Johnny Cash: The Life

by Robert Hilburn

  The meeting with LaFarge reminded Cash of the song, and he told the songwriter he was going to record it someday.

  Though the damage to Cash’s reputation from the Carnegie Hall fiasco was severe in the industry, the fallout could have been even worse if Robert Shelton, the New York Times music critic, hadn’t treated the episode with restraint. He wrote, “Although the star, Johnny Cash, was suffering from a throat ailment, which made it difficult to judge his performance, the evening afforded several divergent moments.”

  When Cash read it the next morning, he was relieved. He was pleased that Shelton went to great lengths to pay respect to Maybelle Carter and the Carter Family tradition and declared that Cash was a singer and songwriter in the vein of country greats such as the late Jimmie Rodgers and the late Hank Williams. That, after all, was what he had hoped the concert would demonstrate.

  It was a sign of Cash’s lifted spirits that morning that he went around to the musicians on the Carnegie bill to thank them for sticking by him. “That made a big impression on us because he often would blame everyone else when things went wrong during those drug years,” Western says. “He’d also stay away from everyone. There were many, many times when Gordon and I didn’t know if he was going to speak to us all day. Sometimes we never saw him until showtime. But this time he was very sheepish. He took responsibility. He said, ‘This was my fault, that mess last night. I apologize.’”

  No one would ever mistake the Mint Hotel in downtown Las Vegas for one of the world’s most prestigious concert stops, but Cash welcomed the chance to check in on May 17 for an eight-night engagement in the hotel’s two-hundred-seat lounge. After the pressure cooker of Carnegie Hall, this was a chance to relax. He also didn’t have to get into the car after the show and drive hundreds of miles to the next venue. Most of all, he was looking forward to spending time with June Carter.

  Though he’d barked at her at Carnegie Hall, he was touched by her show of concern. As he looked back, he also valued the way she seemed to understand his need for time by himself to regroup emotionally. Yes, he was thinking, there is a lot to like about June Carter, and he knew he was kidding himself when he said he would settle for friendship. During a brief East Coast tour between the New York and Las Vegas dates, John told June of his deepening feelings. They stuck to their pledge of friendship only, but he did kiss her for the first time. Other commitments prevented June from joining him for the first three shows at the Mint, but they spoke by phone every day, sometimes twice a day.

  As soon as she arrived on May 20, Cash went to her room and kissed her for the second time. It was clear the pledge was over. No longer trying to keep up her guard, June asked John to give her some time to unpack and get into something comfortable. He returned to his room and drank a half pint of brandy and three or four beers to get up his courage. Then he went back to June’s room.

  By the end of the Mint run, everyone attached to the show knew the affair was under way. Because he had witnessed Cash’s flings with other singers on the road, Marshall Grant wasn’t too surprised until Cash started talking about how this time was different.

  “I’m the last person in the world to get onstage and try to be a jokester, never was my thing,” Cash wrote in one of his autobiographies. “She’s an outgoing, exuberant personality and I’m very reserved when I’m around people I don’t know.... I can walk into a room with 12 people and I’m more nervous than I would be in front of an auditorium filled with 10,000 people. She’s not. If I’ve got to meet a lot of people backstage and she’s there, I’ll grab her and say, ‘You’ll go with me, speak to them.’ She starts conversations with them and I can never think of anything to say.”

  Over the next few months he began to think of June as his new Billie Jean, and he didn’t want to lose her, too. Because Billie Jean had been frightened off, in part, by his drug use, Cash tried to keep that side of him from June, but he was fooling only himself. If she didn’t know about Cash’s drug dependence, she would have been the only one in the country music industry who didn’t.

  June felt equally strongly about Cash. With Cash, she could picture having the life she wanted. But they both had tempers and strong wills, and she knew the relationship could be more stormy than storybook.

  Rather than return home after the Mint shows, Cash flew to Nashville for some recording sessions and to be with June. After spending June 6 working on a Christmas album, he devoted the next evening to an ambitious idea that grew out of the weeks he had spent planning his Carnegie Hall concert.

