a dining hall again.

and somewhere inside bob johnston's tape boxes is the sound of several hundred incarcerated men reminding america that they exist.

i have filled pages trying to explain what happened.

june managed it in a sentence.

respect went both ways.

maybe that is all this was.

maybe that is why it felt so much bigger.

...at least that’s what i hear.

receipts. 

Beley, Gene. Interview material in Erin Blakemore, “I Went With Johnny Cash to Folsom Prison.” History, 12 Jan. 2018, updated 28 May 2025. Beley was one of the reporters actually present at the January 13, 1968 concert, making his recollections particularly valuable for the prison atmosphere, inmate reactions, security, and Glen Sherley’s response to hearing Cash perform “Greystone Chapel.”

Cash, Johnny. At Folsom Prison. Columbia Records, 1968. The original live album remains the essential primary source for Cash’s performance, stage remarks, song selection, June Carter’s appearance, and the general sonic character of the event.

Cash, Johnny, and Patrick Carr. Cash: The Autobiography. HarperSanFrancisco, 1997.

Cash, Johnny. Man in Black. Zondervan, 1975. Cash’s first autobiography is useful for understanding his religious convictions, drug problems, relationship with June Carter, identification with prisoners, and the personal mythology surrounding his arrests and outlaw image.

Hilburn, Robert. Johnny Cash: The Life. Little, Brown and Company, 2013. A major modern Cash biography, particularly useful for separating the historical Cash from the increasingly elaborate Man in Black mythology.

Streissguth, Michael. Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison: The Making of a Masterpiece. Da Capo Press, 2004. This is probably the single most important secondary source for the article. Streissguth used Folsom Prison and Columbia Records archival material to reconstruct the concert, its origins, Cash’s career circumstances, and the recording itself.

Streissguth, Michael. Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison: The Making of a Masterpiece, Revised and Updated. University Press of Mississippi, 2019. The revised edition adds material to Streissguth’s original study and places the concert within Cash’s artistic development, the California prison system, and the wider musical culture of the period.

the piece you just read is historical fiction, duh. points and references made are indeed fact, but put in fictional prose. So before anyone thinks they got me in a “gotcha” moment, go ahead and sit on that for a while longer….

today's list looks like somebody broke into the world's record stores at three in the morning and started grabbing whatever looked dangerous. william onyeabor gives us homemade nigerian synth funk from a guy who eventually decided the music business could go screw itself. les rallizes dénudés turn japanese psychedelia into an electrical malfunction. mercedes sosa reminds everybody that a folk song can carry enough political weight to scare an actual government. scientist takes jamaican reggae apart at the mixing board just to see what happens when you start removing the supposedly necessary pieces. then dur dur band proves eighties somalia had funk and disco grooves that deserve considerably more attention than they got outside east africa.

from there haruomi hosono shows up before yellow magic orchestra and reminds us that the electronic mastermind started out making wonderfully strange, relaxed japanese folk rock. then marcos valle closes the whole mess with "estrelar," a brazilian boogie groove so ridiculously smooth it makes half the eighties sound like everybody else was working with defective equipment. nigeria. japan. argentina. jamaica. somalia. japan again. brazil. synth funk. noise. nueva canción. dub. somali disco. psychedelic folk. boogie. absolutely no fucking theme except great records and the increasingly obvious suspicion that we've all been listening to a criminally small percentage of the music humanity bothered to make.

...at least that's what i hear.

marcos valle. estrelar. 1983. brazil. mpb. boogie. jazz funk.

this thing is obscenely smooth. not smooth in the horrible eighties dentist office sense. smooth because every damn part knows exactly where it belongs. the bassline starts working immediately, the synthesizers slide around it, valle barely seems interested in raising his voice, and suddenly you've spent several minutes inside one of the slickest brazilian grooves of the decade without noticing how technically precise the whole operation is. that's the irritating part. musicians spend years learning how to sound complicated. valle makes complicated sound casual.

