Johnny Cash: The Life

by Robert Hilburn

  Out of respect for Don Law, Johnston didn’t plan to go after Cash right away, but Cash was quick to invite him to the house in the summer of 1967. “I went out to see him, and he told me to jump in the boat and go for a ride on the lake, but I told him, ‘I wouldn’t get on a bicycle with you,’” Johnston remembers. “I could see he was in pretty bad shape. So we eventually sat on the ground and he asked, ‘Can you tell me what’s going to happen to me? What do I need to do with my music?’

  “I said, ‘You need to build a mausoleum in your head with big iron doors so that nobody can get in there except you. You don’t let me in there, you don’t let June in there, you don’t let your manager in there, you don’t let the record company people in there. You have to decide for yourself what you want to do with your music—and not let anyone else tell you. If you do that, you’re going to be one of the biggest stars in the world.’”

  In his spaced-out state, Cash just stared at Johnston, leaving the producer with no inkling whether Cash was going to start working with him or stay with Law, but John immediately knew he wanted this Texan by his side in the studio. He liked Johnston’s spirit; here was a man who talked about the record executives as if they were the enemy. Cash notified Holiff that he wanted to start working with Johnston.

  Shortly after the meeting at the house, Johnston was sitting in his office at Columbia Records on Music Row when Cash stopped by.

  “He walked in and said, ‘I’ve got an idea for an album, but I don’t guess you’ll like it either,’” Johnston recalls. “He said, ‘I’ve always wanted to go to a prison and record the show, but no one would let me do it.’” Clearly he had conveniently forgotten his no-show at the Kansas prison date two years earlier.

  Seizing the moment, Johnston picked up the phone and called San Quentin, but he couldn’t get through to the warden, so he just left a message that Johnny Cash wanted to record an album there. “I called San Quentin because that was the one I thought of first,” Johnston says. “Then, I thought of Folsom and called there. If I couldn’t get through there, I would have called Sing-Sing.”

  Johnston had no idea that Cash had played Folsom the year before, so he was surprised when the warden told him right away that he’d love to have John come back. When Johnston hung up, he warned Cash not to tell anyone at Columbia about their plan because someone might veto the idea. Sure enough, Johnston maintained years later, Cash returned to his office a few weeks later, shaken because somebody at Columbia had found out about the prison plans and told him they’d drop him if he proceeded. Johnston said not to worry; he’d find a way to get the album done—despite the “goddamn record company.”

  Clive Davis didn’t deny Johnston’s key role in finally getting the Folsom project started, but he rejected the idea that anyone at Columbia wanted to kill the project or was thinking about dropping Cash from the roster.

  “I appointed Bob Johnston to the position in Nashville and he reported to me,” Davis says. “I remember discussions with him about the album and I supported it—or it would have never happened. I could have stopped it, but why would I? We believed in Johnny Cash. Why else would we have re-signed him to a very lucrative contract just before Folsom? The Greatest Hits album was huge. No way would we drop an artist the stature of Johnny Cash.”

  Indeed, Cash was having a good year sales-wise. “Jackson” went to number two in the country field. To keep the momentum going, Columbia released “Long-Legged Guitar Pickin’ Man” as a single in late May, and it reached number six on the country charts, but, like “Jackson,” it failed to crack the pop market.

  Johnny Cash’s Greatest Hits, Volume 1 lit up the summer album charts. Columbia celebrated the release with a full-page ad in Billboard that featured the line “The only thing greater than one Johnny Cash hit is a lot of Johnny Cash hits. Johnny’s new album is Cash all the way with 11 of his all-time country classics.”

  The album went to number one on the country charts and broke the Top 100 on the pop charts. It was enough to persuade Davis to tear up Cash’s 1964 contract and order his staff to draft a new one that would increase Cash’s royalty rate from five cents to nine. If an album sold for four dollars, he would get thirty-six cents from every copy plus any writing royalties.

