by Steve Turner
Many times in his writing Cash appears to embellish basic facts to make his story more compelling. For instance, he told Christopher Wren that a school friend had put a pencil in his left ear, which caused his abnormally acute hearing. Four years later, in Man in Black, he suggests the incident occurred while in the service, the "school friend" morphs into "a German girl," and instead of "abnormally acute" his hearing becomes "temporarily impaired." Rather than showing signs of a bad memory, the embellishments suggest a tendency to add danger and intrigue to otherwise mundane events. As one of his producers would later say of him, "John never let the truth get in the way of a good story."
While he was, in fact, at Landsberg on March 5, 1953, the day Joseph Stalin died, his comment in Cash: The Autobiography that "I was who they called when the hardest jobs came up. I copied the first news of Stalin's death"4. brings a wry smile to the faces of those who worked with him. "That's nonsense," says one. "He didn't understand Russian, and if it came in code we wouldn't have been able to decipher it anyway. It created a certain aura about his skill that in my view was directly related to his celebrity."
"I don't know if something like the fight could have happened, but if it had it would have [caused] a lot more rumor, discussion, and discipline," says Rich Collins. "You don't ever hit an air policeman. I don't even remember him having a reputation that way. He wasn't a renegade. He never tested the limits."
A controversial incident that really would have brought Cash shame was either forgotten or left out. One weekend he was in the town of Ausburg on a weekend pass. He and a couple of friends got "blasted" on German beer and cognac and went to a strip club. The colleague he went with says only, "I have a couple of good stories about what happened in Ausburg, but I wouldn't want to tell them to you." The story he doesn't want to tell is well known among others who served in the Twelfth RSM. "John was walking down the sidewalk with this friend of mine," says one of them, "and he saw a black soldier with a white German girl. He was so incensed that he used profanity to say that a black guy was trying to have sex with a white woman and that this wasn't the way it should be. The guy who was with [Cash] had to pacify and restrain him, and in the end MPs came and calmed him down. They told him that while this might not go on where he lived back home. He had to lay off or else he would be in big trouble. That was an incident that stuck with me. I had never seen him being racist back on the base. Ours was an integrated unit. There was probably a black guy for every four white guys."
Probably, a combination of the drink and Cash's cultural heritage led to the incident. Not only did he hail from what was then one of the most racist states in America, but he came from a town where the only African American anyone can remember worked as a janitor. What he saw in Germany—black GIs dating white German girls—was a totally new and shocking experience for him.
His old school friend A. J. Henson says that they were all racist at the time. They considered African Americans to be "almost a different breed" to themselves and never knew any as friends. Henson can recall stepping aside to let an African American pass by on a sidewalk in Memphis, when the friend he was with from Dyess rebuked him for doing such a thing for anyone who was only a "n—."
Throughout his books, Cash claimed that his level of religious commitment decreased during his time in Germany, but his friends remember him regularly attending the Protestant chapel on the base. They allow that he may eventually have changed his habits, but more likely because of the nature of the shifts and the days off. "I can't remember hardly a Sunday that John was not in church," says Bob Whitacre, one of his roommates. "In basic training he was in church all the time. As far as I knew it never tapered off. He was someone who didn't get carried away with his beliefs, but I don't think he had any doubt as to where he stood. He was very obviously a Christian." Says Rich Collins, "He was fundamental, decent, and Baptist. I assumed that there was a moral code behind the fact that he didn't go whoring and drinking like the other guys."
Ben Perea, who roomed with Cash at Landsberg, remembers that he would pray each day and lay on his bunk reading his Bible. "He would always express his faith," he says. "I would do my prayers, and he would do his meditation. He would meditate for what seemed like a lot longer than my prayers. He would just close his eyes and be very quiet. I can still picture him meditating very deeply, and then he would go back to his guitar and start singing."
Music had asserted its place in Cash's life almost as soon as he arrived at the base in Germany. He didn't have a record player but would listen to the Armed Forces Network and, late at night, could even tune a high-powered receiver into American domestic radio stations to listen to the Grand Ole Opry broadcast live from Nashville.
