Johnny Cash: The Life

by Robert Hilburn

  Even when he was touring, Cash often tried to lose himself in his records. By now he had moved on from Folk Songs of the Hills and Blues in the Mississippi Night to other folk and blues collections. He carried a portable record player with him so he could listen to music backstage or at the hotel. Among the albums that he played repeatedly was the seven-volume Southern Heritage series which was released by Atlantic Records in 1960. It was further, invaluable documentation of the diverse music of the rural South— recordings put together by Alan Lomax, who had also been responsible for Blues in the Mississippi Night. Each volume was devoted to another genre of Southern folk music, from Blue Ridge Mountain music and white spirituals to folk songs for children and black gospel. Cash played the set so often that he could recite the titles of all the songs on each album—in order. He was especially pleased to see a Carter Family song, “Lonesome Valley,” in the collection.

  Another album that captured Cash’s imagination during this period was the second Bob Dylan LP. Cash had been playing The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan ever since producer John Hammond sent him a copy in the spring, and Cash marveled at the brilliance of Dylan’s writing. He had liked Dylan’s eponymous first album, but it was mainly the honesty and conviction of Dylan’s approach to folk standards that appealed to him; Dylan had written only two of its thirteen songs.

  When he saw Dylan’s credit as the writer of the new album’s opening song, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Cash’s first thought was that Dylan had simply arranged some folk classic; the song was so good, Cash figured it had been handed down through the ages. Seeing Dylan identified as writer on song after song, however, he realized that this promising folksinger had blossomed into a profoundly gifted songwriter. Cash loved how Dylan would move from the romantic complexity of “Girl from the North Country” to the wry putdown of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” and then segue to the urgent political commentary of “Masters of War.”

  Cash felt an immediate kinship with Dylan and was pleased to see Freewheelin’ attract enough of an audience to reach number twenty-two on the pop charts. Its success—along with the Top 10 popularity of Peter, Paul and Mary’s cover version of “Blowin’ in the Wind”—gave Cash hope that his serious music, too, could eventually reach that same audience.

  Eager to express his admiration, Cash wrote Dylan a letter soon after hearing Freewheelin’, and Dylan wrote back, saying he had been a fan since “I Walk the Line.” Cash invited Dylan to visit him the next time he was in California. Dylan later told him he’d tried but couldn’t find the house in Casitas Springs. When Dylan then wrote Cash from Carmel, Cash thought about taking the five-hour drive north, but Dylan had already left for New York. It was the start of a lifelong friendship, built mostly on respect rather than time spent together, because both men were essentially loners. They looked to each other not for companionship but for inspiration.

  When asked in the early 1970s if he shared the widespread view that Dylan tended to be aloof and withdrawn, Cash told me, “We never did really talk that much. There was a mutual understanding between us. I never did try to dig into his personal life and he didn’t try to dig into mine. If he’s aloof and hard to get to, I can understand why. So many people have taken advantage of him, tried to do him in when they did get to him that I wouldn’t blame him for being aloof and hard to get to. Everybody tells him what he should write, how to think, what to sing. That’s really his business.”

  While the lucrative new record deal gave Cash the confidence to pursue his own instincts even more boldly, it also reminded him of the need to sell records.

  As soon as it was apparent that “Ring of Fire” was going to be his biggest seller yet, he returned to the Columbia recording studio in Nashville in a shameless attempt to duplicate the single’s success, all the way down to another mariachi horn intro. He even brought his good luck charm, Jack Clement, back from Beaumont to stand by his side. But nothing could make “The Matador” sparkle. The song was a slight, melodramatic tale of a once great but aging matador facing the bull for the last time, while his lost love watches with her new flame from the stands.

  To judge from the Billboard charts alone, “The Matador” was a big success. After all, it went to number one on the country charts and number forty-four on the pop charts. But as had been the case with his early hits, there was such demand for a new Cash single after “Ring of Fire” that virtually anything would have done well—at least initially. But though “Ring of Fire” had stayed on the country charts for twenty-six weeks, “The Matador” dropped off after thirteen. In the end, Cash was embarrassed by the calculation involved. He rarely performed the song live and never bothered to include it on any of his “greatest hits” albums.