  Cash went into the studio with Johnston for the first time on October 2 to record a song, “Rosanna’s Going Wild,” that was written by June and her sisters. The song was the story of a sexy young thing who raised eyebrows with her air of abandon. It wasn’t one of Cash’s great records, but it packed a wallop on the radio even if it, once again, shamelessly echoed the trumpet blare of “Ring of Fire.”

  For their first session together, Johnston spent hours in the studio before the musicians arrived, making sure the microphones and speakers were linked up correctly. For all the trouble Law had had re-creating the dynamics of Cash’s Sun recordings, Johnston’s attention to sonic detail paid off right away. The Statler Brothers’ Don Reid says the difference between Law and Johnston was enormous. “I don’t think Don had a lot of creativity, whereas Bob was a big bag of energy and always ready to work. His sessions were creative and loose where Don Law just walked through the motions.” The single went to number two on the country charts.

  There was more good news in the Cash camp. A date had been set for the live Folsom recording: January 13, 1968.

  IV

  Grant and others feared there was no way Cash would be in any kind of shape to do the live album. Between the divorce and his mounting financial problems, Cash was deeper into drugs than anyone could remember. Grant felt as if he was on twenty-four-hour vigil at this point. June gave up—again—in early October. She told Cash it was over.

  Suddenly alone, without either his family or the woman he loved, on October 21 Cash poured out his heart to Holiff in a rambling ten-page letter about his relationship with June. Cash still saw Holiff as the only one in his world who could get things done.

  In the letter, Cash wove back and forth, like a drunken driver crossing lanes, between an almost childlike helplessness and full-fledged rage. He recounted how he had given up his family for June and accused her of having a long history of heartlessly chewing men up and spitting them out. Desperate, he pledged he would seek treatment for his addiction if Holiff could stop June from leaving him.

  It wasn’t the only angry letter the drugged-out Cash sent Holiff that month.

  In researching the film about his father, Jonathan Holiff found a trail of canceled dates in 1967 and a letter his father sent Cash on October 27 that year in response to Cash’s demand that Holiff lower his commission rate to help Cash get over his financial woes. “Johnny was missing more shows than he was doing at this time, and my father pointed that out in his letter,” Jonathan says.

  Saul wrote: “You missed $40,000 worth of dates in one year! If you continue like this, it will lead to disaster. Your solution is to cut back my commissions. I am willing to do that, but I want your cooperation in cutting your own expenses and in missing no more dates.”

  The debts were wide-ranging—from money he owed his family, including his parents, out in California, to a whopping $125,000 government fine (reduced in 1969 to $82,000) for his part in the Los Padres National Forest fire, to payments on the new house and the potential divorce settlement.

  With the attorney bills piling up, Cash finally instructed his lawyers to go ahead with the latest offer from Vivian. Under the agreement, she received the Casitas Springs house, alimony of $1,000 a month, and child support payments of $1,600 a month, as well as half the royalties forever on Cash’s musical works made during the marriage. That meant she would collect money on both the songs he’d written, such as “I Walk the Line,” and the ones he had simply recorded, such as—and this must have been bittersweet—“Ring of Fire” and “It Ain’t Me, Babe.” For his part, Cash got chiefly the trailer park and the remaining 50 percent of his writing and recording royalties. He would control 100 percent of the royalties on any new records or songs.


  For much of the rest of his life, he would speak of that fall of 1967 as some of his darkest days.

  “If you looked in his eyes, you never saw happy, smiling eyes even if he was having a good time,” says Bill Miller, who grew over the years from being a boyhood fan to a friend who put together a line of fan merchandise with Cash, and who opened a Johnny Cash museum in Nashville in 2013. “There was always this deep intensity, this profound sadness. I saw it, and we talked about it.”

  Miller attributes part of the sadness to Cash’s continuing guilt over his failure to be a better father in the 1960s. Miller feels it was that guilt, and his religious upbringing, that contributed to Cash’s refusal to judge others.

