by Steve Turner
Through Gene Ferguson, Columbia's promotion man in Nashville, Cash learned of the work of another New York folk musician, Peter La Farge. The son of Oliver La Farge, who was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and a student of the Navajo people, his songs almost exclusively concerned Native American issues. In fact La Farge barely sang. His songs were more like rhythmic recitations over a backing of acoustic guitar and bongo drums, with titles like "Johnny Half-Breed," "I'm an Indian, I'm an Alien," and "Coyote, My Little Brother."
La Farge played at the Gaslight on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village and performed at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival. He presented a very exotic background. He said he had left school to work in rodeos, then served on an aircraft carrier during the Korean War, and later spent time as an amateur boxer, radio announcer, painter, actor, poet, and playwright. And though he also claimed to be part Narragansett Indian, neither his father, Oliver La Farge, nor his mother, Wanden, had any Indian blood.
"Johnny wanted more than the hillbilly jangle," said La Farge when trying to explain what had attracted the King of Country to Greenwich Village. "He was hungry for the depth and truth heard only in the folk field . . . the secret is simple. Johnny has the heart of a folksinger in the purest sense, and he has a very lovely soul. He is capable of anything he puts his soul and his Band-Aid heart to, and he is capable of being a folksinger in the very essence of folk truth. He would love to be out from that heavy legend that binds him to Hillbilly Heaven."
In March 1964, Cash recorded "The Ballad of Ira Hayes," a track that La Farge had first recorded in 1961 on a Folkways album On the Warpath and rerecorded in 1962 for a Columbia album produced by John Hammond titled Ira Hayes and Other Ballads. Ferguson had thought Cash would like it for two reasons. "I knew of John's relationship with the Indians," he says. "I also knew that he had served with the American armed forces. This song put these two things together and I thought John would like it. As it happens, he loved it."
"The Ballad of Ira Hayes" told the story of Ira Hamilton Hayes, the Pima Indian who was one of the six American marines photographed by Joe Rosenthal raising the American flag after the Battle of Iwo Jima. Though feted on his return home, as national interest waned and the speaking engagements and parades stopped, Hayes drifted into a life of poverty, jail, and alcoholism. When found dead from "exposure" in a cotton field on a Pima Indian reservation in Arizona in 1955, Ira Hayes was only thirty-two.
La Farge's song pointed out the irony that despite the personal risks Hayes took for his country, he returned home only to find his tribe's ancestral land lacked adequate water—something which ultimately contributed to his death. The injustice of the tale moved Cash. "I loved it so much," he said of the song. "I had such a feeling for Ira Hayes. I had been to the Apache country. I had seen the old women carrying the big bundle of sticks on their backs for their night's firewood. I had seen the poverty and had a feeling for it."
Cash liked the song immensely and decided to build a concept album around the Native American plight. In June he recorded "Drums" and "White Girl" from La Farge's 1961 debut album, and "As Long as the Grass Shall Grow" (itself the title of a 1940 book written by the senior La Farge) and "Custer" from his most recent album. He added two of his own songs, "Apache Tears" and "The Talking Leaves," and Johnny Horton's "The Vanishing Race."
Although the "protest song" had a long and healthy tradition in folk music circles, such social commentary never made its way into the politically conservative country scene. Native American land rights had yet to become a fashionable cause. Some country music critics thought Cash, by pushing the norms of the genre, was forgetting his humble roots. Others thought he had become tainted by left-wing radicalism. Because country music D. J.s refused to play "The Ballad of Ira Hayes," Cash paid for a full-page ad in Billboard that ran August 22.
Addressed to "DJs, station managers, owners, etc.," the ad asked,
Where are your guts? I'm not afraid to sing the hard, bitter lines that the son of Oliver La Farge wrote . . . . Classify me, categorize me—STIFLE me, but it won't work. . . . I am fighting no particular cause. If I did, it would soon make me a sluggard. For as time changes, I change, you're right! Teenage girls and Beatle record buyers don't want to hear this sad story of Ira Hayes—but who cries more easily, and who always go to sad movies to cry? Teenage girls . . . Regardless of the trade charts—the categorizing, classifying and restrictions of air play, this is not a country song, not as it is being sold. It is a fine reason though for the gutless to give it thumbs down. "Ballad of Ira Hayes" is strong medicine. So is Rochester—Harlem—Birmingham and Vietnam . . .