  Columbia Records, however, was delighted, and Don Law felt vindicated in his decision to let Cash set his own agenda in the studio. To honor Sara and Maybelle Carter, Cash talked Law into doing a Carter Family “reunion” album with them in July.

  John and June had become so comfortable together that they began to flaunt their relationship. Whereas even weeks earlier they’d tried to avoid any publicity away from the stage, they were now willing to pose for a photo when a newspaper reporter spotted them in a restaurant on July 24 in Kingston, Tennessee, just across the state line from Maces Springs.

  The reporter didn’t know, or at least chose not to mention, that they were married to other people; they came across in the story as a couple, taking a break from the concert trail while June showed John around her old teenage stomping grounds. The article noted that the two famous singers had “enjoyed relaxation in the traditional East Tennessee manner by spending a quiet day fishing on Holston River,” and that the mood was so relaxed at breakfast the next morning that John asked June to throw him a bite of her ham.

  Holiff had not slowed in his efforts to link Cash with the evolving folk movement. He got Cash a role in a low-budget MGM film, Hootenanny Hoot, which tried to capitalize on the folk boom the same way that films like Rock Around the Clock had used a parade of rock stars to lure teens into theaters in the late 1950s. Cash’s appearance to sing “Frankie’s Man Johnny” was the only interesting thing about the film, even though he looks miserably out of place amid the mostly pop-folk acts.

  Johnny fared better in an appearance that fall on an episode of the Hootenanny series on ABC, singing “Busted” and “Five Feet High and Rising.” The show was taped at SMU in Dallas on September 30 and aired on October 5. But the performance failed to help Cash’s reputation among the folk purists, because Joan Baez and other important folk artists were refusing to go on the show after the Hootenanny producers rejected Pete Seeger over his “left-wing views.”

  Ironically, the most effective thing Cash did to connect with the folk audience had nothing to do with Holiff’s strategy. On November 12 he went into the studio in Nashville to record a song that had clearly been influenced by his hours of listening to Dylan’s music. Not only did “Understand Your Man” carry much of the melodic feel of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” but also the lyrics reflected a similar mix of confrontation and wit. The theme, however, was all Cash’s. The number was a not so thinly veiled message to Vivian.

  Don’t call my name out your window, “I’m leavin’!” I won’t even turn my head.

  Don’t send your kinfolks to give me no talkin’; I’ll be gone like I said.

  You’d say the same old things that you been saying all along,

  lay there in your bed, keep your mouth shut till I’m gone.

  Don’t give me that old familiar cryin’ cussin’ moan.

  Understand your man.

  As soon as the Columbia brass in New York heard the record, they made plans to give it a heavy pop promotion push—and they congratulated themselves for keeping Cash in the Columbia family.

  As Kathy Cash recalls, her mom was worried to death when her dad wasn’t at home and even more worried when he was. “He would do stupid, bizarre things, like get in the camper and disap
pear without saying he was leaving,” she says. “Or he’d scream or just say, ‘Don’t talk to me, I’m writing.’ When I’d hear them yelling, I’d go to my room and close the door. I had this little record player, so I’d put on a record, anything to drown it out. But it never worked. Then we’d all go to bed, and we’d get up the next day and he’d be gone.”

  Over several months, Vivian had put together a list of people and places to call when looking for her husband. The trail often led to Curly Lewis, the contractor who had built their house, and Floyd Gressett, the minister who had walked up the driveway to welcome them when they first moved to Casitas Springs. She detested both men for not standing up to Cash when he was in a drugged or drunken state.