Very few men of the Twelfth RSM in the early 1950s liked all types of popular music. Those from the cities of the North and East liked cool jazz and swing and considered artists like Hank Snow too crude, simple, and sentimental. On the flip side, those from Southern towns and farming communities liked country and gospel and found Stan Kenton too complicated and disorganized.
Cash fell in with a group of fellow country boys whose idea of a good time was to hang out in the basement with their musical instruments for picking sessions. Rich Collins thought of them as "footlocker guys"; "the kind of guys who, if they weren't working, would play cards, do music, or socialize in small groups" as opposed to the "traveling types," who looked for pleasure in the cities or the "jocks," who played competitive sports. Ben Perea, Ted Freeman from West Virginia, Orville Rigdon from Louisiana, and Reid Cummins from Arkansas made up the original core of pickers. When Ben Perea left the Twelfth RSM in 1953, he was replaced by Bill Carnahan from Missouri.
Except for Perea, who only sang, they were all more accomplished musicians than Cash. Freeman played a mean mandolin, but he could also play fiddle and banjo and had perfect vocal pitch. Carnahan boasted the best voice and could finger-pick beautifully on guitar. Eventually, Rigdon accompanied Cash into Landsberg and helped him choose a twenty-five-Deutsche Marks guitar. Returning to the basement, he and Carnahan then had to teach John the rudiments that he'd last been taught by Jesse Barnhill. "I had to show him basic chords," remembers Rigdon. "Then he would start to sing. His key was usually E or A."
This informal group is frequently referred to as the Landsberg Barbarians, but if Orville Rigdon's memory is right, they only once played outside the barracks as part of a fund-raiser on the base for United Way, and it's unlikely that they ever formally adopted a name. If they were known as the Landsberg Barbarians, then it wasn't, as some commentators have speculated, because they acted wildly in the local bars and taverns, but as a playful reference to the biweekly base newspaper, the Landsberg Bavarian.
The picking sessions gave Cash the stimulus he needed to learn to play guitar and even to begin to write songs. The fact that they didn't perform in public—other than for interested onlookers from the Twelfth RSM—meant that Cash's music education took place in the context of friendship, respect, and a mutual love of music. "The other guys had been brought up playing music and they taught him," says Bob Whitacre. "Like anything else it takes practice and hard work."
The music they played was a combination of the popular songs of the time and old favorites that they'd grown up singing on farms, ranches, and cotton fields. Bill Carnahan remembers Cash singing the cowboy song "One More Ride," written by Bob Nolan of the Sons of the Pioneers. Ben Perea remembers harmonizing with Cash on the bluegrass classic "Beautiful, Beautiful Brown Eyes" and the spiritual "Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?" Their collective musical heroes included Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Snow, Roy Acuff, Ernest Tubb, and, inevitably, Hank Williams.
Hank Williams's music combined elements of folk, blues, and gospel, and the story he told usually involved someone who could be alternately hard-living and repentant. Hank sang with a poignant sadness in his voice, and yet at the same time the listener sensed that he enjoyed the misery for the dangerous edge it gave his life. He drank to drown his sorro
ws and then felt sorry that he'd been drunk. During Cash's time in Germany, Hank was at the peak of his recording career. In 1951 he released "Cold, Cold Heart" and "Hey, Good Looking." In 1952 he released "Honky Tonk Blues," "Half As Much," "Jambalaya," and "Setting the Woods on Fire."
The papers widely reported Williams's errant lifestyle, which would become the template for the postwar country music star. Country stars came from poor backgrounds, and as they acquired wealth they would often use it ostentatiously. Once they'd reached the top of the charts, they'd become addicted to alcohol or drugs and carry on a series of tempestuous relationships. Hank Williams died in the back of a car while being driven to a gig on New Year's Day 1953. "AFN had the story right away," remembers Jack Matheson. "That was the hardest moment of John's life in Germany. He went into a depression for the rest of the day."
