Johnny Cash: The Life

by Robert Hilburn

  Its key line: “Where are your guts?”

  In the lengthy, rambling diatribe, he criticized the DJs for shying away from the record’s controversial theme. He appealed to their conscience by including American Indian rights among other headline-making social issues: “‘Ballad of Ira Hayes’ is strong medicine. So is Rochester—Harlem, Birmingham, Vietnam.”

  He also argued that pop DJs were avoiding the record because of his country roots. Addressing this issue, he pointed to his appearance at the Newport Folk Festival, where “Ira Hayes” had stolen his portion of the show: “And we all know that the audience (of near 20,000) were not ‘country’ or hillbillies. They were an intelligent cross-section of American youth—and middle age.”

  In closing, he added, “I’ve blown my horn now, just this once, then no more. Since I’ve said these things now, I find myself not caring if the record is programmed or not. I won’t ask you to cram it down their throats. But as an American who is almost a half-breed Cherokee-Mohawk (and who knows what else?)—I had to fight back when I realized that so many stations are afraid of ‘Ira Hayes.’

  “Just one question: WHY?”

  Hugh Cherry urged Cash to place the ad in Billboard, even though the label had warned him about a backlash. “What backlash?” Cherry asked years later. “If they were offended, what could they do—stop playing the record? They weren’t playing it anyway; that was the whole point of the ad.”

  Because the ad appeared in the country section of Billboard, many in Nashville thought it was only aimed at them rather than also at pop radio. People in the industry, especially in broadcasting, as Cherry told it, “were going, ‘Fuck him!’ and ‘Who does he think he is?’” There was even talk about boycotting his records. But the experience taught both Cash and Nashville something.

  It showed broadcasters that “they couldn’t stop playing his records because the listeners wanted to hear them,” Cherry said. “The people who listened to the radio and bought records didn’t know anything about some ad in Billboard. It showed Johnny Cash was more important than any individual disc jockey.”

  Despite the odds, the “Ira Hayes” campaign—much to the surprise of Columbia executives—worked. By mid-September, the single was number three on the country charts. Cash was so thrilled, he took the Apache tear stone from around his neck and gave it to Western in appreciation. Now he hoped the “Ira Hayes” momentum would carry over to the Bitter Tears album, but he soon learned there were still some bruised feelings in Nashville.

  Ignoring the success of “Ira Hayes” on its own charts, Billboard gave Bitter Tears a lukewarm mention. Although most of the publication’s reviews of albums went on for several sentences, complete with generous praise, the text of the Bitter Tears review was a one-sentence kiss-off: “Cash, in narrative and song, documents the tragic history of the American Indian.”

  To add to the insult, Cash’s own label ran a full-page ad in the same issue, but it didn’t mention Bitter Tears. The ad saluted Cash’s new single, a duet with June on Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me, Babe.” Despite the success of “Ira Hayes,” Columbia didn’t see much commercial potential in Bitter Tears—or perhaps, as Cherry suggested, the label still feared arousing any underlying hostility among country DJs over the “Hayes” Billboard ad controversy.

  Columbia preferred to concentrate on “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” a record that had more obvious pop and country potential—and one that helped raise the profile of two of its artists. The single would be a smash on country and pop charts, but Bitter Tears—even with minimal marketing—also found an audience. It climbed to number forty-seven on the pop charts and all the way to number three on the country charts.

  This experience strengthened Cash’s determination. His faith in “Ira Hayes” and Bitter Tears separated him even further from the relatively timid creative stances of his fellow country stars. Increasingly, he was building a national following that believed in him as a musician and an artist.

  As 1964 came to an end, Cash had ties to the rock world (through Sun Records), the folk world, the country world, and even the pop world. At thirty-two, Cash was on his way to becoming a musical institution—and he could take pride in the fact that he had done it largely on his own terms. He was not the creation of a producer, a record company, or a manager. For better or worse, he had called the shots.

  It was an enormously important period for him—and he wasn’t through.

  His creative instincts heightened, Cash looked forward to doing an album of modern and traditional folk songs, largely because he wanted to record more Dylan. After spending most of November on the road, he went into the studio for a series of sessions in mid-December in Nashville. In the end, he recorded only two more Dylan songs—a second attempt at “Mama, You’ve Been on My Mind” and his longtime favorite, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” To add some of Dylan’s harmonica flavor, he brought in Charlie McCoy, who would later play on Dylan’s Nashville recordings.

  IV

  The news that Cash was following up “It Ain’t Me, Babe” by recording more Dylan songs caused grumbling around Nashville that Cash was selling out—jumping on the Dylan folk music bandwagon as a way to make greater inroads into the more lucrative pop world. His detractors failed to recognize the creative similarities between Cash and Dylan.

  Dylan has frequently said he didn’t set out to change songwriting or society, but he was clearly filled with the high purpose of living up to the ideals he saw expressed in Woody Guthrie’s work. “I always admired true artists who were dedicated, so I learned from them,” Dylan says. “Popular culture usually comes to an end very quickly. It gets thrown in the grave. I wanted to do something that stood alongside Rembrandt’s paintings.”

