Johnny Cash: The Life

by Robert Hilburn

  Despite its radio-friendly arrangement, the “Love” single fell flat in its bid for pop airplay, as did Cash’s version of a catchy but otherwise uneventful “Kate” by Marty Robbins. Both singles rose to number two on the country charts, but that was little consolidation for the folks at Columbia Records, who continued to watch with dismay as Cash’s sales shrank. Whereas the Folsom Prison album had stayed on the country charts for ninety-two weeks—nearly two straight years—the Love album fell off after just twenty-four.

  But Cash wasn’t even fazed. The cheering crowds who greeted him each night on the road were enough to encourage him. Plus, his artistic triumphs in the 1960s had led him to trust his own musical instincts; they would eventually, he believed, pull him through any sales slump. More important, there continued to be a gradual shift in Cash’s personal agenda.

  Ever since Dyess, three musical styles had formed a triangle of influences that framed his highly personalized brand of country and folk music: Jimmie Rodgers’s tales of everyday life, the emotionalism of the blues, and gospel music. But the changes in his personal and professional life in the wake of Folsom and the TV show had made gospel music his major concern. He was slowly beginning to value the message in his music over the quality. His underlying question was: “Is this something people should hear?”

  Gradually, his passion for music was shifting entirely toward his spiritual expressions—whether on screen or on record. Though he would never put it in such crass terms, secular music was ever so slowly becoming just his day job.

  As Elfstrom stayed busy in New York editing the Gospel Road film through 1972, Cash continued between tours to work with Butler on the music for the soundtrack. Butler had become valuable enough as producer and tour pianist that Cash hired him away from Columbia to be general manager of the House of Cash studio. Johnny’s relationship with Butler fell somewhere in between those he’d had with Don Law and with Bob Johnston. Like Law, Butler was wholly supportive of Cash’s ideas, though he played a greater role than the Englishman had in shaping the musical arrangements in the studio. He didn’t, however, follow Johnston’s lead in pushing for the defiant edge that had defined Cash’s most memorable music.

  In between Gospel Road sessions, Cash and Butler also returned to a project Cash had begun shortly after his White House performance in 1970. During their conversation about the Apollo 13 flight, the president had urged Cash to put some music on tape so astronauts could play it on a future space mission. Rather than use the Tennessee Three, Cash opted for a more personal approach when he went into the studio in December 1970. Accompanied only by Norman Blake on guitar, he recorded a few songs along with linking dialogue—a miniature version of Ride This Train. He turned to several songs he had previously recorded, including “Mister Garfield” and “Mean as Hell,” to create a portrait of the American spirit. After a couple of days, Cash started thinking of the album in more ambitious terms—as something he would release on Columbia. This led him to set it aside until he could devote more time to it. Released in September 1972 under the weighty title America: A 200-Year Salute in Story and Song, the album generated some interest at Columbia headquarters. The hope was that it would tap into Cash’s new role as a national icon, but the package didn’t even match the chart success of A Thing Called Love. The LP was another sign of lax judgment—an unfocused and unfulfilling mix of history, folklore, commentary, and songs. The idea of tackling two hundred years of American history in less than thirty-five minutes was probably doomed from the start. Cash ended up jumping from a song about Paul Revere to one about heroes of the Alamo to a musical version of the Gettysburg Address to a reprise of his own song “The Big Battle.”

  When Cash started doing concept albums in the 1960s, there was a sense of daring and edge, a great young musician on a gallant quest to remain true to his artistic impulses. His choices were equally intuitive and painstakingly planned. Whatever the sales figures had been, the quality of the work was undeniable, and his artistry grew. He had proved himself time and again, never even considering making the compromises that might have brought him a mass audience for the concept albums sooner. In those ambitious works, Cash threw himself into his music because it was the only shelter from the emotional storm around him. The strength of those works empowered him with the self-assurance that is both essential and dangerous in an artist. When he was in a creative groove, there was no need for second-guessing. But the lack of critical reflection and outside input eventually catches up with even the greatest of artists. No one is invincible—not Elvis, not Sinatra, not Dylan, and not Johnny Cash.

  That the America album was released at all suggests that nobody was protecting Cash from himself. Butler was too laid-back and deferential; no one at Columbia wanted to take on a legend despite the widespread misgivings about their star’s direction, and Holiff, who should have been the last line of defense, had stopped confronting Cash altogether. Their relationship was hanging by a thread.

