Known for working on records from Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Leonard Cohen, Simon and Garfunkel, and many others, Johnston passed away Friday in a hospice in Nashville, Tennessee.
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Among his other production credits during this period were Simon & Garfunkel’s 1966’s album Sounds Of Silence and Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, produced Leonard Cohen’s Songs From A Room (1969) and 1971’s Songs Of Love And Hate. The producer had a very specific perspective on his job.
Johnston was far more humble in the explanation of his success, once telling writer Louis Black, “I saw brilliance being destroyed, album after album, group after group, because producers went in and were overly ready …”
Before he produced Blonde on Blonde, Johnston had been knocking around the music business for 10 years: as a performer and songwriter in his native Texas, and working for Hill and Range Songs in Nashville, where he pitched and wrote songs for Elvis movies.
Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde were among several LPs that Johnston produced for Bob Dylan. ‘It’s something Al Kooper wrote down, it’s overdubs.’ I said, ‘If you keep doing that there won’t be anything left.’ ‘I’m gonna cut live.
“All I know is that I was out recording one day, and Tom had always been there – I had no reason to think he wasn’t going to be there – and I looked up one day and Bob was there”, Dylan told Rolling Stone in 1969 about how he and Johnston were first paired. “He should have been wearing a wide cape, a plumed hat, and riding with his sword held high”.
Johnston played an integral role in the creation of many of Johnny Cash’s albums, including the live records At Folsom Prison and At San Quentin. “Dylan, in his 2004 Chronicles shared his take on Johnston: “… He also worked with Willie Nelson, The Byrds, Jimmy Cliff and Pete Seeger.
“Guy stood on the front steps of my house in Nashville on a Sunday night”, he told Uncut. “I thought if you want to be a hero or if you want to take credit, get some other people to work with”.
“All that is actually disturbance you have heard for it, the new fish was transpiring since he filmed”. One of his earliest freelance successes was the UK #1 album Fog on the Tyne by Lindisfarne. “I was better than everybody else”, Johnston said.
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His Lone Star landmarks begin with two seminal long-players that helped spark the cosmic cowboy movement, Michael Murphey twofer Geronimo’s Cadillac and Cosmic Cowboy Souvenir, both from 1983, and are bookended by Willie Nelson and The IRS Tapes: Who’ll Buy My Memories? Once he was confined to bed and connected to machines, hospice only gave him a few days to live. “Bob’s wife told me he pass[ed] away peacefully”.