  While working on “Waiting for a Train” and other Jimmie Rodgers songs, Cash began imagining an album that would feature traditional folk songs about railroads and working people, songs like “John Henry” and “Casey Jones.” The problem was that those songs were too familiar, even to schoolchildren. He needed to redesign them to give them fresh identity and impact. The easy thing would have been to repeat the narration-song, narration-song format of Ride This Train; but Cash wanted to move beyond that. To supply backing vocals and, no doubt, encouragement, he brought June, Maybelle, Anita, and Helen into the studio with him.

  During the session, which stretched from seven p.m. to two thirty a.m., Cash created an expanded eight-and-a-half-minute version of “John Henry.” He turned the tale of a steel-driving man trying to beat a steam drill in laying railroad tracks into an epic expression of a workingman’s courage and will—and the belief that a machine can never take the place of a human heart.

  Besides customizing the lyrics, Cash employed several special techniques, including narration, spoken dialogue, and sound effects (a hammer striking steel rails among them), as well as variations in tempo to accentuate the drama of the heroic struggle. Cash had been experimenting with the song live, and the strong audience response inspired him to keep expanding it until he felt it was ready for the studio. For her encouragement and input, he gave June half the songwriting credit on the track, which he titled “The Legend of John Henry’s Hammer.” He was pleased with how the music turned out, and he began to think of it as the centerpiece of another concept album, this one about the constant struggle of the workingman in America.

  While in Nashville, June introduced Cash to her father. Cash had worried that Eck Carter would look with disfavor upon him because of the drug rumors; and, after all, he was a married man having an affair with Carter’s married daughter. But Eck welcomed the singer into the family home in Madison, a Nashville suburb, and said he should feel free to stay there whenever he was in town. At that first meeting they went off by themselves for much of the evening, caught up in their mutual passion for books and their shared interest in religion. It was especially stimulating to Cash, because books had been a solitary pursuit for him over the years; he often wanted to talk about the latest history or religious book he had read, but no one in his circle seemed the least interested.

  Dixie Dean, who later married songwriter Tom T. Hall and edited the Nashville country music weekly Music City News, was living with Maybelle and Eck at the time, and she remembers Cash’s early visits to the house. Maybelle was still appearing on the Opry on weekends and doing an odd live date elsewhere, but it wasn’t enough to live on, so she worked at hospitals, watching over ill patients, earning about $10 to $12 a night. Eck was no longer working and was dividing his time between Madison and a second home in Florida.

  “Maybelle and I were co-writing songs, and I was sitting at the kitchen table working on a lyric on a yellow pad when John came in,” Dixie says. “The first thing he did was take off his boots, the ankle-high kind they had back then, and he had these big holes in his socks and I thought it was so funny.

  “Then he came over to the table and looked over my shoulder at my notepad. He asked if I wrote that song and I said I did, and he just looked at it and finally said, ‘You’re halfway smart.’ He was always joking like that. Later, when he was getting ready to leave, he walked back over and said, ‘I’d like to record that song if I may.’”

  Dixi
e knew that he was trying to get together with June and that June was nervous because of the drugs. “He was in bad shape at the time,” Dixie remembers. “He was gaunt and very thin, and when he’d stay over in the spare room, we’d find pills all over the floor the next day. But we were pulling for him. He was warm and he treated me like a big sister. In those days there were always two camps—the people who were in John’s camp and the people in June’s camp. I was in both camps. I cared about them both.”

  After a couple of vacation days, John and June headed for Los Angeles and the Hollywood Bowl—and the inevitable encounter with Vivian. “Saul told me I should not be with June anymore,” Cash related. “He said, ‘You’re going to go through a living hell.’ I said, ‘I know, but I’m not gonna live without June.’”