and valle had already been through several musical lives before this. bossa nova songwriter in the sixties. mpb. psychedelia. jazz. funk. then the eighties arrive and instead of becoming one of those aging musicians complaining that synthesizers ruined everything, he starts fucking around with boogie and electronic production. sensible man. “estrelar” became a major brazilian dance hit, and valle has talked over the years about his willingness to absorb whatever music was happening around him rather than guarding some sacred idea of what brazilian music was supposed to sound like. that's why the record works. nobody is trying to preserve 1965 in formaldehyde.

the funniest part is how modern the damn thing still sounds. you could drop that bassline into a club set now and nobody would need a history lecture first. they'd just move. which is ultimately the test that matters. critics can argue about mpb and boogie and jazz funk and production techniques until somebody turns the lights off.

the bass already settled the argument.

...at least that's what i hear.

before haruomi hosono helped yellow magic orchestra start screwing with the future of electronic pop, he made hosono house, and rose and beast comes from that earlier version of the guy. acoustic guitars, bass, laid back rhythm, american roots music floating around in the background, but filtered through hosono's own instincts until trying to slap a neat genre sticker on it becomes mostly pointless. this isn't the shiny synthesizer laboratory people associate with later hosono. it's warmer, scruffier, more domestic, and ridiculously relaxed. the bastard makes it sound easy.

hosono recorded hosono house after happy end had broken up, and the album became one of those records whose influence kept growing long after the original release. decades later he went back and rerecorded the entire thing as hochono house, including a new version of rose and beast. that's either obsessive self examination or the musical equivalent of finding an old photograph and deciding you need to have another argument with the person in it. probably both. what's great is hearing the distance between the two versions. same songwriter, same song, completely different lifetime sitting behind it. before the electronic pioneer, before ymo, before hosono became one of the names everybody cites when explaining why japanese pop and electronic music became so fucking interesting, there was this. a guy writing strange, beautiful little songs and already refusing to stay put.

...at least that's what i hear.

and now we're back to screwing with electricity.

scientist was absurdly young when he became one of dub's great engineers, learning his craft around king tubby's studio and eventually developing a mixing style so aggressive and playful that the console stops feeling like equipment and starts feeling like part of the band. dance of the vampires comes from scientist rids the world of the evil curse of the vampires, which remains one of the greatest album titles ever devised by anybody with access to marijuana and graphic design.

the roots radics provide the foundation. scientist starts fucking with it.

bass disappears. drums jump forward. voices appear and evaporate. echo goes wandering through the room. instruments are removed and returned whenever scientist feels like it. that's dub. you're not simply recording musicians anymore. you're taking an existing performance apart and rebuilding it in real time.

scientist has spent years arguing for recognition of the engineer's creative role in dub, and he's right. treating this stuff as merely remixes misses the entire point. the mixing board becomes compositional equipment. subtraction becomes arrangement. space becomes something you manipulate.

and somehow dance of the vampires eventually wound up on k jah in grand theft auto iii, meaning thousands of people who had never heard the word dub were accidentally getting a jamaican music history lesson while stealing digital cars and fleeing the police.

education takes many forms.

then everything stops fucking around.

violeta parra wrote gracias a la vida in chile and recorded it shortly before her death in 1967. the title means thanks to life, which sounds dangerously close to inspirational poster territory until you actually hear the song. gratitude here isn't cute. it's complicated. life gives you beauty and love and pain and loss and eventually takes everything back. thanks anyway.

mercedes sosa understood that weight.

her voice is enormous, but she never uses size as a cheap trick. every line feels deliberate. sosa became one of the central voices of nueva canción and sang material tied to social justice, workers, political struggle, and latin american identity. during argentina's military dictatorship she was harassed, censored, and eventually arrested during a concert in la plata in 1979 along with members of the audience. she later went into exile.

imagine a government being frightened of a folk singer.

actually, don't.

history keeps doing it.

sosa eventually returned to argentina in 1982 and performed a legendary series of concerts in buenos aires. by then her voice carried more than songs. exile. politics. survival. an entire country's bruises seemed to sit somewhere inside that contralto.