  If Cash harbored private doubts about the state of his recordings, there continued to be plenty in his life to reassure him about the importance of his music. On June 19 he was cheered by 100,000 people when he was the featured performer at a Campus Crusade for Christ weekend in Dallas that was described by honorary chairman Billy Graham as a “religious Woodstock.” Later that month he was awarded the Audie Murphy Patriotism Award at a Spirit of America festival in Decatur, Alabama. Most of all, Cash was getting ready to unveil his prized film.

  The Gospel Road had its first public showing at the Tennessee theater in Nashville on October 23. “It’s my life’s proudest work,” Cash told the motion picture editor of the Nashville Tennessean the day before the showing. “I want my friends to see the picture before I decide what to do with it.” As expected of a hometown audience, the response was wildly enthusiastic. But there was still a lot of work for Cash to do. He had to find a distributor for the film so he could begin recouping his $200,000 outlay. He also had to put the finishing touches on the soundtrack album.

  Because of his focus on the film project, Cash’s secular career continued to take a secondary position, which led to the once unthinkable day in January 1973 when Grant couldn’t find a Johnny Cash album anywhere on the country charts. For some time Cash had been displaced at the top of the charts by Charlie Pride, whose generally cheerful but otherwise unremarkable records were sculpted by none other than Jack Clement. Pride’s albums didn’t generate much attention in the pop field, but they topped the country charts for thirty-two weeks in a row in 1972.

  Cash returned to the country charts in February with Any Old Wind That Blows, an album he had put together the previous fall, but it was another listless compilation that could be described simply as Cash’s “1973” album. Nothing on the LP would become a permanent part of his repertoire.

  Finally, the Gospel Road film was ready for its formal release.

  With Holiff again on the sidelines, Lou Robin stepped forward. His corporate partner, Hal Landers, had talked 20th Century–Fox into paying Cash $200,000, the amount of his initial outlay, for the rights to distribute the movie. On February 14 the official premiere of The Gospel Road was held in Charlotte, North Carolina, with Billy Graham serving as honorary chairman. The following night, Cash showed the movie in Memphis, as close as practicable to Dyess. Again, understandably, the audiences loved the film.

  When the album, a two-record set, was released two months later, Columbia took out a full-page ad in the music trades reprinting Cash’s comment about its being his proudest work. Unlike the relatively aimless secular work he was doing, Gospel Road was inspired and uncompromising. He could have made it more accessible by limiting it to a one-record album built around the generally excellent songs, including the Statler Brothers’ “Lord, Is It?” But Cash wasn’t interested in shortcuts. Just as with Bitter Tears and Ballads of the True West, he wanted to tell his full story, and he didn’t let anything stand in the way.

  High principles aside, a double album cont
aining mostly spoken dialogue was a hard sell, and the collection managed to get only to number twelve on the country charts while not registering in the Top 200 of the pop charts.

  The film had even more trouble finding a broader audience. John waited anxiously for good news, but Fox wasn’t able to supply any. The plan had been to release the film initially in the South, where the studio hoped it would create enough word-of-mouth to spark strong box office results. The studio would then slowly move the film into the rest of the country. But Fox found it couldn’t even get bookings in the South for so heavily religious and unorthodox a movie. Billy Graham came to the rescue. His organization bought the rights from Fox to show the film for free in thousands of churches across the country. At least, Cash told himself, the film would be seen. That lifted his spirits enough for him to think about producing a second film, this one on the life of Saint Paul, but he eventually decided to write a book about the apostle instead.

  With the album and film project complete, Cash took a pause. It felt as if a chapter in his life was over—the first chapter, he sometimes said. His long struggle had been rewarded. He had his family, his faith, his career. Once again he felt redeemed.

  Even though Christopher S. Wren’s biography of him had been in the stores for only two years, Cash wanted to write his own account, stressing the role of God in his life. It would be, in some ways, a companion piece to The Gospel Road, titled Man in Black. “You’ve told the world about your beliefs,” Billy Graham said to him. “Now tell them about how those beliefs shaped your life.”

  II

  Despite the near-constant volatility, the Cash-Holiff relationship endured in the 1960s because the two men needed each other. But that mutual need waned quickly in the 1970s. Thanks to Cash’s superstardom, Holiff had made a fortune. But he was drained from the years of emotional combat. Also, as he told Lou Robin, he thought Cash’s career had peaked and it was going to be downhill from then on. He feared that Cash would start popping pills again, and he couldn’t imagine reliving that agony. At the same time, Cash saw that Robin, along with Marty Klein, was starting to do most of the work anyway, and Robin was a lot easier to deal with than Holiff. Everything didn’t have to be a battle.