  IV

  Just as great athletes are able to shake off a disappointing performance, Cash showed in the “John Henry” session that he too was able to put the embarrassing Carnegie Hall show behind him quickly and look forward to the next challenge, the eighteen-thousand-seat Hollywood Bowl. Not so with Holiff. He was worried about a relapse at the Bowl, the summer home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The Beatles would play there in both 1964 and 1965, but country was a rare presence. The only previous show listed in the Bowl archives featured Hank Snow, Lefty Frizzell, the Collins Kids, and the L.A. Philharmonic on “Western and Country Music Night,” way back in the summer of 1955.

  In bringing Cash to the Bowl, Holiff went to great lengths to make sure there would be a full house. He teamed up with a local radio station, KFOX, to guarantee that the concert would receive heavy promotion among the city’s country music fans. He also packed the bill with enough stars for two shows: Marty Robbins, Don Gibson, Patsy Cline, Flatt and Scruggs, George Jones, Mother Maybelle and the Carter Family, Sheb Wooley, Johnny Western, Gordon Terry, Tompall and the Glaser Brothers, the Hollywood Square Dancers, and Roger Miller. To emphasize Cash’s folk connection, Holilff titled the evening the “1ST GIANT FOLK WESTERN BLUEGRASS MUSICAL SPECTACULAR.”

  He also took steps to minimize the damage in case Cash’s voice was anything close to the Carnegie Hall nightmare. Instead of having Cash—who was, after all, the headliner—close the show with a lengthy set, he restricted him to thirty minutes. Holiff wasn’t just worried about Cash’s voice. He also knew Vivian would be attending the concert, and the pressure of putting his wife and his new girlfriend together could send Cash reaching for even more pills.

  To everyone’s relief, Cash showed up at the Bowl that afternoon in relatively decent shape. He may have taken pills, but he was in good spirits, and his voice sounded at least passable. Holiff and other members of Cash’s inner circle celebrated backstage, but not everyone would go away happy.

  At the end of the show, Vivian took the girls and John’s parents to the artists’ parking area, as instructed, to say good-bye to John before he headed for Phoenix, where another concert was scheduled for the following night. Accounts vary as to what happened next. Some remember John greeting the family, but he was distracted, constantly looking over his shoulder for June. When he finally saw her, he quickly said good night to the family and led June to a Cadillac. Others recall John and June both just rushing by on their way to the car.

  Whichever version is true, the result was the same: Vivian was humiliated and his parents were furious.

  “I remember him in the backseat of the car when all of a sudden—out of nowhere—June races up and jumps right in the middle of the backseat, not at the other end of the backseat, but right next to him,” relates Kathy Cash. “Then she goes, ‘Bye-bye, Vivian. Bye-bye, girls.’”

  Johnny Western, who drove the Cadillac to Phoenix that night, also watched the drama unfold. “As soon as Vivian saw him get into that car,” says Western, “a lightbulb came on. Maybe it was the way he looked at June. Maybe it was the way they sat together so close in the backseat. The look on Vivian’s face was pure anguish.”

  The scene troubled many in Cash’s circle, including Grant, who thought the world of Vivian. But Patsy Cline apparently was the only one who spoke directly to June about it. The two singers were part of a small sorority of female stars in country music, and they found they had a lot in common when they met around the time June’s marriage with Carl Smith was ending.

  They were both from Virginia, had sung on the radio as teenagers, and had rocky marriages. Beneath her brassy, cocky persona, Cline had deep feelings of insecurity, especially when it came to men. Three years older, June became something of a big sister. She listened to Patsy’s problems, offered advice, and even let Patsy use her house as a retreat when she needed quiet time.

  One persistent message from June to Patsy was to stop her fooling around with so many men. She even had a name for it: “running, jumping, and playing.”

  Shortly after the Bowl incident, big sister June went into another one of her lectures: “Patsy, you’ve got to quit your running and jumping. You’re married.”

  Cline responded angrily, “Who are you to talk? You’re doing the same thing to Vivian that Goldie Hill did to you.”

  The words hit June hard. But it was too late. She was in love with John, and she remembered her mother’s lesson of never giving up on the man you love.

