This past Friday, Aug. 14, the record producer Bob Johnston died in hospice care near his home in Nashville, Tenn. He was 83 years old.
More than any other single practitioner of that post, Johnston helped give shape, heft and durability to some of the most transformative American music of the past five decades, framing the sounds and intentions of an era — when invention was valued on par with accessibility; lines were confused and maps were being redrawn — and helping to foster a culture of autonomy and liberation for visionary artists that remains vital to this day, and continues to evolve.
As a staff producer for Columbia Records (and then as a free agent) Bob Johnston was a guiding force behind the artists on his watch — playing priest and lifeguard, counselor and agitator to such standard-bearers and upstarts as Johnny Cash, Marty Robbins, Leonard Cohen, Simon and Garfunkel, and The Byrds, to name a scant few.
On behalf of Cash, Johnston stood up fearlessly against Columbia’s executives — who had threatened both men’s continued affiliation with the label should they follow through with the singer’s outlandish desire to record live concert albums at the maximum security prisons at Folsom and San Quentin — albums that proved to be not only blockbusters both, but definitive statements in burnishing the heroic and populist image of the rough-and-tumble Cash and helping to transfigure his standing from country star to national icon.
Leonard Cohen, already a successful novelist and poet in his native Canada, nonetheless regarded himself a novitiate as a musician, and was skittish in the studio. His debut album for Columbia — begun by legendary producer John Hammond, then handed off to John Simon — had proved arduous and creatively unsatisfying to Cohen, who felt it too dense and over-worked, leaving him unsure he would ever make another. But he knew Johnston’s work and reputation, and loved country music; on a chance encounter between the two in Los Angeles, Johnston promised to find Cohen a log cabin to rent in the woods outside of Nashville. He pledged as well to fight the label for Cohen’s right to make the kind of album he truly wanted to, and to help him see it through.