  When recounting the darkness of the fall of 1967, Cash invariably told three stories that have been repeated time and again in books and articles—one of which involves an alleged suicide attempt. The first step in his march toward regaining his will to live supposedly occurred in early October, when, as he later explained it, he went into the historic Nickajack Cave on the Tennessee River, just north of Chattanooga. He had often explored the massive system of caves looking for souvenirs from the Civil War or early Native American relics, sometimes with buddies, but usually alone.

  On this occasion, Cash, buried under remorse over the breakup of his marriage, decided it was too painful to keep on living. Nickajack contained the remains of “many spelunkers and amateur adventurers who’d lost their lives in the caves over the years, usually by losing their way, and it was my hope and intention to join that company,” he wrote in his second autobiography. “If I crawled far enough in, I thought, I’d never be able to find my way back out, and nobody would be able to locate me until I was dead, if indeed they ever could.”

  According to his account, he parked his Jeep outside and crawled through the cave for two or three hours until the batteries gave out in his flashlight and he lay down in the darkness, preparing to die. “The absolute lack of light was appropriate,” he wrote, “for at that moment, I was as far from God as I have ever been. My separation from Him, the deepest and most ravaging of the various kinds of loneliness I’d felt over the years, seemed finally complete.”

  But then something came over him. “I thought I’d left Him, but He hadn’t left me,” Cash continued. “I felt something very powerful start to happen to me, a sensation of utter peace, clarity, and sobriety. I didn’t believe it at first. I couldn’t understand it. How, after being awake for so long and driving my body so hard and taking so many pills—dozens of them, scores, even hundreds—could I possibly feel all right? There in Nickajack Cave I became conscious of a very clear, simple idea: I was going to die at God’s time, not mine. I hadn’t prayed over my decision to seek death in the cave, but that hadn’t stopped God from intervening.”

  Cash made his way out of the cave, aided by a wisp of air that guided him to an exit, where he found June and his mother waiting with a basket of food and drink. “I knew there was something wrong,” his mother told him, he wrote. “I had to come and find you.”

  He supposedly decided then and there to quit drugs.

  In all his drugged days and nights, Cash likely did sometimes feel sufficiently trapped and devoid of hope that he wanted to give up on life, and the story dramatized the feelings of helplessness and recovery.

  Nevertheless, the problem with the story and the way Cash told it is twofold.

  First, Nickaback Cave was underwater in the fall of 1967, as a Cash historian discovered after an extensive check of weather records.

  Second, Cash did not quit drugs that day.

  Cash was on a tour break a month after the supposed Nickaback adventure when he somehow ended up in LaFayette, Georgia, a tiny burg just across the state line from Chattanooga. He was arrested for public drunkenness on the afternoon of Thursday, November 2, and spent the night in jail. He was taken from the cell the next morning to see Sheriff Ralph Jones, who surprised him by saying he was free to go.

  Recalled Cash, “He was sitting behind the counter and he looked up at me and he said, ‘My wife is such a big fan of yours that she’s got every record you got and watches you every chance she can on the television. When I told her I had you in my jail, she cried.’”

  Jones then placed Cash’s pills, money, and pocketknife on the counter and continued, “But I’m not gonna cry. You wanna kill yourself? I’m gonna give you your God-given right to go ahead and do that, so take your pills and go.”

  This story was true. Sheriff Jones confirmed this account in 1970.

  Deeply touched, Cash resolved again he would give up drugs—which leads to the final story in the trilogy.

  Whether because of Sheriff Jones’s lecture, his pledge to seek treatment if June would stick with him, or the upcoming Folsom date, Cash returned home on Saturday and, through June, turned the following day to a psychiatrist, Dr. Nat Winston. Winston agreed to see Cash on Monday.