  Cash continued to flee the confrontations by driving to remote desert areas either to go hunting or simply to lie on the ground at night and let the drugs go to work. Death Valley was a favorite destination because he was fascinated by the name of the place. On occasion, however, he brought Lewis along, and the contractor seemed to delight in Cash’s often foolish daredevil antics, such as the time John drove his camper into the Mojave Desert and came across the fenced-off Naval Air Weapons Station. The land seemed isolated enough that Cash ignored the “No Trespassing” sign and drove through a gate. The camper bounced along a rough dirt road for several miles before they reached a curious sight: a paved highway that was marred by occasional bomb craters and burned-out remains of military vehicles.

  Soon they were approached by someone in a military vehicle, who explained they were lucky to still be alive because the area was littered with thousands of dud bombs and land mines.

  After that, although Lewis continued to spend time with Cash, he let Cash go on the all-night explorations by himself. When Cash returned from the desert, he was usually too wasted to go home, so he’d spend a day or two at a ranch owned by Gressett.

  While Vivian and the girls attended Catholic services, Cash had joined Gressett’s nondenominational congregation in the spring of 1963; it was the first time he had gone to church regularly since Dyess. The church’s adopted slogan was “No law but love; no creed but Christ.”

  Cash felt comfortable with Gressett because he, like Ezra Carter, didn’t judge him. “Floyd Gressett was always kind to me, even when I was at my worst,” Cash wrote in his first autobiography. “But he was wise enough to know from having preached for 13 years in the prisons of California that a man taking drugs isn’t going to listen to you.”

  One of the prisons that Gressett visited regularly was Folsom, and he told Cash the prisoners would love to see him if he ever had time. Singing “Folsom Prison Blues” at Folsom Prison obviously appealed to Cash, and he passed the idea along to Holiff, who eventually worked out a date with Gressett for November 11, 1966.

  To make their silent pact work, Cash said, he pretended that the pastor didn’t know he was hooked on drugs, and Gressett had to act as if he didn’t know. “He came looking for me more than once and found me at the point of death from days without food,” Cash wrote. “He’d take me back to the ranch and give me food and a bed.”

  Sometimes Gressett joined Cash at the ranch, which was in the Cuyuma Valley about ninety miles north of Ventura. At other times Cash was alone or with his nephew Damon Fielder, the son of his older sister Louise. Cash was only ten years older than Damon, and he enjoyed his nephew’s company. Like Cash himself, Damon was a man of few words, and he loved to go camping, hunting (usually just for jackrabbits), and fishing. He also treated Cash like an uncle, not a star.

  “Gressett provided a place for us to hide for two or three days when J.R. didn’t want to be home,” says Fielder. “Over time, J.R. must have burned every piece of wood on that ranch, because there wasn’t any firewood. He’d rip the boards and doors off the barn and shed and put them in a fire because he couldn’t find any firewood.”

  On some days, when he wasn’t in any condition to drive ninety miles, or was found by a neighbor simply wandering around in a daze, Cash ended up at Fielder’s apartment in Oak View.

  “He’d be so spaced out that he wasn’t making any sense, so of course he didn’t want to go home,” Fielder says. “He was really changing physically during this period. It got to the point where he looked like a drug addict. We wore the same kind of clothes, so he gave me a lot of his clothes after he lost all that weight. He’d sometimes call me from the airport in Los Angeles and say, ‘I don’t have any clothes,’ so I’d go to my closet and get his clothes and take them to him.”

  Fielder had known Vivian since Memphis, which caused him frequently to end up in the middle of their arguments.

  “Vivian would call and say, ‘Are you with Johnny?’ and it would be hard because I didn’t want to be disloyal to J.R.,” he says. “But Vivian was like my second mother, the sweetest lady that ever was, and all of a sudden, she is the jilted wife who thought she had done everything right and wanted to stay in the marriage. So I’d tell her the truth: ‘I have talked to him and he asked me not to tell you where he is. He’ll be home soon; he’s just messed up.’”

  Cash went home to Vivian for Christmas, but it was a painful time. After the strain of the holidays, he looked forward to being back on the road and seeing June. They opened a week’s engagement at the Mint Hotel in Las Vegas on January 2, 1964, and it didn’t take long for the friction over his behavior to resurface. In their time apart, June had hoped that Cash would act on their lengthy, sometimes nightly talks—“bouts,” some would say—regarding his drug use and the marriage. But she could tell that nothing had changed.

