I'm not super familiar with all of his work, but I know that he got the absolute best out of Johnny Cash in the last decade of Cash's life. For that, I'm thankful. Cash's recordings for American Records are treasures.He sounds like a snake-oil salesman to me. A damned successful one though.
That's funny, J Dylan refers to those recordings as a "card trick"
I'm not sure, that's a question for Jakob Dylan. I like the recordings as well. It sounds like Dylan had a bad experience recording with Rubin, perhaps that's colored his perception of the cash recordings. But I will stand by my statement that he does seem a bit like a snake-oil salesman, there seems to be a gimmicky quality. But then, I've never met the man and I'm relying solely on second and third hand accounts of him. There's no doubt that he's been a part of some of my all time favorite recordings.