by Steve Turner
It flows right out of heaven where the soul will never die.
If you're hot, tired and thirsty; if you crave a tall cool drink;
He will pour it right out for you a whole lot quicker than you think.
He already knows you're thirsty, so let him just come on in,
And he will give you living water, and you'll never thirst again.
("Have a Drink of Water," 1977)
8
The Voice of America
CASH HAD PLAYED PRISONS SINCE 1957, and since 1962 he had wanted to record one of these concerts. He believed that no applause equaled the applause of incarcerated men who had suddenly been treated to some entertainment. "The first time I played a prison I said that this was the only place to record an album live because I'd never heard a reaction to the songs like the one that prisoners gave," he said. "They weren't ashamed to show their appreciation." Despite his enthusiasm for such a project, Columbia wasn't interested.
Cash's opportunity came when Don Law, his producer since 1958, retired and was replaced by thirty-five-year-old Bob Johnston, who had come to Nashville from New York where he'd been a staff producer since 1965. Thirty years younger than Law, Johnston was on the cutting edge of contemporary music, having produced Simon & Garfunkel's Sounds of Silence and Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme and Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, and John Wesley Harding —all popular albums with the newly radicalized college-age generation. A no-nonsense Texan with a loud voice, who thought that record companies frequently failed their artists because executives played safe in order to keep their jobs, Bob Johnston was an ideal partner for Cash at this point in his life.
Johnston felt that the executives at Columbia had neglected Cash's career because they didn't know how to present or promote him. They also considered him well past his peak and, therefore, not worthy of too much attention. "They were producing garbage because nobody had any idea," says Johnston. "They thought of him as a bag of bones who crashed into telephone poles and tore up hotel rooms. They couldn't see that all he needed was his music. The second he got his music back, he got off all that stuff."
Johnston planned to revive Cash's recording career by first identifying his artistic vision and then enabling him to realize it. If Cash wanted to record in a prison, then he'd make sure that it was the best album that could be produced in a prison. He wouldn't take orders from New York-based accountants and marketing consultants. He'd trust the singer's instinct. "I signed on to do what the artist wanted to do because I believe in that," he says. "It has always worked for me."
They chose Folsom State Prison in Repressa, California, as the venue. Not only had it been the subject of one of Cash's best-known songs, but he'd also played there before at the suggestion of Floyd Gressett, his minister friend from Ventura, who regularly worked with prisoners on the West Coast. Situated twenty-five miles east of Sacramento, it was California's second-oldest prison and had a reputation for housing some of the state's worst offenders. Five massive cellblocks held over thirty-five hundred inmates.
After two days of rehearsals in the banquet room of the El Rancho Motel in Sacramento, Cash, the Tennessee Three, Carl Perkins, the Carter Family, and the Statler Brothers arrived at the prison on the morning of January 13, 1968. The dining hall, a cavernous room with a pitched roof, was thronged with two thousand men sitting at small white tables. Armed guards patrolled the overhead walkways, and because the men couldn't be left in darkness, rows of neon lights blazed down throughout the show.
Because the prisoners rarely had a chance to express themselves as a group, the room overflowed with tension. "Those prisoners were all power," says Johnston. "There was nothing but power. If he [Cash] had gone in there as a wimp, I don't think it would have worked. We would have had a pretty good album, but I don't think he would have done all those songs, and I don't think he would have done them the same way. That's why I made him say, 'Hello. I'm Johnny Cash' as soon as he got onstage. He needed to assert control right from the start."
Cash had played enough prisons to know the songs that most touched the hearts of those forced to live there. Almost half of his set was either about prison or crime. Another quarter addressed loneliness, separation, and despair. The difference with the prison audience—and this is obviously what Cash knew would translate well onto the album—was that their applause didn't just come at the end of the songs, but whenever a line hit home. These men took his words seriously. They weren't there to appreciate or evaluate but to respond.