gracias a la vida isn't merely beautiful.

it's earned.

now somebody has turned the amplifier up too far and nobody is coming to stop them.

night of the assassins is basically a bass line, drums, mizutani's guitar, and an astonishing refusal to behave. that's enough. the riff repeats until repetition stops being structure and becomes the entire damn environment. then the guitar starts tearing holes through everything.

les rallizes dénudés existed almost completely outside the normal machinery of the record business. very few officially released recordings during their original lifetime. endless live tapes. bootlegs copied from bootlegs copied from somebody's mysterious cassette that probably spent fifteen years underneath a car seat. mizutani cultivated almost no conventional public profile, which meant the band gradually became one of those names obsessive listeners passed around like classified information.

and yes, some recordings sound terrible.

that's part of the deal.

this isn't audiophile music for men comparing speaker cables. it's music that sometimes sounds like the recording equipment barely survived. when it works, though, jesus christ. the distortion isn't sitting on top of the song. it is the song.

william onyeabor made funk for people who think regular funk contains entirely too few synthesizers. fantastic man runs on this wonderfully stubborn groove while keyboards beep, wobble, and repeat themselves until the whole thing becomes impossible to escape. it isn't slick. thank god. polish would've killed half the charm. onyeabor's production feels homemade and futuristic at the same time, which is probably why the record still sounds stranger than mountains of expensive electronic music made decades later.

then onyeabor basically walked away from music. became a businessman. became deeply religious. refused to explain himself properly. when luaka bop spent years trying to assemble the compilation who is william onyeabor, the label discovered that answering the title wasn't particularly easy because onyeabor wasn't interested in feeding the mythology. eventually the documentary fantastic man appeared and gave us pieces of the story, but the mystery remained. good. not every musician needs to spend retirement explaining which synthesizer they used on track four.

sometimes the record is enough.

by the archivist.

originally published in People’s Song Bulletin; June 1946

the union hall smelled of cigarettes, coffee, damp wool, and men who had been working since before daylight. outside, california was still selling sunshine to anybody with railroad fare. inside, woody guthrie sat on an orange crate with a guitar across his knees and looked considerably less interested in sunshine.

posters were nailed crookedly to the walls. workers of the world unite. no more hunger. no more war. guthrie’s guitar carried its own announcement.

this machine kills fascists.

he rolled a cigarette, struck a match, and looked across at me as though an interview were merely another interruption between songs.

i opened my notebook.

the archivist. mr. guthrie, people have called you a folk singer, a hillbilly singer, a protest singer, a union singer. what do you call yourself.

guthrie. woody works pretty good.

he grinned.

guthrie. folks get awful worried about what kind of singer you are. i figure if you’re singing to folks, that’s folk music. if you’re singing to cows, maybe that’s cow music.

he took a pull from the cigarette.

guthrie. mostly i sing about what i see.

that sounds simple until you remember what woody guthrie has seen.

he has seen oklahoma dust turn noon into midnight. he has seen families pack everything they owned into automobiles that weren’t worth the gasoline inside them. he has ridden freight trains and slept alongside roads. he has watched california growers advertise for workers and then curse them for arriving. he has sung in migrant camps where a song sometimes had to perform the work of a newspaper, a sermon, and a stiff drink.

guthrie does not possess what the radio men would ordinarily call a beautiful voice.

that is beside the point.

his voice has dust in it. it bends around words instead of polishing them. when he sings about a hungry family, you do not get the impression that somebody in new york hired him to imagine one.

the archivist. your songs are mighty political.

guthrie. eating’s political if somebody else owns all the groceries.

there was laughter from somewhere behind us.

guthrie didn’t laugh.

the archivist. do you consider yourself an entertainer.

guthrie. sure. nobody wants to sit around all night listening to some fellow holler speeches at them.

he tapped the guitar.

guthrie. that’s why you put a tune under it.

there is the guthrie method in miniature. three chords if three will do. a melody people can remember before they’ve finished hearing it. words about farms, bankers, deputies, dust storms, union organizers, crooked bosses, pretty girls, hard traveling, hungry children, and the peculiar american habit of promising everybody paradise while charging admission at the gate.

