#58, “San Quentin,” Johnny Cash (1969)

150 Favorite Songs: #58, “San Quentin,” Johnny Cash (1969)

There’s a strong possibility that Johnny Cash’s performance of “San Quentin” is the most punk rock thing ever recorded. It doesn’t sound particularly punk—it’s a pretty slow 4/4 beat with a basic bassline and a simple plucked guitar, plus June Carter Cash and the Carter Family on backing vocals—but for the shouting from the crowd. Who were, of course, the prisoners incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison, listening to this defiant song written just for them.

Johnny Cash liked to perform in, and think about, prisons a lot. (He never did time himself; that was Merle Haggard.) He wrote “Folsom Prison Blues” from a prisoner’s perspective, maybe the most famous song in his catalog, and released a hit album in 1968 from that facility in California. But “Folsom Prison Blues” isn’t a song for people who are incarcerated, it’s a song for people who aren’t to imagine what it might be like if they were, and maybe to listen to and be glad that they’re free to eat what they want, go where they want, drink coffee and smoke big cigars in a fancy dining car. Listen to the recording of “Folsom Prison Blues” on Live at Folsom Prison and the audience seems to appreciate the shout-out, but you don’t get the sense that the song particularly speaks to them. It’s a great song, but he’d get the same response playing it at the Grand Ol Opry or the Tom Green County Fair. Even the line when he sings “far from Folsom Prison, that’s where I want to stay” only gets some scattered applause.

Now go ahead and listen to “San Quentin.” From that very first line—“San Quentin, you’ve been living hell to me”—and on, as it gets even more direct (“San Quentin, I hate every inch of you,” “Mr. Congressman, you can’t understand,” “Do you think I’ll be different when you’re through?” “San Quentin, may you rot and burn in hell,” “may all the world regret you did no good”), the crowd goes fucking apeshit. The original release of the album is ten tracks, and side two opens up with “San Quentin,” which is followed up by “San Quentin,” because the audience demanded to hear it again. (Columbia Records, in a forward-thinking move, recognized that it was worth releasing the way it happened, instead of including any of the 21 tracks from the performance that didn’t get released until 2006.

Playing a song about how San Quentin is hell on earth in San Quentin, before an audience that includes not just people incarcerated in the prison but also the guards, warden, and others who are responsible for the place, is really bold as fuck. It’s also an exercise in deep compassion, and what’s really amazing about it is that he does that without lionizing the people for whom he’s displaying that empathy.

Lots of bands have played prisons over the years. There’s a video of Metallica playing a set at San Quentin, and Lars high-fives a dude as he’s leaving the stage, and we don’t know what the man he’s high-fiving has done in his life to end up there, but Lars treats him sort of like a political prisoner or something in that moment. And Johnny Cash does not do that. When he introduces the song, he explains, “I think I understand a little bit about how you feel about some things, it’s none of my business how you feel about some other things, and I don’t give a damn how you feel about some other things,” which is, I think, the right attitude: The audience are humans whose perspective is worth considering, whose experiences are valuable, whose lives are meaningful, but that doesn’t make them either heroes or villains, and “San Quentin” walks that line neatly.

I’ve known people who’ve been in prisons, and I’ve visited those places myself. They’re not good places, even when you can walk out any time you choose. And what I’ve always found to be true of the people in them is that they rarely claim to be locked up for a cause. In movies, when someone talks about a prison, there might be a line like “everybody in here says they’re innocent,” and that’s not my experience at all. In “San Quentin,” what Johnny Cash does that’s so special, so radical, so—yes—punk rock is he doesn’t care about any of that. He speaks to the prison itself, and the pointlessness, the futility of incarceration, and he speaks to the people in there with dignity. The guards, you can tell on the recording, are nervous about it. And then he plays it again.