Johnny Cash was backstage the night of the taping pacing nervously. I asked him if there was something I could do. I can remember his response like it was yesterday. 'This is a real music show. This matters to me a lot.' That hit me right there that this wasn't your average music show. We'd suddenly taken a dramatic leap out of the stratosphere. |
That didn't feel quite right. I wanted to do something fresh, to capture the spirit and emotion. When I saw the lineup and the songs and the concept (of the New Orleans Social Club), I knew right away it would be a great show. |
We will make sure he gets his Lifetime Achievement Award, no matter how hard it is to track him down. |
We've always known there was a reason to keep all these original masters. We've never erased a single tape from any show we've ever done. We've just about run out of space to store these tapes, but they've turned out be gems. We're proud of these old shows and we think they deserve to be seen by new generations of fans and people that have been fans all along. |
We've been recording these great shows for 31 years, they air on PBS a few times and then they go on the shelf. And that's been the end of it. We've had calls from people begging for old programs, which we can't give to anyone off the street. With the arrival of DVD, that's the format. The quality is there, especially the audio quality. And the price point has come down to where it makes more economic sense to start rolling these out and we're doing it with a vengeance right now. |