  Like Cash, Dylan found his musical heroes in the past—not just the legendary names like Guthrie, Jimmie Rodgers, the Carter Family, and Robert Johnson, but scores of Irish, Scottish, and English balladeers. Cash and Dylan delighted in talking about and playing those traditional ballads.

  In advising young songwriters how to develop their craft, Dylan stresses the roots of today’s music. “It’s only natural to pattern yourself after someone,” he says. “If I wanted to be a painter, I might think about trying to be like Van Gogh, or if I was an actor, act like Laurence Olivier.

  “But you can’t just copy somebody. If you like somebody’s work, the important thing is to be exposed to everything that person has been exposed to. Anyone who wants to be a songwriter should listen to as much folk music as they can and study the form and structure of stuff that has been around 100 years. I go back to Stephen Foster.”

  Beyond their mutual respect for tradition and purposeful themes, both men believed it was essential not to let anyone else set their agendas. They wanted to be free to move in any direction at any time. For all his love of country music, there were few artists in Nashville who inspired Cash at all. He did admire Marty Robbins for moving from teen hits to honky-tonk to Old West themes. But he was discouraged by the way most of his peers played it so safe.

  For all the speculation that Cash was recording an entire album of Dylan songs (maybe even calling it, some joked, Johnny Cash Sings Bob Dylan), he used only the three Dylan compositions. When it was released, Nashville was surprised to find that the album—which he’d called Orange Blossom Special—wasn’t any more folk-based than some of his earlier efforts. However much he identified with the commentary and spirit of folk music, he was still, at heart, a country artist. Once again, those around Cash marveled at his ability to step away, even if only temporarily, from the instability of his personal life and rise to the occasion—not that they appreciated what struck many of them as unusual, if not downright weird, twists and turns in his musical direction. Grant measured Cash’s success almost exclusively by chart position. Though he rarely said it to Cash directly, Grant thought the drugs were responsible for many of Cash’s seemingly erratic artistic decisions.

  As the two headed to their respective homes for
Christmas, Grant asked, “Well, John, what you going to do next?” It was just a casual question, but Cash took it seriously. He sat with Grant and outlined in detail a long series of possibilities, including an album about the Old West, a gospel album recorded in Israel, and that album of prison songs that he had been thinking about for years. Grant just hoped there were some hits in there.

  Columbia execs and Nashville DJs were relieved when they heard the Orange Blossom Special album; this was something they all could feel comfortable with. When the album was released early in 1965, the label took out a full-page ad in Billboard.

  The trade publication, too, embraced it: “Cash is in fine form here and he has been coupled with a great choice of material. There are train songs like ‘Orange Blossom Special,’ country songs like ‘The Long Black Veil,’ revival-type material such as ‘Amen’ and his hit ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe.’ Cash displays a sense of drama and wit.” By the end of March, both the single and the album were in the country Top 5. They also made the Top 50 on the pop charts.

  As he had told Grant, Cash had already moved on. When Orange Blossom Special was beginning its chart rise, Cash was back in the studio in Nashville working on the album about the Old West. He had enough songs after two days for an entire LP, but he was on such a roll, he kept recording for five more days in March and one more in April, ending up with enough material for two albums.

  Because Cash viewed the collection as a unified work, complete with a few linking narratives à la Ride This Train, he wanted to release the songs in a double album, which was a bit much even for the obliging Law. A double album? How could Law get his bosses at Columbia to agree to such a risky commercial move? It was hard enough to get people to buy a full album, much less shell out the added bucks for a double one. But Cash was so hot that everyone signed off on the project. It sounded crazy, but maybe Cash would pull off another surprise.

  Almost as remarkable as the music were the liner notes that Cash wrote for the album. As if tired of having everyone, including his own bandmates, question his motives and direction as an artist, he recounted the history of the album in considerable detail. The result countered the notion that he was stumbling blindly from one concept to another, or that he was following the pop charts for inspiration.

  In the notes for the collection, Johnny Cash Sings Ballads of the True West, Cash explained that he got the idea from Law, who even gave him some books on Western lore. As he read more on the subject, he came across a magazine called True West and began reading it religiously. He even looked up Joe Small, the publisher of True West, as well as Frontier Times and Old West, and visited his office in Austin, Texas. He eventually dedicated the album to Small, among others.

  After reading all he could find about the period, Cash turned to his friend Tex Ritter to put together a list of traditional songs—and Cash used several of them, including “I Ride an Old Paint,” “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie,” and “Streets of Laredo.” Another key song was “Mister Garfield,” an old folk song he learned from Ramblin’ Jack Elliott about the shock of an earlier presidential assassination. But Cash wrote a few himself, most notably “Mean as Hell,” a vivid portrait of the spirit and challenges facing the outsiders Cash so identified with in the Old West. In the song, the Devil, after being confined in God’s hell for thousands of years, asks the Lord if he can find a hell of his own, and God points him to the desert wasteland of the Rio Grande in the American Southwest.

  Cash’s liner notes also chronicle what amounted, collectively, to weeks he spent alone on personal journeys in the desert, trying to get as close as he could to the spirit of the Old West figures. He became so engrossed in the project that he put in countless more hours on the road and at home in California, going to antique and junk stores to search for items from the period.