Although Johnston knew that the applause would be something special, Folsom State Prison wasn't an ideal setup for live recording. The dining hall's high, pitched roof and thick stone walls were an acoustical nightmare. They had to use five separate machines—running simultaneously in a truck parked in the prison yard—just to record the music. "When I got back to Nashville I spent about three weeks mixing it. I had to take the echo off. I was bringing it back and forth from these five tapes so that the end result was what it was supposed to be."
Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison kick-started his first major comeback. The album was as important to him in the 1960s as the single "I Walk the Line" had been in the 1950s. It sold six million copies, reached number thirteen in the pop charts, and led to Johnny Cash at San Quentin, which in turn led to his network television series. At the end of 1969, Columbia Records president Clive Davis would announce that Johnny Cash had sold more records in the U.S. that year than the Beatles.
The album cemented Cash's image as an outlaw. It didn't matter that he'd never served real time. What mattered was that he not only looked the part—rugged and weathered—but he identified with a huge audience of hardened criminals in a way that implied he was on their side—not that of the law. Many of the songs, written from the perspective of the imprisoned, addressed the guards with a mocking sneer. In "Cocaine Blues" the lines "Early one morning while making the rounds / I took a shot of cocaine and I shot my woman down," were met by a wave of applause, presumably coming from men who'd either done the same or wished they could. Cash did nothing to quell their enthusiasm.
Questioned closely, Cash would attribute his concern for prisoners to a belief that they needed to know that they were not forgotten. They may have earned society's punishment, but they also deserved their dignity, especially if they were ever to be rehabilitated. How could we expect prisoners to emerge more loving and caring citizens if they were deprived of love and care? "The conditions are the reasons for the crimes," says Johnston. "You can't lock people up and treat them like animals and then punish them even more when they act like animals. At Folsom I stood by the doors as they filed in and I stood there as they filed out and there wasn't one person who looked me in the eye."
Cash was also aware of the biblical edict to care for those in prison. In Matthew 25, Jesus distinguishes between those who are religious in name and those whose faith results in action. He says that the faithful who care for the sick and lonely are indirectly caring for Jesus himself. "For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me" (Matthew 25:35-36).
"There's three different kinds of Christian," said Cash. "There's preaching Christians, church-playing Christians, and there's practicing Christians. I'm trying very hard to be a practicing Christian. If you take the words of Jesus literally and apply them to your everyday life, you discover that the greatest fulfillment you'll ever find really does lie in giving. And that's why I do things like prison concerts."
Ten days before the Folsom concert, on January 3,1968, Cash's divorce became final. Two days before the concert, Vivian married Dick Distin, a Ventura policeman. She met her new husband when Cash did a benefit he'd helped organize for the Ventura Boy's Club. To remarry as a Catholic, she had needed special dispensation from the ecclesiastical hierarchy or risk excommunication.
Distin took special instruction during 1967 and converted to Catholicism by the time of the wedding. There was now no obstacle, and Cash could finally marry June. While performing in London, Ontario, on February 22, 1968, he proposed to her onstage. Just more than a week later, they wed at the Methodist Church in Franklin, Kentucky. Merle Kilgore stood up as best man and the reception was alcohol free.
Cash and June didn't honeymoon immediately but waited until after a tour of Britain in May to travel to Israel. They visited Nazareth, the town where Jesus grew up, the area around the Sea of Galilee where his early ministry took place, and sites of Jerusalem, including the disputed site of the Crucifixion and the Via Dolorosa. Cash, who had only been to Israel once before, was gripped by the sights, sounds and smells of this land and spoke his thoughts at each site into a tape recorder. At a jewelry shop they each bought the other a ring engraved with "Me to my love and my love to me" in Hebrew.
Just as Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison began to climb the charts in 1968, a thirty-year-old director, Robert Elfstrom, began shooting a documentary on the singer. His film opens with Cash out hunting in the woods with his rifle. He downs a crow but when he realizes he has only wounded it, he playfully caresses it. "Be still, be still," he urges it as it tries to peck his finger. "I already like you for some reason. I'm gonna charm you yet." With the bird firmly gripped in one hand and his rifle in the other, he strolls on through the long grass, composing a song as he goes:
If I could fly like Mister Crow
I know where I would go
I would leave you
I would leave you
He eventually completed and even copyrighted the song "Mr. Crow" in 1970, but never recorded it.