The next month, Cash's album of Indian songs, Bitter Tears, hit the market. Robert Shelton, the New York Times music critic who had given Bob Dylan his first rave review, greeted it as "one of the best LP's to emerge from the 60s folk movement." The album may have alienated Cash from the Nashville scene, but it endeared him to bohemians, students, and intellectuals. Not a complete stranger to this group of fans, Cash had performed "Big River," "Folsom Prison Blues," "I Still Miss Someone," "Rock Island Line," "I Walk the Line," "The Ballad of Ira Hayes," "Keep on the Sunnyside," and Bob Dylan's "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" to a crowd of seventy thousand at the July 1964 Newport Folk Festival.
Although Dylan once said that he first met Cash at the Gaslight, the two generally agreed that Newport was where they finally came face to face—Cash, the country legend with almost a decade of recording experience behind him and Dylan, the young folk musician who was being hailed as the voice of a generation. Tony Glover, a longtime friend of Dylan's, later recalled the meeting:
That night Cash went on, and that was a groove. He came on like a king country stud, full of humble arrogance, and he lit the night with his own kind of charisma. Dylan came later and instead of all the political material that everybody expected, he did songs from Another Side like "Ramona." You could tell the audience was puzzled, but they didn't want to be thought uncool by anybody, so they applauded just as vigorously anyhow. Later, in a motel full of people like Joan Baez, Sandy Bull, Jack Elliott, and some others, Dylan and Cash sat on the floor trading songs. Joan set up a portable machine and that's where Bob gave Johnny "It Ain't Me, Babe" and "Mama, You've Been on My Mind."
"It Ain't Me, Babe" also came from Dylan's soon-to-be-released Another Side. The demo of "Mama, You've Been on My Mind" had been made, but the song had not been recorded. Cash went on to record both songs along with "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" for his Orange Blossom Special album. The label released "It Ain't Me, Babe" as a single and advertised it as "A new song from Bob Dylan on a new single sung by Johnny Cash." For Columbia, the championing of one of its new discoveries by one of its established artists provided great cross publicity.
Orange Blossom Special, Cash's most folk-inspired album, contained the three Dylan songs, as well as a version of the Carter Family's "Wildwood Flower," the classically constructed "The Long Black Veil," the Irish ballad "Danny Boy," the 1930s' railroad song "Orange Blossom Special," and his own protest song "All of God's Children Ain't Free."
By 1965, though his marriage was clearly over, Vivian refused to consider divorce because of her strict practice of Roman Catholicism. Cash believed in the family and extolled the virtue of hearth and home in his songs, yet he was no more than an infrequent guest in his own house. His children were growing up outside of his immediate care and control. He was torn because he felt that he had let everyone down.
"He always came home eventually," says Rosanne. "He might be away for long periods and he might come back really messed up, but he would always come home and he would always try. When it was Christmas he would bring back presents and leave footprints through the house so that we'd think Father Christmas had been through. He would get on a tractor and go round the acres of land that we had. He was doing stuff. But he was tortured beyond belief. Even as a little kid I could look at him and see how tortured he was."
To cope with the pain, Cash often
drove deep into the desert, usually stoked up on beer, amphetamines, or a combination of both. His interest in the Old West had deepened, and he used these trips to "commune with the cowboy ghosts," as he put it. Sometimes he'd even dress in antique Western clothes with a gun strapped to his leg and spend a few nights in an abandoned ranch near Maricopa, California—with nothing but candles for light and a wood-burning stove for heat—hoping to find inspiration.
He had always enjoyed immersing himself in a subject, reading everything he could lay his hands on, contacting experts, and then projecting himself imaginatively into the situation or historical period. While planning Bitter Tears he absorbed himself in Native American studies. Don Law had suggested Cash record an album of Western songs, so for Ballads of the True West he investigated cowboys and pioneers. He read books by John Lomax, B. A. Botkin, and J. Frank Dobie; read back issues of True West magazine; looked up original newspaper accounts of outlaws and their crimes; and listened to taped interviews with the last of the original pioneers. He quizzed musical friends like Peter La Farge, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, and Tex Ritter about the history of cowboy songs. To write a song about John Wesley Hardin, he read a manuscript of Hardin's original autobiography and, in the end, felt he knew Hardin as well as he knew himself.