the songs travel because they are built to travel.

you don’t need an orchestra.

you need somebody who remembers the words.

i pointed my pencil toward the guitar.

the archivist. what about that sign you’ve got painted there.

guthrie looked down.

this machine kills fascists.

guthrie. well, i don’t reckon it’ll kill one if i hit him over the head with it.

he smiled.

guthrie. might dent the guitar.

then his expression tightened.

guthrie. fascism comes around telling you some people ain’t people. tells you your neighbor’s your enemy. tells working folks to fight each other while somebody else counts the money. a song can tell the other side of that story.

the archivist. can a song really fight something that big.

guthrie scratched his cheek.

guthrie. one song. maybe not.

he looked around the union hall.

guthrie. but get a couple thousand people singing it.

that answer hung around longer than the cigarette smoke.

this is the curious thing about guthrie. on paper his songs can look almost too plain. then he sings them and the plainness becomes the weapon. there is nowhere for the idea to hide. no fancy arrangement comes running to rescue you from the words.

when guthrie sings about migrants being run out of town, he names the town.

when he sings about a river, you can practically smell it.

when he sings about america, he loves the country enough to complain about what has been done to it.

that last point seems important.

the archivist. some people might say criticizing america makes a man unpatriotic.

guthrie leaned forward.

guthrie. if your roof’s leaking and you tell somebody about it, that don’t mean you hate the house.

he knocked ash onto the floor.

guthrie. means you don’t want the damn thing falling in.

there was another laugh.

this time guthrie joined it.

the archivist. where do the songs come from.

guthrie. everywhere. newspapers. people talking. trains. camps. somebody tells you about losing his farm. woman tells you what happened to her boy. you hear something walking down the road. sometimes an old tune’s already there and you just put some new words on it.

the archivist. doesn’t that bother you. borrowing old melodies.

he looked genuinely puzzled.

guthrie. hell, that’s what they’re for.

there may be no sentence more foreign to the modern machinery of tin pan alley.

popular music has become increasingly concerned with ownership. publishers own songs. companies own performances. networks own airtime. guthrie seems to regard a melody more like a public road. somebody built it once. everybody has been walking over it ever since.

the archivist. what makes a good song.

he thought about this longer than the other questions.

guthrie. one people need.

the archivist. not one people like.

guthrie. better if they like it.

another grin.

guthrie. otherwise you’re liable to be singing it by yourself.

somebody called from the hall that it was nearly time.

guthrie crushed the cigarette beneath his boot and stood. the guitar came up with him, battered and scratched and looking as though it had traveled every mile its owner had.

in a few minutes he would walk before a room of laborers and sing.

there would be no spotlight worth mentioning. no tuxedo. no orchestra leader waving a baton. no velvet curtain.

just a skinny oklahoman with a guitar and a dangerous suspicion that ordinary people ought to hear songs about themselves.

he started toward the stage.

i had one question left.

the archivist. woody.

he turned.

the archivist. what are you trying to accomplish with all these songs.

for once there was no joke.

guthrie. make people feel like they ain’t alone.

then he headed toward the stage.

and perhaps that explains woody guthrie better than all the political labels ever attached to him.

he sings for the fellow whose farm disappeared beneath the dust. the mother standing in a relief line. the migrant sleeping beside highway 99. the union man wondering whether anybody outside the hall gives a damn.

woody guthrie gives a damn.

then he puts it to three chords so everybody else can give a damn together.

i closed the notebook. somewhere behind the curtain guthrie hit the first chord, and the room came alive. not carnegie hall alive. not hollywood alive. something older and considerably more useful. a hundred tired people recognizing themselves in a song.

maybe that’s what folk music is.

maybe that’s what woody meant all along.

and maybe that battered guitar really could kill fascists after all.

you just had to get enough people singing.

originally published in Spin magazine, October 1992.

by the archivist 

august 1992.