It was an unusual and arresting opening to a film about the life of a popular singer. Elfstrom used it because he thought that it encapsulated Cash's contradictions. Here was a man, though capable of destruction, who became overwhelmed with the desire to repair what he had destroyed; a nonviolent man who had a love affair with guns; an artist who could cause suffering and then turn that suffering into art. "John is all of those people," says Elfstrom. "He would sit around his house and get bored and so he'd say, 'Let's go outside and get a crow.' He wounded the crow and then he spent the next day or two trying to mend it. He was driving around to doctors and vets and buying gaffer tape to fix the bird's leg. There was a whole Doctor Doolittle thing going on."
The idea of making a documentary had originated with Harry Wiland, a twenty-two-year-old graduate film student at Columbia University, who with the help of a tutor secured one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars from the Public Broadcast Library. They pitched the idea to Saul Holiff in a letter and secured Cash's participation. Elfstrom, active in the cinéma vérité school of filmmaking in New York, had filmed documentaries in Vietnam and Central America, was hired to direct even though he knew little about Johnny Cash. With no planned outline, he hung around Cash intermittently for eight months, filming him relaxing at home, traveling to concerts in his Dodge RV, recording, performing, returning to Dyess, and listening to his father sing.
"He was just in a great place in his life and so was June," says Elfstrom. "I just hit it off with both of them. John is the kind of guy who looks you in the eye when he makes a decision. He's very earthy. He makes decisions with his stomach and his heart, and I guess that he figured that I was good enough. Once he had made that decision he just opened and opened as the film went on. He became more and more revealing and trusting. I've been making documentaries for over forty years now and that was one of the highlights of my life."
Elfstrom captured Cash in July 1968 with Bob Johnston recording "Land of Israel" for the Holy Land album, based on the tape-recorded impressions Cash had made in Israel. Seven months later, in the same studio, Elfstrom filmed him cutting his first Kris Kristofferson song, "The Devil to Pay," with Carl Perkins on guitar and harmonies. Kristofferson, who'd been in Nashville for three years working at menial jobs to support his family while he wrote, pitched songs to Cash on a regular basis. Most celebrated is the time Kristofferson once flew a National Guard helicopter up to Hendersonville, landed on the Cash property, and hand-delivered a cassette demo. Legend has it that the track was "Sunday Morning Coming Down," but Kristofferson says it was "It No Longer Matters," a song that neither of them ever recorded. "I figured it would get his attention," he says of the stunt. "So many times Luther would say, 'John loves that song of yours,' but he wouldn't record them. You never knew what he was going to do."
Kristofferson was part of a new generation of songwriters who wanted to shake up Nashville by broadening the parameters of what was acceptable in country music. His songs were more sexually frank, drug aware, urban, and socially concerned than the traditional Opry fare. Kristofferson was also more consciously literary, having studied English literature at Oxford University for a year on a Rhodes scholarship. He enjoyed the poet William Blake as much as he enjoyed Hank Williams and wasn't afraid to use allusion, alliteration, and other rhetorical devices in his lyrics. As with his friends Mickey Newbury, Chris Gantry, and Vince Matthews, he had more in common with Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and the culture of the Monterey Pop Festival than he did with George Jones, Porter Wagoner, and the Grand Ole Opry.
For them, Johnny Cash remained one of the archetypal Nashville rebels, a man who defied the country ethos of his day by recording songs that drew attention to Native American rights, who'd been banned from the Opry, and whose credentials had been questioned by the country elite. "The rest of us wanted to be like him," says Kristofferson. "He had integrity. He went his own way boldly. He was an outlaw and that appealed to us. He went in his own direction and nobody told him what to do."