Explaining how he prepared for the album Cash said,
I followed trails in my Jeep and on foot, and I slept under mesquite bushes and in gullies. I heard the timber wolves, looked for golden nuggets in old creek beds, sat for hours beneath a manzanita bush in an ancient Indian burial ground, breathed the west wind and the tales it tells only to those who listen. I replaced a wooden grave marker of some man in Arizona who "never made it." I walked across alkali flats where others had walked before me, but hadn't made it. I ate mesquite beans and squeezed the water from a barrel cactus. I was saved once by a forest ranger, lying flat on my face, starving. I learned how to throw a Bowie knife and kill a jack rabbit at forty yards, not for sport but because I was hungry. I learned of the true West the hard way, a la 1965.
Two days after completing the recording of Ballads of the True West he smashed June's 1964 Cadillac into a utility pole on South Street in Nashville, causing two thousand dollars of damage to the car. Police came to the scene, and although he didn't have his driver's license with him, he wasn't charged. They did take him to Vanderbilt Hospital, where he was treated for minor injuries. The official reason given for the accident was heavy rain (and a lapse in concentration as he tried to fix a faulty windshield wiper), but as he and everyone around him knew, alcohol and/or drugs were truly to blame.
Permanently hyper and incapable of breaking his amphetamine dependency, thirty-three-year-old Cash looked fifty, with his drawn face, hollow cheeks, and two great furrows scored from his nose down to the outsides of his mouth. His 155 pounds were distributed over a six-foot-two-inch frame, making him look alarmingly thin. (He had been five pounds heavier at the age of eighteen.) He had developed a number of nervous habits often imitated by people on the country scene—scratching his neck, the nervous cough, the twisting of his head. Kris Kristofferson, then serving in the army, first met Cash at the Opry in 1965. "He looked like a panther pacing around backstage," he says. "He was so skinny and wired out."
Cash's condition began seriously affecting his career. "Many times we'd have to go ahead and do the show without him just to try and save whatever the box office had taken," says Don Reid of the Statler Brothers. "We just had to walk out on stage and say 'Ladies and gentlemen, Johnny Cash is not here this evening. Anybody who wants their money back can go to the box office now, but the rest of us are here and we'll put on a show. We hope that you'll stay and that you'll enjoy it.' Surprisingly a lot would stay."
At other times Cash would perform, but in such an agitated state that everyone would be on tenterhooks. At the Grand Ole Opry in 1965, he lost his temper onstage, either because he couldn't dislodge a microphone from its stand or because he found the stage lights too bright. His tantrum resulted in his banishment from the Opry. "What I remember is that he dragged his microphone stand right across the footlights so that he'd take them out," says Don Reid. "It was because of the pills. It was the pills talking. He would do really bizarre things. I've seen him stop in the middle of a concert and take a microphone apart with a screwdriver while the audience sat there waiting for him to carry on. All of a sudden, right in the middle of the show, that microphone became the most important thing in his life. We were all standing there waiting for him. These strange urges would come over him."
These distractions could sometimes cost him days. He would drive to the desert for an afternoon and not come back for a week. Once, on the way home to Los Angeles from Nashville, he found himself partying in Dallas with people he didn't even know. "In 1965 he lost my Cadillac," remembers Johnny Western. "He was on an amphetamine jag. He had flown to California to do a TV show with me and asked if he could borrow my car for a couple of hours. The next day at around 9:00 a.m. I had a call from a rather sheepish Johnny who said that, er, he'd been up all night on pills and couldn't remember where he'd left it." It was later found outside the Farmers Market with a dead battery and the keys in the ignition.
The show he'd flown in to do was Shindig produced by Jack Good, who had introduced him to British television in 1959 on Boy Meets Girl. Good recalls that Cash was on pills when he first met him in Manchester, England, but that by 1965 he was barely controllable. It took them two hours to tape one song because Cash couldn't remember the words. "We introduced him as being In his famous role as Harry the Hobo,' but I think that was put in to disguise his strange behavior," says Good. "We also had to bring some dancers on so that we had somewhere to go if he was really out of it."