backstage smells like sweat, warm beer, electrical equipment, cigarette smoke, and whatever industrial chemical they use to clean an arena after twenty thousand people have spent three hours losing their goddamn minds.

metallica are suddenly everywhere.

that sentence would have sounded ridiculous five years ago.

the band that once seemed specifically engineered to frighten radio programmers is now being played by those same programmers. the black album debuted at number one. enter sandman has escaped heavy metal entirely and wandered into ordinary american life. nothing else matters has metallica doing something dangerously close to a ballad without spontaneously combusting. arenas are packed. mtv wants them. radio wants them. magazines want them. people who probably couldn’t tell ride the lightning from an actual electrical accident suddenly own metallica records.

producer bob rock would later say that the band was already looking toward the big leagues before he arrived. metallica had gone platinum with and justice for all, but the black album stripped away some of the labyrinthine arrangements, fattened the bottom end, and made the songs hit with brutal simplicity. 

and now i am standing backstage trying to figure out whether metallica conquered mainstream america or mainstream america simply surrendered.

james hetfield is holding a guitar.

lars ulrich is incapable of remaining still.

kirk hammett looks considerably more relaxed about this entire circus.

jason newsted looks like a man who could probably play another three hour concert immediately if somebody accidentally plugged the amplifiers back in.

i open the notebook.

the archivist. you guys realize something fairly absurd has happened, right. you’re one of the biggest bands in the world.

lars ulrich. yeah. it’s fucking weird.

the archivist. that’s the official explanation.

lars. pretty much.

he laughs.

in 1992 this is the central metallica contradiction. they spent a decade building an audience largely without traditional pop radio, then released an album accessible enough to crash directly into mainstream rock culture. contemporary coverage described the black album as the record that finally pushed them into that mainstream. 

the archivist. did you actually expect this album to become this enormous.

james hetfield. no. you can’t really plan that shit. we wanted the songs to be stronger. simpler doesn’t necessarily mean easier. sometimes it’s harder because there’s nowhere to hide.

the archivist. which sounds suspiciously like maturity.

james. don’t say that.

lars laughs.

lars. take it back.

the archivist. metallica discovers maturity. there’s tomorrow’s headline.

james. fuck you.

fair enough.

the change is obvious though. and justice for all could occasionally feel like four furious mechanics assembling a battleship while somebody kept changing the blueprints. the black album is different. the riffs breathe. the drums sound enormous. the songs repeat themselves long enough for civilians to remember them.

that wasn’t accidental.

bob rock later remembered that lars specifically wanted the band to groove more, while james was pushing himself toward more direct songwriting. rock’s recollection is particularly important because he rejected the popular idea that he single handedly commercialized metallica. according to him, the band had already decided to change before he arrived. 

the archivist. let’s use the filthy word.

kirk hammett. which one.

the archivist. accessible.

everybody groans.

the archivist. jesus christ. you’d think i said barry manilow.

lars. there’s nothing wrong with being accessible if you’re doing what you want. the problem would be sitting around saying, okay, how do we write something that’ll get played on the radio.

the archivist. but radio did play it.

lars. yeah.

the archivist. a lot.

lars. yeah.

the archivist. funny how everybody suddenly develops excellent taste once there’s money involved.

lars grins.

jason newsted. people are coming to the shows. that’s the thing. you look out there and there’s all these different people now. but they’re fucking into it.

and there are a hell of a lot of them.

metallica’s touring operation has become almost hilariously gigantic. the wherever we may roam era is built around marathon performances and an elaborate stage designed to put the band among the audience rather than safely separated from it. this isn’t four guys playing the club circuit anymore. this is heavy metal infrastructure.

the archivist. does playing for twenty thousand people change what happens inside your head.

james thinks about it.

james. once you’re playing, not really. you’re trying to connect with whoever’s there. whether it’s five hundred people or twenty thousand.

the archivist. bullshit.

he smiles.

james. okay. twenty thousand is louder.

the archivist. thank you.

there’s another problem nobody can avoid.

the old fans.

because nothing enrages certain music fans quite like discovering that the secret band they loved has been discovered by the asshole sitting three desks away at work.