  “I followed trails in my Jeep and on foot, and I slept under the mesquite bushes and in gullies,” he wrote, possibly taking poetic license in places, but weaving a mostly convincing narrative. “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 heard the tales it tells only to those who listen.”

  Grant and others assumed that Cash was wandering around aimlessly those many days and nights when he was nowhere to be found, and indeed he was on the night of May 11, when he was arrested for public drunkenness at five a.m. after a concert in Starkville, Mississippi, and spent three hours in jail before being released. But Cash himself characterized much of his “missing” time as a lonely but obsessive quest for his next song.

  While Cash was following his own musical path, Hollywood kept after him to do songs for movies. Just after the Starkville arrest, he recorded a song he wrote on spec for the latest James Bond film, Thunderball, but the producers chose Tom Jones’s version of a song written by John Barry and Don Black—and it’s easy to see why. Cash’s “Thunderball” has one of the clumsiest sets of lyrics he ever wrote, and the musical arrangement—which leaned toward a sort of rambling, Old West “Ghost Riders in the Sky” feel—lacked the contemporary edge needed for a Bond thriller. A month later Cash applied the same “Ghost Rider” undercurrents to the title track of a John Wayne western, The Sons of Katie Elder, and it worked better. The song was used over the film’s opening credits.

  Looking ahead, Cash decided to forget about his long-standing goal of recording an album of prison songs in favor of doing a live album taped at a prison. This is where he belonged, he told Law, not Carnegie Hall. After the embarrassing foul-up in New York and all the times Cash hadn’t shown up for recording sessions, Law was wary. But once again, he went along with his star. Cash and Holiff decided on the Kansas State Reformatory because they’d already set up a date there for July 6. It would be, Law believed, the first time a big-name singer had ever cut an album inside a prison.

  Bob Dylan once said that ideas for songs were coming to him so fast in the 1960s, he didn’t want to go to sleep because he was afraid he might miss them. Cash was moving at the same speed. Some of those around him—especially Grant—continued to shake their heads at many of Cash’s ideas. Others were crossing their fingers as Cash’s private life continued to spiral out of control.

  “The farther we got into the mid-1960s, the more worried we were,” Johnny Western says. “There were times we’d find him when we thought he was dead, like the morning in Waterloo [Iowa] in 1965. It was a week before the True West sessions and it was colder than hell. John had the window wide open in the hotel and he was passed out on top of the covers with just his boxers on…cold as ice. Marshall called the doctor, who gave him some shots and got him under some warm blankets. And you know what? He gets up and does the show that night. It was touch and go like that for years.”

  Those on the road with Cash weren’t the only ones who felt at times like they were on constant alert. In California, Vivian was in such bad shape—from worry and depression, lack of sleep, and little interest in food—that her oldest daughter, Rosanne, feared the worst. She says, “It got so bad that I remember coming home from school every day, wondering if my mother was going to be alive.”

  Chapter 16

  The Los Padres Fire and the El Paso Drug Bust

  I

  ONE OF ROSANNE AND KATHY CASH’S most vivid childhood memories was watching their mother puffing anxiously on a cigarette as she stared through the living room window of their Casitas Springs house on those rare nights in the mid-1960s when she thought her husband might actually be coming home. Vivian imagined him in the arms of June Carter, or dead somewhere, and she prayed to see the headlights in the driveway that would prove her wrong. On most nights, Vivian gave up around one a.m. and tried to grab a few hours’ sleep before getting the girls ready for class at St. Catherine-by-the-Sea elementary school.

  Though Cash was showing up less and less often, she held out hope that he would be home one night in mid-June 1965 after Saul Holiff phoned from the airport in Los A
ngeles to say that Johnny was on the way. Vivian took her familiar place at the window and let the girls stay up late to greet their father, whom they hadn’t seen in months. By two a.m., she knew she was going to be alone with the children again. As she headed for the bedroom, she figured that Johnny was at Reverend Gressett’s ranch, where no one would yell at him for taking pills. The next day she was too embarrassed to call Gressett or anyone else to ask about her husband’s whereabouts, so she just waited again.

  It was nearly a week of day-and-night vigils for Vivian before Cash’s camper—which he named “Jesse” after the outlaw Jesse James—headed up the driveway. Despite all the pain he had caused her, she wanted to run to him just like the day he arrived home from Germany at the airport in Memphis eleven years earlier. As he approached the front door, her nostalgia gave way to resentment. Why was he doing this to her? Why was he abandoning his family? Cash, feeling guilty and defensive, sensed her fury, and an argument broke out immediately. Finally, he shouted that he wanted a divorce. He had broached the subject before, but only fleetingly, never so angrily, and it was always quickly dropped. This time he tried to force the issue.

  Johnny Western says Cash told him that he offered Vivian a half-million-dollar settlement if she’d give him the divorce, though his finances remained in such bad shape, he must have been kidding himself if he thought he could put that much money together. Most of the new Columbia contract income was going to pay off old loans. Vivian shouted back, refusing even to consider a divorce, and he stormed off to his sanctuary, an office at one end of the house.