In the pop field, Johnston produced Simon & Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence and Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme and Leonard Cohen’s Songs From a Room and Songs of Love and Hate.
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“Bob Johnston is a producer that is an artist’s dream”, Cash was quoted as saying in the film The Other Side of Nashville, according to a profile and interview featured on b-dylan.com.
In an email sent to Uncut by Austin Chronicle editor Louis Black, who also published an online biography of the producer, Johnson had been in a memory facility in Nashville and in hospice for much of the past week before being confined to a bed. Dylan memorably asked Johnston “Is it rolling, Bob?” at the beginning of the song “To Be Alone with You” on Nashville Skyline.
Bob Johnston, who produced Bob Dylan’s celebrated Blonde on Blonde album and Johnny Cash’s live At Folsom Prison in a career spanning more than 50 years, has died at age 83. Johnston worked for Columbia Records first in New York, and later in Nashville, before becoming an independent producer.
He also talked about how he managed to persuade the authorities to allow Cash to record in Folsom Prison, an idea as controversial then as it would be now. With the hugely successful follow-up At San Quentin, Cash transitioned into that elite group of artists whose appeal crossed genre boundaries, and these albums undoubtedly helped establish Cash as the icon he remains today. In latter years, he produced infrequently, usually with acts of his own generation or older, including Willie Nelson and Carl Perkins.
Johnston went on to helm the other Bob’s creative full blossom over the course of six albums – many of them masterworks, including the still-unparalleled Blonde On Blonde double set of 1966.
Following that success he began working with Dylan, eventually persuading him to come to Nashville.
“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. “The grand master waved his magical wand for the last time, then disappeared off into the night”, the friend continued. In his work as a musician, he has collaborated with a disparate array of artists ranging from Ornette Coleman and Madonna to Bonnie Raitt, Harry Belafonte, Mose Allison and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott; from Bill Frisell and Salif Keita to Ani DiFranco, Solomon Burke, Bettye LaVette and Hugh Laurie.
McCoy, 74, said Johnston’s top priority was at helping player’s rejoiced. And you compare all the work with what I did and compare the other people’s records.
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“The world was changing”, Johnston said, “and he was right in the goddamn middle of it, and that put us right in the goddamn middle of it, as far as I was concerned”.