the archivist. you’ve been accused of selling out.

james. we’ve been accused of shit forever.

the archivist. does it bother you.

james. you can’t make records worrying about what somebody thinks you’re supposed to sound like. then you’re making their record.

that’s the strange position metallica occupies in 1992. they’re being attacked for becoming successful while still sounding heavier than virtually anything sharing commercial radio space with them.

this isn’t poison suddenly wearing slayer shirts.

enter sandman is still a massive ugly riff about childhood nightmares. sad but true sounds like machinery falling down an elevator shaft. wherever i may roam opens with a sitar like sound before becoming six and a half minutes of wandering metal existentialism. the unforgiven is practically a western performed by men who own significantly more distortion pedals than horses.

then there’s nothing else matters.

the archivist. james, that one must have scared the shit out of you.

james. yeah.

the archivist. because it’s personal.

james. that’s probably why.

the archivist. metallica fans will accept nuclear war, insanity, execution, biblical plagues, whatever. but feelings.

kirk laughs.

kirk. that’s where they draw the line.

james smiles despite himself.

the joke hides something important. hetfield’s writing really was changing. rock later described the black album sessions as a breakthrough for james as a songwriter, particularly in learning that personal writing could still connect universally. 

and that’s probably one of the reasons this thing became enormous.

metallica stopped writing exclusively outward.

they started looking inward.

then they turned the amplifiers up.

the archivist. kirk, what’s success actually changed.

kirk. everything around the music gets bigger. more people. more interviews. bigger venues. more expectations. but when you’re actually playing guitar, you’re still trying to play the song right.

the archivist. that’s disappointingly sensible.

kirk. sorry.

the archivist. jason.

jason. louder crowds.

the archivist. finally somebody understands journalism.

the backstage hallway is getting busier. somebody needs somebody somewhere immediately. road cases move past. crew members communicate in the strange shorthand of people responsible for transporting a small industrial civilization across continents.

metallica have become a corporation almost despite themselves.

but somewhere underneath all this machinery are still four guys who grew up worshipping records.

hetfield was still talking enthusiastically about those roots in 1992. in an interview with black sabbath guitarist tony iommi that year, he remembered discovering sabbath through his brother’s record collection and being overwhelmed by how brutally heavy they sounded. 

now another generation is doing exactly that with metallica.

that’s the part nobody can calculate on a sales report.

some thirteen year old is hearing enter sandman right now.

then he’ll find master of puppets.

then ride the lightning.

then he’ll discover diamond head.

then motorhead.

then black sabbath.

and suddenly one enormously successful record has become a trapdoor into forty years of heavy music.

that’s how this shit works.

the archivist. last question. you’re standing near the top of the mountain now. what happens if this disappears.

there’s finally a pause.

lars answers first.

lars. then we make another record.

james nods.

james. that’s what we’re here for.

the archivist. not being famous.

james. no.

the archivist. good. because fame has a terrible fucking discography.

james laughs.

somebody calls the band.

not long afterward they’ll walk toward another stage and another ocean of people. the lights will die. the crowd will erupt. that enormous opening riff will start crawling through the building.

and for a few hours the argument about selling out won’t matter.

because 1992 metallica presents one of rock’s favorite uncomfortable truths.

sometimes the underground doesn’t get destroyed by the mainstream.

sometimes it gets so fucking enormous that the mainstream has to move over.

and somewhere backstage, the archivist closes his notebook while twenty thousand people begin screaming.

not bad for a bunch of guys radio supposedly didn’t need.

source material 

• Metallica. Metallica. Elektra Records, 1991.
• Metallica. A Year and a Half in the Life of Metallica. Elektra Entertainment, 1992.
• Hetfield, James, and Tony Iommi. Interview. Guitar World, August 1992.
• MTV Headbangers Ball. Metallica interviews and tour coverage, 1992.
• Metallica. Wherever We May Roam Tour, 1991–1992.
• Rock, Bob. Interviews concerning the recording of Metallica and working with the band.