Cash started writing songs while at Landsberg. Ben Perea remembers him writing "Hey! Porter" and that the military paper Stars and Stripes published the words. He wrote "Belshazzar," his earliest gospel song, while there, and Orville Rigdon asserts that he started writing "Don't Take Your Guns to Town" at the barracks. Certainly the song's protagonist, Billy Joe, was named after Billy Joe Carnahan. Also while in Germany, Cash saw Crane Wilbur's 1951 film Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison, which inspired him to begin writing almost immediately. "He liked that film quite a bit," remembers Ben Perea. "It was shown in the recreation hall on the base, and he wanted it to be shown again."
Cash also claimed that the musical inspiration for "I Walk the Line" came when someone inadvertently twisted a rehearsal tape in the Wilcox-Gay tape recorder that he'd bought from the base PX. When he hit play, it sounded like religious music, but what he was actually hearing were backward chords. "The drone and those weird chord changes stayed with me," he said. In 1956 he added the words.
The first time they heard themselves on tape was when Paul E. Smith arrived in January 1953 and spent eight weeks, with Cash as his Morse code instructor. Smith had a reel-to-reel recorder that he'd had sent to him by Allied Radio in Chicago, and he joined the boys in the basement to tape their efforts. "They would pick and sing and John would write little ditties and songs, and so I would record these," he says. "Later I was shipped to Scotland, and I sold the recorder to a GI in Kirknewton, and I let the tapes go with it."
"When we were playing in Germany I knew there was something special about John," says Carnahan. "He was kind of a charismatic character. He was always telling stories. He had the wildest imagination you ever came across in your entire life. It was a very wild imagination. He also seemed to have this uncanny ability to know which way things were going to develop in the future. He was able to anticipate trends."
Besides telling stories, Cash was writing stories. He told a friend that he had published some under the pen name "Johnny Dollar" (a popular radio detective) either in a magazine for men or in a literary journal. One of his stories from 1953, a science fiction piece titled "The Holografik Danser," was kept in his drawer until 2001, when his daughter Rosanne published it as part of the collection Songs without Rhyme: Prose by Celebrated Songwriters.
For a twenty-one-year-old Arkansas farm boy who'd never taken a course in literature, "The Holografik Danser" was an imaginative piece of writing. It portrayed a twenty-first-century America that had been conquered by Russia—major cities had been razed by nuclear attacks, and entertainment was paid for in kiosks and then piped into homes via phone lines. Partly inspired by the news of the explosion in television broadcasting, he envisaged a time when live holographic entertainment would be beamed into living rooms for twelve dollars a show. He further imagined the possibility of a man projecting himself into the hologram.
The story illustrates his growing preoccupation with words. One of the first things the Soviets did, he wrote in his story, "was to desecrate the English language." In order to speed up integration, the niceties of grammar and spelling were forsaken, and everyone wrote words phonetically. His friends at Landsberg remember his fascination with unusual words and new coinages. Jack Matheson has never forgotten Cash informing him that the longest word in the English language was antidisestablishmentarianism. With Chuck Riley he used to pass time during breaks by organizing word-making competitions. "We each had to make up a word which would stump the other," he says. "John would always beat me. I remember one time he came up with crematearatlatax. I gave up and asked him what it meant. He said that it was the art of burning rattails. Latax was Latin for the tail of an animal, cremate was to burn, and then there was the rat, obviously!"
Cash also liked to draw. Bob Moodie recalls that he loved the cartoons of Rube Goldberg and often made sketches of mechanical devices. Well remembered by those who lived in the Landsberg barracks, Cash's drawing of a saguaro cactus surrounded by sand and bleached bones hung framed on the wall beside his bed. He titled it Custer 's Last Stand. A closer look at the drawing revealed a hidden genius—a thinly disguised finger raised as a symbol of insult. "It was giving the bird," says Jack Matheson. T h e guy was a total talent."
One of the great advantages of serving with the Twelfth RSM in Germany was the three-day break that followed every six days on duty. Men could take their passes and travel to major European cities. If transport was available they could even save money by hitching rides on military aircraft. For the more hedonistically inclined this presented a grand opportunity to sample the beer and brothels of places like Amsterdam and Copenhagen. The sporting types looked forward to skiing in the Austrian Alps or swimming on the French Riviera. To Cash, these breaks brought the chance to follow country pursuits, such as trout fishing at Gross Kitscherkoffen or exploring the art and architecture of major cultural centers. As Rich Collins observes, "It was a great opportunity for those of us who were young and who had seen nothing more than our local towns to go to Europe and see this remarkable variety of cultures. For most of us it was a tremendously opening experience."