  In his first autobiography, Cash wrote that he made it through Sunday without any pills, but Monday he found a bottle of amphetamines he had hidden in the bathroom, and he swallowed a handful. He spent most of the day in the house in a daze, but just before dark he raced outside for some air. Suddenly “craving excitement,” he drove his tractor along the cliff that overlooked the lake, daring himself to get closer and closer to the edge—until the earth gave way and Cash tumbled into the lake with the tractor right behind him, barely missing him. He tried to pull himself out of the freezing water, but he didn’t have the strength.

  Just when he thought he was going to drown, Braxton Dixon, who had apparently seen the whole thing from his adjacent property, came rushing down to the lake and pulled him to safety. When he awoke around four a.m., Dr. Winston was sitting beside the bed. With June and her parents by his side, Cash spent the next three weeks (or, by some accounts, thirty days) in the house, kicking drugs.

  That story is partly true.

  Dr. Winston confirmed years later that he did help Cash, though he remembered the time of his arrival that night as ten p.m. and the detox period closer to ten days.

  “When I got to the house, Johnny was lying on this huge round bed, and he didn’t weigh more than 125 pounds,” the psychiatrist told me. “He was just a skeleton, and he was out of it. When he woke up, I recommended he see someone in private practice who could devote more time with him, but June was more comfortable with me, so I agreed. I stopped by to see him every day. He was very polite. He wanted to get off the drugs, and he knew he couldn’t do it himself.”

  Things progressed so well over the next week and a half that Cash was in good enough shape to follow through on a promise he had made months before, to perform November 18 at a benefit concert to raise money for the local high school band. Cash wrote in his memoir that he had never felt stronger onstage. He was finally off drugs for good.

  Well, not really.

  Cash was getting more rest and healthier meals, thanks to June’s and Maybelle’s cooking, than he had in ages, and his pattern of recovery continued throughout the month. The gaunt addict look went away. Cash gained at least thirty pounds. A thrilled Marshall Grant proclaimed, “Old John is back.”

  Cash ended the year with a brief California tour that included a November 28 stop at the 6,300-seat Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. He looked great with the extra weight, and his voice sounded stronger than it had in ages. Carl Perkins was so inspired by what he saw in his friend that he walked onto the beach north of L.A. the day after the Shrine show and threw a bottle of bourbon into the ocean. He made a pledge to God that he would never take another drink.

  As the musicians headed home for Christmas shows, everyone hoped for the best, but Grant knew the moment of truth was at hand when he learned on December 22 that the divorce from Vivian had become final. Even though John had signed off on it, Grant feared the worst—and sure enough he heard from June that Cash, deeply depressed, was off to Chattanooga, where he again turned to drugs, telling a musician friend, “This is the worst d
ay of my life.”

  Folsom was just twenty-two days away.

  Chapter 19

  Folsom Prison and Marrying June

  I

  AS FAR BACK AS HIS Air Force days, Cash had paused each New Year’s Eve to go over the highs and lows of the year and to set a few goals. He would eventually commit those thoughts to paper, but he was still keeping them in his head in 1967—and he was badly shaken by the way things had been going. Even when his personal life was hopelessly messed up, he had usually been proud of his music. No longer. He realized that he hadn’t felt good about an album since the True West package. Everybody Loves a Nut was fun, but a side step. Carryin’ On was lazy, and with Shining Sea he had mostly just gone through the motions.

  With the Folsom date nearing, he asked himself if he could regain the discipline and drive. Even the question frightened him. As he put it much later, “If I couldn’t pull myself together for an album I had been wanting to make for years, I didn’t know if I could ever find my way again.”

  Cash credited Bob Johnston with helping him overcome his fears.

  “Bob kept telling me I was an artist,” Cash told me. “He would sit me down and say, ‘Cash, you and Bob Dylan are different. You’re “fuckin’ artists.” You don’t just make records. You make records that mean something to you and the people who hear them.’ I liked the sound of the word ‘artist,’ and he helped me understand I needed to put everything I had into the Folsom album.”