  Chapter 14

  “Ring of Fire,” “Understand Your Man,” and the Troops in the Far East

  I

  CASH WANTED TO BE WITH JUNE as much as possible, and he went often to Nashville, both to see her and to do more recording sessions. He was eager to proceed with the album inspired by “John Henry.” Don Law, too, was desperate for some new music, hoping for something to put Cash back on the charts in a big way. He was deeply impressed by “The Legend of John Henry’s Hammer,” but he couldn’t release an eight-and-a-half-minute single when DJs rarely played anything more than three minutes long in order to squeeze in more commercials and talk.

  During July 30 and 31 sessions in 1962, Cash recorded a version of “Casey Jones,” the traditional song about a courageous train engineer, and “Waiting for a Train,” the Jimmie Rodgers song. Again he had the Carters sing backup vocals. Returning to the studio four weeks later, Cash recorded another one of his longtime favorites, Merle Travis’s tale of coal mining life, “Nine Pound Hammer,” as well as his first formal duet when Anita joined him on the gospel-type call-and-response of the traditional tune “Another Man Done Gone.”

  But the song that most interested Cash, it turned out, was one that fit perfectly with his plans for the album, which he had decided to call Blood, Sweat and Tears. “Busted” was written by Harlan Howard, one of Nashville’s hottest writers thanks to such honky-tonk gems as “Heartaches by the Number” and “I Fall to Pieces.” Howard and his wife, a pretty young singer named Jan, had known John and June separately for years. Howard was born in Detroit, but his parents were from coal mining country in Kentucky, and he was fascinated by their tales of poverty and hard times back home. To honor that tradition, he took a break from his more commercial compositions and wrote “Busted,” never imagining anyone would want to record it.

  Cash heard the song on a Burl Ives album and redesigned it, changing the setting from coal mines to cotton country. In addition, Cash changed the arrangement in the studio, throwing out the bright, sparkly tone of the Ives recording to a starker, more plaintive tone that seemed to better reflect the theme of the song and the album.

  Law thought “Busted” had big commercial potential, and he told Cash he’d like to release it as a single as soon as possible, which meant at the end of the year. Columbia had just released “In the Jailhouse Now,” off the Sound of Johnny Cash album, and it climbed to number eight on the country charts, but it never made its way onto the pop charts at all. Columbia then planned to release “Bonanza!” in September, hoping fans of the TV show would be eager to buy it.

  With June by his side, Cash resumed touring after the Blood, Sweat and Tears sessions, doing shows chiefly in the Midwest. He dreaded returning home because
it would mean another confrontation with Vivian.

  When he got back to Casitas Springs, the atmosphere was unbearable—and for all the couple’s hopes of shielding their problems from the children, it impacted everyone in the Cash household. It was as if darkness suddenly fell on what had been a picture-perfect time for the youngsters.

  Unable to face Vivian, and not wanting to frighten the girls, Cash would bolt out of the house at all hours of the day and night, get into his car, and, he wrote later, “drive recklessly for hours through the streets and into the hills and deserts of California until either I wrecked the car or finally stopped from exhaustion.”

  Frantic from worry, Vivian would wait at home for some kind of word—often from a policeman or a neighbor—so that she could go pick him up in another car and bring him home, only to have him race back out the door a few hours later and start the wait all over again. What kind of life was this?

  The USO Far East tour came at an ideal time for Cash because it gave him a chance to get away from his problems at home. There was such a demand to see him that he sometimes played six shows a day, to as many as eight thousand soldiers each, on a tour that ran from October 28 to November 12. Cash, also joined by the Tennessee Three, spent countless hours meeting with soldiers, both in hospital wards and on the military outposts. By the end of the Korean leg, he came down with a severe case of laryngitis and had to spend time in the hospital himself before heading to Japan for the remaining shows. The mood among the soldiers in the Far East was anxious because the United States appeared to be on the brink of another war, this time sending troops to South Vietnam to defend the American ally against attack from Communist North Vietnam.