Cash most preferred traveling with Ted Freeman and Ben Perea. The red-headed Freeman grew up on a farm in Nicholas County, West Virginia, and Cash nicknamed him Fenrod, both in honor of his given name, Fenton, and the eponymous twelve-year- old hero of Booth Tarkington's novel Penrod. They took the train down to Venice, where they played together in a sidewalk cafe, and to Oberammergau, where the renowned passion play is produced once every decade. The last production had been in 1950, when General Eisenhower had attended a show. With Perea Cash went to Zurich, London (where they saw the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth arriving for the premiere of the film The Conquest of Everest at a cinema near Piccadilly Circus), Munich, Salzburg, Amsterdam, and Berlin.
What struck Perea was the way in which Cash would become quietly absorbed in all he saw. In Holland the sight of the old windmills with their huge wooden sails transfixed him. "He looked at them, and once he saw something he really liked he would stop. He would gaze at it and just stand there thinking. I'd just stay beside him until he was done. That's the way he was."
When they went to Paris in October 1953, Cash wanted to drink in everything. "He wanted to see the Sorbonne. He wanted to see Notre Dame. He wanted to visit the Louvre and see the Mona Lisa. Oh, how he wanted to see that! We saw the Pigalle district and the Arc de Triomphe. We did a lot of walking in Paris. He wanted to walk and to see. He didn't really like organized tours. He wanted to walk and see, to look at everything. He actually wanted to touch the things. To see and to touch."
Cash's jottings made on the trip reveal how little sophistication he had at the time. A country kid who grew up surrounded by flat, dark earth, cotton, and single-story, white buildings now stood before some of civilization's greatest artistic and cultural achievements. He had no points of comparison, no vocabulary adequate enough to analyze his responses. It was all so awe-inspiring.
Upon first impression, October 18, 1953, Cash found Paris "a poor, dirty place," but after cleaning up back at the hotel and putting on civvies he found it "didn't look so bad." He saw the Arc de Triomphe: "It was r
eally a beautiful thing. About three times as big as I thought it would be and a lot prettier. We walked around there taking pictures and then went on to the Eiffel Tower. That was something else. That was different than I'd imagined. It didn't seem so high but was probably higher than it looked. We couldn't see it from very far off because of the fog, and we didn't go to the top because we were plenty cold on the ground where we were, and it sure looked a lot colder up there."
Privately Cash began to focus on the idea of making music his career, a bold step for an unskilled instrumentalist who could count on his fingers the total number of his public performances, including those at school. Based on sheer musical ability, the best bets in Landsberg would have been on Ted Freeman and Bill Carnahan, both of whom possessed skill and versatility. Cash's primitive playing style and limited voice range still needed a lot of work. "I thought he had great potential as a performer," says Orville Rigdon. "I just didn't care much for his singing ability. His voice wavered and was unstable. His forte was his charisma and his ability to write. He was never an accomplished guitar player, but he did have a knack for writing story-type songs."
Though Cash's religion and upbringing may have contributed to his restraint from any wild passions he might have had during his tour of duty, an even more significant influence keeping him on the straight and narrow was Vivian Liberto. Everyone who knew Cash knew about Vivian. He had her picture in his locker, talked about her to anyone who was willing to listen, and wrote to her every single day. For example, between May 2 through 18, 1952, he posted a total of twelve letters. On May 9 alone he posted three.
Cash thought he was in love with Vivian, and she thought she was in love with him. He wanted her to come to Germany and marry him and proposed to her through the post. He even rented a hard-to-come-by apartment in Landsberg for her, but Vivian's father wouldn't entertain the idea. He wasn't going to let his precious daughter go off to Europe to marry a man she'd only dated for thirty days. When he realized that she wouldn't be coming, Cash passed the apartment on to Bill Carnahan, who was himself newly married.
