Johnny Cash: A Night to Remember (CBS-Sony Entertainment, 1973)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last Saturday night, June 19, KPBS showed one of their usual pledge-break specials which turned out to be a lot more interesting than most of them: a recently discovered filmed live performance of Johnny Cash from the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles on May 5, 1973. If the concert had one flaw (aside from the usual problems with PBS concert specials – the endless begging sessions American public television, lacking the guaranteed revenue stream from license fees for TV sets that funds the British Broadcasting Corporation, including the frustrating boasts that what we’re seeing on air is just a fraction of the full concert and to see and hear the rest we’ll have to make a substantial contribution to the station to get the DVD), it’s that the original director kept the cameras focused on Cash throughout. We heard his backup musicians but didn’t get to see them – a real pity because he not only used hi