When he was working in Nashville he'd stay with Gene Ferguson and his family, but there were times when Cash's behavior was so unacceptable that Ferguson would make him stay in his office downtown. "When he was staying with me he'd sometimes take a ballpoint pen and write phone numbers on my couch," he says. "He'd go out into the rain with no shoes or socks on and in the morning there would be mud right through the house. There were a couple of times when I went to wake him when he didn't respond and I couldn't feel a heartbeat. Once I called Luther to ask him what I should do and Luther said, 'Well, he'll either wake up or die.' That was the answer I got."
Today such escapades would be widely reported and there would be public concern about his state of mind, but in 1965, as far as his fans knew, Johnny Cash was a happily married Christian who sometimes suffered from laryngitis. For Saul Holiff, who had had no previous experience of dealing with addictive personalities, his client's erratic behavior gave him quite a headache. "I was brought up in a rational, nonreligious, openminded household of logic," he says. "Suddenly I found myself in this chaotic, unpredictable, terrible atmosphere. Nothing could be finalized. Nothing could be definite. The cancellations were awful and I had to handle them and make good on them. I had to fend off lawsuits. There was never a tranquil period that lasted for more than a week."
Cash's drug-impaired ability to react quickly started to threaten his safety. He crashed cars and rolled them down banks. He sank a boat. He overturned a tractor on his land in Casitas Springs. In June 1965, while fishing in the Los Padres National Forest, he stalled his camper in the sand on the edge of the creek, and, as he revved the engine, the heat from the exhaust pipe set the grass on fire. He attempted to put it out, but the fire spread rapidly and eventually razed five hundred and eight acres, which were a significant habitat of near-extinct California condors. It took four hundred and fifty firefighters to put out the blaze. In an unprecedented case, the federal government sued Cash for $125,127. He contested the figure and two years later settled for $82,000.
Things finally came to a head. On October 2, 1965, Cash played a show in Dallas, but instead of staying overnight, as expected, he checked out of his hotel and flew to El Paso, Texas, from where he took a cab across the Rio Grande to Juarez, Mexico. There, he'd bee
n told, was a thriving black market in pills. From a Mexican dealer he bought 475 Equanil and 668 Dexedrine tablets, which he then hid inside a guitar. He returned to El Paso International Airport and waited for a plane home to Los Angeles. However, the dealer in Juarez had been under surveillance because he was believed to be selling heroin. Federal customs agents promptly arrested Cash and locked him up overnight in the county jail.
The next day, dressed in a black suit and a white open-necked shirt, he appeared in court at a bond hearing where he faced U.S. Commissioner Colbert Coldwell. Cash was charged with "willfully smuggling and concealing drugs after importation," ordered not to leave the continental United States until further notice, and released on a fifteen-hundred-dollar bond. After the hearing, he left the court flanked by two plain-clothes policemen, his wrists cuffed together in front of him. A press photographer pointed his camera at him and Cash kicked out in anger, but not before the shutter clicked. The next day, a photograph of the handcuffed Cash in dark glasses appeared in newspapers across the country. "It was on the front page of our local newspaper in Casitas Springs," says Cindy Cash. "I remember being terrified that my friends would see it."
Two months later, accompanied by Vivian, and with moral support from Don Law and Floyd Gressett, Cash returned to El Paso to plead guilty to the possession of illegal drugs. The misdemeanor criminal offense carried a maximum one-thousand dollar fine, one year in prison, or both. The district judge deferred sentencing indefinitely, pending a report from his probation officer.
When Cash left the court that day, he was again photographed, this time without dark glasses, wearing a suit and tie, and holding hands with Vivian. The picture that ran in papers the next day made Vivian's full lips and Mediterranean complexion resemble those of a light-skinned African American. For some reason, the Ku Klux Klan picked up on it and published the photograph in their paper Thunderbolt as well as on flyers. They described Vivian as a "negress," Cash as "scum," and their four children as "mongrelized." The Klan also ran advertisements in newspapers across the South, saying, "FOR CASH, CALL THIS NUMBER." The listed number connected to a recorded message warning people not to attend Johnny Cash concerts because the singer was "married to a n - woman."
