It's widely acknowledged that
Johnny Cash
's time at
Mercury
didn't find the Man in Black at either his commercial or creative peak.
Cash
moved to the label in 1986, just after he departed his longtime home of
Columbia
, and he stayed there through 1991, a half-decade stint that resulted in only one Country Top 40 hit (1988's "That Old Wheel," which charted thanks to the momentum of
's duet partner,
Hank Williams, Jr.
) and has subsequently been framed as the wilderness years before he righted himself on
Rick Rubin
's
American Recordings
. The 2020 box set
The Complete Mercury Albums 1986-1991
and its accompanying single-disc sampler
Easy Rider: The Best of the Mercury Recordings
provide the first opportunity to challenge this conventional wisdom, a place where it's possible to concentrate on the relative merits of the handful of LPs he recorded for the label.
As heard on
Easy Rider
, this era sounds much better than its reputation suggests. Even the cuts from
Classic Cash: Hall of Fame Series
, a 1988 collection of re-recordings of his old hits, is livelier than its description suggests, benefitting from
sounding spry and invested in the material. That none of these LPs generated hit singles at the time can be chalked up to a matter of age.
was on the other side of 50 when he made this music and he'd been a hitmaker for 30 years. He was a known property who couldn't fit into the sound of modern country radio, which happened to be running away from veterans like him in the first place. Which isn't to say he wasn't embraced by modern musicians:
Elvis Costello
wrote the rousing hangover anthem "The Big Light" for him and
U2
had him sing "The Wanderer" on their 1993
Zooropa
, a cut that isn't quite in step with the rest of this collection but is nevertheless a welcome addition, since it isn't on any other
comp. All these personal and cultural changes doomed
records to commercial failure, and while the albums still have a distinct gloss endemic to the '80s, each of them has its share of moments, and many of them are here. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine