Johnny Cash: The Life

by Robert Hilburn

  “He stood out onstage from the start,” recalls Larry Collins, the guitar-playing, hopscotching, hyperactive half of the Collins Kids, one of the Party’s key attractions. “He had a physical presence that was commanding, plus this great, authentic voice, and he meant it when he sang. His music wasn’t any casual, showbiz thing. When he sang, it came from the guts of his soul.”

  Larry was only twelve at the time, and Lorrie, his pretty sister and the duo’s main singer, was just two years older—and Cash enjoyed their act, which combined a bit of rock energy and country twang into a sound not unlike what was being created back at Sun. He spent a long time that night talking to them and their parents, who invited him to join some other Party cast members for a barbecue the next afternoon at their home in the San Fernando Valley. “He was just very down to earth,” Larry says. “But you could tell there was something about him that was different from most of the musicians on the show. He wasn’t content with what he had. He was aiming high.”

  Two other nights also stood out on the California tour. Fred Maddox, part of the colorful, high-spirited Maddox Brothers and Rose family act, had a club in Ontario, just east of Los Angeles, called Fred Maddox’s Playhouse. Maddox proved to be as flamboyant a promoter as he was a performer. He wanted to take advantage of Cash’s Elvis-Sun connection, so the poster for the show read “Johnny Cash—The Memphis Flash,” and a good-natured Cash took it as a challenge. He wore the bright red jacket his mother had made for him as well as black pants and two-tone black and white shoes. He gave as rockin’ a show as he could, supplementing his own tunes with “Blue Suede Shoes,” “That’s All Right,” and Chuck Berry’s “30 Days,” as well as “Sixteen Tons.” Still, even the young fans liked “I Walk the Line” best.

  Maddox wasn’t alone in linking Cash with Elvis.

  There was also the show in Northern California that was attended by Ralph Gleason, the celebrated music critic of the San Francisco Chronicle. It was Cash’s first big-time review and it was a rave. The headline read: “It Looks as Though Elvis Has a Rival—From Arkansas.”

  Though Cash carried a copy of the review all the way back to Memphis, he didn’t recognize its significance. Gleason wasn’t just a sympathetic country music writer, eager to boost a new act; he was a respected jazz and rock critic who would eventually serve as co-founder of Rolling Stone magazine. He was an early champion of the idea that pop music could be more than simply light entertainment; it could be a serious art form. Gleason’s early stamp of approval reinforced Cash’s connection to rock culture first established by his place on the Sun roster.

  Cash was looking forward to being home for the holidays when the tour ended, but he had enjoyed himself so much in California that he couldn’t wait to come back. It seemed like one big party, and in a way, it was. Carnall and Cash agreed it’d be fun to work together again, and Carnall phoned Neal to arrange for some more dates in California. The young promoter was so enthusiastic that he went much further than simply booking more shows. It was the start of a process in which Carnall would become Cash’s co-manager.

  Neal was hesitant at first. Was the fast-talking Carnall another operator who would try to lure Cash away from him the way Colonel Parker had done with Presley? Naw, Neal must have figured. What are the chances of lightning striking him twice? He took Carnall’s offer—which included $5,000 in cash—and the partnership was set.

  There was something else that Cash liked about his trip to California: the Collins Kids. Larry was smart, funny, and talented, and Cash enjoyed his youthful innocence. Johnny was discouraged by the way the road had seemed to wear down so many of the musicians he had met over the past year. They were for the most part cynical and sarcastic. They didn’t seem to care about music as much as they did a bottle of Jack Daniels and the women who followed them back to their motels. Larry reminded John of his own wide-eyed days in Dyess, when the music and lights all seemed thrilling. He also liked the fact that Lorrie loved music and was so confident at the microphone. There was something about her smile, too—not quite adoring, but certainly admiring.

  “My impression of Johnny was that he was very, very shy and quiet,” Lorrie Collins says. “When we first saw him onstage, you could tell he was kind of uncomfortable, maybe a bit unsure of himself in front of people. He had come a long way in a short time. Suddenly, ‘I Walk the Line’ was a huge hit, but his mother was still making his clothes.”

  Cash found himself spending time with the two youngsters, both backstage at Town Hall Party and on the few shows they did together that month. “There was this solitude about him,” Larry remembers. “There could be a hundred people backstage and Johnny would be over in the corner with Lorrie and I. That was our space. He could relax. The same thing at the Sunday afternoon gatherings at our house. It was like we were his family away from home.”

  Cash was thankful when his own family gathered for Christmas dinner at his parents’ house in Memphis. “I Walk the Line” had made him a star everywhere. He was even named the most promising country singer of the year by the nation’s country DJs, and requests for concert dates were coming in from all over the country and Canada.

  The image of all those screaming girls kept coming back to Vivian. As much as she tried to be supportive, she would find herself wishing he didn’t have to go away all the time.

  “I’m doing this for us, baby,” he told her whenever the issue came up.

  Even so, there were times at night when she would stare across the room at her husband, sitting on the sofa working on his songwriting, and feel alone. There was something about the way he was throwing himself into his work that alarmed her. She’d find herself talking to him at times and realize he wasn’t really listening. She was starting to learn that there was no way the young man from Arkansas was going to let anything interfere with his dream of being a country music star.

  Cash was confused by her growing disenchantment.

  He had worked hard to give his family a comfortable home and someone to be proud of.

  He loved making music and singing to all those fans. In fact, he felt he had to devote even more of his time to it.

  He couldn’t just stay home.

  The hit song that he had written to assure her that he’d always be by her side was threatening to push them apart.

  Chapter 7

  Columbia Records, “Big River,” and Pills

  I

  ADDICTION, AS COMMONLY DEFINED in the 1950s, was simply the act of giving in to “habit-forming pursuits”—which meant Johnny Cash was an addict many times over. By the start of 1957, several habit-forming pursuits had already made their presence known in Cash’s life or were about to do so. Not all were bad.

  Everyone who knew Cash in those days agreed he was devoted to music and the scriptures. He may have moved into secular music without a moment’s hesitation and lost the habit of regular churchgoing once he started spending most of his time on the road, yet he read the Bible almost every day, and he rarely went twenty-four hours without singing those old Baptist hymns in his head. In his later years, Cash would say those hymns were his favorite form of prayer, his church of choice.

  Marshall Grant also saw early in Cash a compulsion to help others, a behavior he attributed to Cash’s spiritual values and modest roots. He was always going out of his way, Grant wrote in his 2006 book, I Was There When It Happened: My Life with Johnny Cash, to help people in need—family, friends, or strangers—regardless of his own finances. “There were many times on tour when we’d stop at a grocery store to buy food and supplies and John would see…someone who seemed to be struggling,” and would try to help out.

  Grant also told of Cash learning about fans who had traveled long distances to see his concerts, and he’d pay not only for their meals in town but also for their lodging. “He’d give you the shirt off his back, and if he was straight, everything else he had in his possession.”

  In fact, Grant believed, the thing Johnny Cash was most addicted to was “tr
ying to do good.”

  As Cash was also discovering, he was becoming addicted to the road. After years of the isolation of Dyess and the restrictions of the Air Force, Cash appeared forever restless, eager to move on to the next town and the next experience. He would eventually quote a line from a Billy Joe Shaver song: “Moving’s the closest thing to being free.” He also realized that it was intoxicating to have thousands of people cheering the very sight of him each night as he walked onstage. Fame, like music, was another way to strike down his insecurities.

  But there were more troubling pursuits—classic addictions, some might say—only a few months away, and they would ignite a pattern of guilt and torment in his personal life that sometimes brought him to his knees. Once away from Memphis and family, he would become drawn to a particular type of woman, though it would take a while before he came to the point of setting aside his values, as a married Christian, and actively pursued the temptation. Sensing a slowly growing void at home, he tended to be attracted to women who were pretty, smart, spiritual, and, most of all, supportive of his music in ways that helped him in his struggle for self-worth. “John was not just looking to get laid,” says songwriter Tom T. Hall, a longtime friend. “He was searching for love.”

  Also looming just ahead were drugs, especially amphetamines, and they would cause dramatic mood fluctuations and extreme behavior patterns, influences that would both interfere with and yet sometimes deepen his art.

  In describing Cash’s drug use, his friend James Keach quoted a remark by Lenny Bruce, the cutting-edge comedian and social observer, who had his own drug issues: “I take a hit and I feel like a new man, and the new man wants a hit.” About Cash, Keach says, “John said one pill was too many and a thousand wasn’t enough. And so it was like once he got into it, he couldn’t stop.”

  While continuing to smoke cigarettes, Cash was still months away from his first amphetamine when he and the Tennessee Two left Memphis for New York in mid-January 1957 in a brand-new black Cadillac. He and other country musicians didn’t favor the fancy cars merely for their prestige. They were also a practical choice—built well enough to stand up to the rigors of the road better than any other make. The guys were motoring north for what they expected to be one of the high points of their young career: a January 19 guest appearance on the hugely popular Jackie Gleason TV variety show on CBS.

  Though Bob Neal could have gone after one of several other shows, such as Milton Berle or Steve Allen, he had a special reason for wanting Gleason. It was on another Gleason-produced program, Stage Show, that Elvis had made his national TV debut almost one year earlier. To make his Gleason booking even sweeter, Neal arranged for Cash to appear on up to ten shows—four more than Colonel Tom Parker had secured for Elvis.

  Cash looked at Elvis’s spectacular rise in 1956 as an encouraging sign that he might enjoy a similar career trajectory. After all, Sam Phillips and the folks in Nashville were telling him his songwriting and his maturity could make him even bigger than Presley. And the success of “I Walk the Line” made him feel that Sam might be right. On the night of the Gleason taping, “I Walk the Line” was in its eighth month on the national country charts, and the new “Train of Love”/“There You Go” single was in the country Top 10. It wasn’t coming close to matching the pop success of “I Walk the Line,” but that’s what the Gleason show was designed to do: increase Cash’s mainstream exposure.

  After the taping, Gleason thanked Cash and said he was looking forward to seeing him again soon. But that program—which was aired a week later—proved to be Cash’s only appearance. Gleason experimented from week to week with the show’s format, sometimes devoting the entire hour to a musical special or a reprise of a popular Honeymooners segment. If Cash had created a buzz like Elvis, Gleason might have found time for him on another show, but as it was, the options weren’t exercised. The Gleason show went off the air in late June.

  Once touring began in earnest in early February, the cities came so fast that Cash had trouble keeping up with all the names: Akron, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Austin, Tucson, San Diego. When Cash first heard Hank Snow’s travelogue toast “I’ve Been Everywhere” a few years later, he laughed out loud. Boy, could he identify with that. Sometimes he’d substitute his own tour itinerary for the cities mentioned in Snow’s hyper-paced song and sing them out loud. On those long, endless trips Grant evolved as the man in charge—doing most of the driving, booking travel arrangements—while John and Luther just concentrated on the shows. The two men both had an easygoing, nonjudgmental style that led them to form a deep friendship. While everyone else was calling Cash either Johnny or John, Luther good-naturedly called him J.R., and Cash responded by calling Perkins L.M. (for Luther Monroe).

  By now, John was headlining most of the multi-act package shows, but he still felt the need to prove himself. He didn’t want to be one of those guys in country music who spent his whole life riding one or two old hits. But the miles in the car at night left him constantly exhausted. He often arrived just before showtime and was usually back in the car and on the highway again right after the show.

  When he and Marshall and Luther did get a room for the night, Cash was usually too keyed up to take advantage of it. He often spent the night staring at the ceiling or sitting in a chair, smoking cigarettes and trying to come up with those elusive song ideas. With so much time on his hands, Cash was eager to find ways to fill it. Slowly he found himself slipping back into his Landsberg ways. Once in a while the boredom, the loneliness, and a few beers combined, and Cash ended up in bed with one of the girls who knew their way around the country music dressing rooms and motels. Marshall gently tried to remind Cash that he was married, but John didn’t see it as a problem; these occasional trysts didn’t mean anything.

  Nephew Roy Cash Jr., who often stayed with Vivian at night, remembers being routinely awakened at ungodly hours—often three or four in the morning—when Cash would call as he arrived in another city. These weren’t brief “I love you” check-ins. He would often keep Vivian on the phone for an hour or more, describing what was happening at the shows, bouncing song ideas off her, and telling her over and over how much he missed her and the girls. Sometimes the calls would be so long that Vivian would play Rook with Roy while listening to her husband. On top of the calls, there was a constant stream of postcards and letters.

  As crowds across the country were still cheering mightily night after night, Neal was getting feelers from Hollywood, or so he told Cash. They’d both been envious when Elvis’s multiyear movie contract got off to an impressive box office start the previous November, as Love Me Tender earned its entire $1 million production costs in a single week: $540,000 in the United States, the rest overseas. Those figures convinced Hollywood doubters that this young rock ’n’ roller was indeed a red-hot film property. Within the next twelve months, Elvis would be back in theaters with two more song-heavy films, Loving You and Jailhouse Rock.

  Neal believed that Elvis’s success meant the studios would be lining up to sign Cash. There must have been talk about the movies around the Cash house, because Vivian told a columnist from the San Antonio Light who called later in 1957 that Johnny was in Hollywood making a screen test. But that appears to have been wishful thinking on Cash’s part.

  Grant didn’t think all the movie talk was good for his friend. He felt it distracted Cash from his most important challenge—songwriting. But that may be too harsh a judgment. The strain of the road made it hard for Cash to find the energy and the time to think about composing new material. At the same time, Phillips was starting to worry that the Tennessee Two’s sound was too narrow. Part of the appeal of “I Walk the Line” was its unique tone. “Train of Love” and “There You Go” came across to DJs, especially in pop, as too simple.

  Even though “There You Go” reached number one on the country chart, Phillips was savvy enough to know the success was due more to the DJs’ interest in Cash spurred by “I Walk the Line” than to any audience enth
usiasm for the new record. Plus, the Gleason show exposure had not noticeably helped expand Cash’s appeal in the pop field. At the same time, Carl Perkins hadn’t come close to the sales bonanza of “Blue Suede Shoes” with his follow-up, the rollicking but less dynamic “Boppin’ the Blues.” Roy Orbison, too, hadn’t been able to build on the modest success of “Ooby Dooby.” None of Sun’s other young hopefuls had caused much of a stir outside Memphis.

  Remarkably, Phillips, the man whose judgment had produced the Presley record that helped change pop culture around the world just two years earlier, feared he was losing his touch. He had no idea how to help Cash regain his momentum in the studio.

  II

  During his second trip to California, Cash hoped to meet with movie or TV executives, but Neal thought that was premature. He told Cash he was still “fielding offers,” though there is no indication that there was any genuine interest in Cash among studios.

  Then when Cash headed back south in March, he learned that he was going to have a new tour mate: none other than Sun’s new shining star, Jerry Lee Lewis. In fact, Lewis—along with Carl Perkins and the Collins Kids—would be on the road with him a lot during March, April, and early May, including an extensive swing through Canada. Because concert promoters were trying to lure both country and rock fans, ads frequently boasted that the tour package was “the biggest country rock ’n’ roll show ever” to come to the area.