Johnny Cash is the Babe Ruth of Country music. He is wildly popular, he has hit a lot of home runs and in general is an icon representing America and apple pie. That being said, Johnny has probably struck out more than any other major country artist also. Things cruise along nicely for a while after he moved from Sun Records to Columbia in 1958. The boom-chuck Johnny Cash sound stays in place and holds up through the mid 60's until it seems that Johnny needed to explore the repertoire of the folk boom (which he himself helped to popularize by covering many traditional songs) and the new generation of songwriters that flourished in that era.
Johnny Cash really just did not have the voice or the good judgment to know when to stop. "The One in the Middle", "The Junkie, The Juicehead, Minus Me" and even his off key, overblown rendition of "Sunday Morning Coming Down" help to cement the fact that maybe Johnny Cash was as much about myth building as anything else.
By 1977 when The Rambler was released by Columbia Records, the Outlaws had taken over the country music scene, Urban Cowboy was still a few years away and while Johnny might be able to lay claim as one of the original outlaws, this crazy, rambling mess of an album shows that he has been left far behind conceptually by his pals Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings.
The "concept" of this album is an imaginary road trip by a wayward rambler smarting from the loss of his woman. The album starts off with one pretty good song "Hit the Road and Go" and goes right downhill from there. Interspersed between EVERY song are long, rambling dialogs between Johnny, a Cowboy and some girl who cheats at pinball. The story seems to revolve around everybody looking for love and redemption (who isn't?) and proceeds to bore the shit out of you while waiting for the next song. The songs try to tie themselves to the story and none of it ever comes together in a way that would be interesting to anybody but the most rabid Cash freak. Consequently, this album gets filed in the litter box.