  Back in California, things took another bad turn for Vivian when she heard her husband’s “Understand Your Man,” his open letter to her. Now she had two reasons to avoid the music stations.

  Don Law was pleased to see that Billboard magazine in its January 25 issue praised the single of “Understand Your Man” and Cash’s version of Merle Travis’s “Dark as a Dungeon,” calling the release so appealing that the only problem DJs were going to have was “deciding which of these sides is to be played first.” As it turned out, they had no trouble determining which song to play: “Understand Your Man” spent six weeks at number one on the country charts, while “Dungeon” made it only to number forty-nine. “Understand Your Man” also went to number thirty-five on the pop charts.

  Meanwhile, Holiff continued to push on the television front. Cash not only made repeat musical appearances on Hootenanny but also was penciled in as a key guest on several TV pilots aimed at the networks or syndication. In its January 18 issue, Billboard ran a roundup on the various efforts. Star Route, hosted by actor Rod Cameron, was a sort of country version of This Is Your Life. Another project, hosted by Houston DJ Bill Bailey, was designed to be a “pop country” variety show with a live audience. The third show was called Shindig, and it was also a variety show, featuring Cash and artists from across the pop, country, and rock spectrum. Only Shindig would prove noteworthy, but the show had been completely redesigned by the time it aired that fall. Instead of the original country format, it focused on rock ’n’ roll, highlighting such major emerging stars as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and James Brown, along with Cash and Sun alums Jerry Lee Lewis and Roy Orbison.

  The relationship between Cash and Carter was not all romance and cheering crowds. What Cash would look back on as his first real showdown with June came in early March while they were in Toronto, where as usual they had adjoining rooms. He had been up for days and seemed drained, physically and emotionally. Suddenly June walked into his room and said flatly, “I’m going. I can’t handle this anymore. I’m going to tell Saul that I can’t work with you anymore. It’s over.”

  Writing about the incident in his second autobiography, Cash said he didn’t know exactly what had prompted her outburst—though it’s easy to assume it was her exasperation with the drug and divorce issues.

  Rather than apologize, he lashed out verbally and grabbed her so that she couldn’t leave the room. When June struggled, he
slapped her with the back of his hand. Realizing what he had done, he let her go, and she went back to her room. While she was in the shower Cash went into her room, gathered up her suitcase and all her clothes, including her shoes, and took them back to his room and locked the door. Now let’s see her go!

  Soon, June, covering herself with a towel, knocked on the door and demanded her clothes, but Cash refused until she promised not to leave. After tempers cooled, she gave in. The relationship was salvaged—for the moment. But the stress between them would resurface throughout the tour.

  Johnny Western was driving John and June to the airport in Detroit a few weeks after the Toronto incident when they got into a screaming match in the backseat of the rental car. “They were going on and on about why his divorce was not happening,” he says. “And Johnny challenged her about her marriage. They called each other liars and just about every other name you could think of. But by the time we got to the airport, they had kissed and made up. It was surreal. It was not a fun time for anyone.”

  In the first week in March, Cash went into the studio in Nashville to record songs for an album Columbia planned to rush out in order to capitalize on the success of the “Understand Your Man” single. The emphasis of the album, titled I Walk the Line, would be on six Cash favorites from his Sun days. To round out the collection, Cash threw in a song that Maybelle and Dixie Dean had written, “Troublesome Waters.” When he had all the material he needed for the album, he decided finally to record that Peter LaFarge song he had been thinking about for so long, the forceful commentary of “The Ballad of Ira Hayes.” He wanted it to be his next single—and it would be one of his finest moments on record.

  Around the same time, Holiff came up with a booking coup—a showcase appearance at the prestigious Newport Folk Festival, where Cash would be introduced by Pete Seeger, no less, and share the bill with Dylan. This was, Holiff hoped, Cash’s chance to make up for the Carnegie Hall fiasco.