Later that year Cash would record another Kristofferson song, "To Beat the Devil," and he introduced Kris to the audience at the Newport Folk Festival. Kristofferson had gone to the festival—as a fan—with Vince Matthews. When Cash heard that he was sleeping in an old church that offered space to hippies, he invited him to perform two songs during his show. Time was tight and it was an extraordinarily prestigious spot to be given, especially to someone with no previous experience in performing for audiences.
"I got to sing 'Sunday Morning Coming Down' and 'Me and Bobby McGee,'" says Kristofferson. "They went over so well that John told me on one of the last occasions that I spoke to him that the New York Times had said that I stole the show. I don't remember that. I do know that it went over well enough that they put me on at some of the afternoon workshops with people like Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, and James Taylor and that it started my performing career. It took me from being a guy who sat on a chair at John's house to getting an invitation to appear at the Berkeley Folk Festival. I never looked back."
The third recording session that Cash permitted Elfstrom to film was one with Bob Dylan, who was in town to record Nashville Skyline with Bob Johnston. Since John Wesley Harding, also recorded by Johnston in Nashville, Dylan had turned away from the wild drug-warped electric blues of his Blonde on Blonde period and toward the simple melodies and sentiments of country music. He'd cut his instantly recognizable shock of unruly hair, had grown a beard, and now lived on a mountainside in Upstate New York. Nashville Skyline, for which Cash wrote the liner notes in the form of a poem, captured Dylan's exploration of the country sound.
The two men crossed paths at Columbia Studios on February 18, and Bob Johnston thought he should take advantage of the situation. "There was no purpose to the session other than my selfishness," he says. "I've always tried to put people together and I thought it would be wonderful if Dylan and Cash got together. They went out to eat and while they were gone I set up microphones, chairs, and stools and put the lights on in a special way so that when they got back and saw what I had done they just chuckled, got their guitars, and began playing. I started requesting stuff and four hours later Dylan said, 'We've finished.' Columbia never wanted it done."
Gone was the nervousness that had been obvious two years before w
hen they'd sung in a hotel room in front of Pennebaker's camera. They were more confident in each other's presence. Not much more than an improvised jam, the session included all the false starts, faltering vocals, and forgotten words expected from such a spontaneous get-together. Though most of the eighteen tracks were too unpolished to ever be considered for release, one, "Girl from the North Country," became the opening track on Dylan's Nashville Skyline album.
Elfstrom's film illustrated the variety of live shows Cash was performing. Dressed formally at the Ryman Auditorium, he accepted the CMA Album of the Year award for Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison. With a voice filled with emotion, he accepted it on behalf of Luther Perkins, who had died two months previously of burns and smoke inhalation after falling asleep on a couch with a lighted cigarette. Cash played an unnamed county fair, a concert hall, Nashville's Tennessee State Prison, and the St. Francis Reservation in South Dakota. The day after the St. Francis concert, Elfstrom filmed Cash's visit to the site of the Battle of Wounded Knee, where, in December 1890, 146 members of the Miniconjou Lakota tribe were killed by the Seventh United States Cavalry.
This trip had been set up by John L. Smith, a fan who was not only an authority on Cash's recording career (and later his discographer) but was a student of Native American history. They first met after a concert in Des Moines in April 1967 and had since corresponded to exchange information about Native Americans. Cash promised to give Smith one of his guitars if he could supply him with detailed information about and photographs of Wounded Knee.
The St. Francis concert gave Cash an excuse to finally see Wounded Knee. He listened attentively as Jesse White Lance, Robert Holy Dance, and William Horn Cloud, descendants of those killed, took him around the site and showed him the grave markers. He was particularly taken with the story of the Indian leader known as Big Foot. "I took John and June back in my car after the visit," says Smith. "As we drove through the Badlands June fell asleep. When we got to the airport she woke up and John said, I think I've got something you ought to hear,' and he just sang this song called 'Big Foot' to both of us, keeping track of the melody by slapping his leg."