  There was another problem for Holiff, a ticklish one revolving around Billy Graham and The Gospel Road.

  The relationship between artists and managers is a delicate one, built around much the same kind of commitment and trust as a marriage. The only thing missing (usually) is sex. Artists want to feel that a manager cares about them as people, not just as cash cows, so any hint of distance or indifference can lead to a messy divorce. As much as John valued Saul, it was only a business relationship.

  The seeds of the breakup began in the early 1970s, when John and June noticed that Saul wasn’t showing up at the Billy Graham Crusades. When they asked him about it, Holiff said he needed to keep an eye on regular concerts to protect their interests. The Crusades were benefits put together by the Graham organization. He didn’t feel a need to be there. The topic was dropped, but the Cashes were disappointed by his answer. They took it as a sign of a lack of interest.

  Tensions between the two sides escalated when John and June began talking about The Gospel Road.

  Holiff was cool to the project, pointing out that it’d be hard for Cash ever to recoup his money because of the difficulty of finding a mass audience for the film. When Cash mentioned his millions of record buyers and TV viewers, Holiff—reasonably—warned that he couldn’t count on all those fans also wanting to see a gospel movie. Even though Holiff was on the set in Israel for part of the time, he still didn’t embrace the project, causing Cash to turn to Robin to put together the logistics in the Holy Land.

  The strain became so intense after the filming that Cash, at June’s urging, confronted Holiff—not in person, as Cash hated face-to-face disagreements, but on the phone. In the conversation, taped by Holiff, Cash and his manager both sounded nervous; each was trying his best not to offend the other, but the edginess was apparent. After a discussion of their differing opinions of the prospects for The Gospel Road, they broached the subject of their own relationship.

  “I’m one of the few people who [will] try to say to you exactly what they think without meaning to be harmful,” Holiff told him. “I’m not trying to break things down. I’m just trying maybe to temper things a little bit by saying not exactly what people think you want to hear. I find a lot of people tell you exactly what you want to hear.”

  “I know that. I don’t need that either.”

  “And that doesn’t help.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  The crisis was over for the moment, but the wound still wasn’t healed. Everyone in the Cash entourage knew it was only a matter of time before Holiff would be out. In retrospect, they thought it was remarkable that the Cash-Holiff relationship lasted as long as it did.

  The final showdown between the Cashes and Holiff occurred in July 1973 in the idyllic setting of Lake Tahoe, the second major gambling and entertainment center of Nevada. Soon after Cash’s dramatic success at the Las Vegas Hilton, the Sahara Tahoe Corporation approached Cash’s agents and offered the same $100,000-a-week contract. After his usual morning jog, Holiff was invited to have breakfast with the Cashes at the house on the lake supplied to entertainers by the hotel.

  There aren’t many more beautiful spots in the world, but the mood was anything but relaxed. As soon as Holiff sat down, June brought up the matter of the Billy Graham Crusades. Again Saul offered the defense of seeing no purpose in attending shows that he hadn’t set up. According to Holiff, June lashed back with the charge that he was only interested in money. This time there was no turning back.

  When the meeting ended, the nearly thirteen-year relationship was ended too.

  Lou Robin learned from Cash a few days later that Holiff was out. He wasn’t surprised. “John had been looking for the opportunity to get rid of Saul for a long time,” he says. “Saul had done a lot for John. He saved his rear many times when John was out of control. He got him some good record deals and found promoters who would do the shows despite John’s reputation for no-shows in the 1960s. But at some point he was just getting less and less interested. It got to where he was referring more and more to us, and John noticed that.”

  After a show two weeks later at Pine Knob in Michigan, Robin and partner Allen Tinkley made a pitch to John and June to take over the management duties. “We were in the limo with John and June, and we resolved everything by the time we got to the Detroit airport forty-five minutes later,” Robin recalls. “It was easy because we had pretty much been acting as managers before that.”

  The news didn’t become public until Holiff issued a press release on his Volatile Attractions, Ltd., stationery on October 27.

  “After serving in the dual capacity of Johnny Cash’s manager and agent for nearly thirteen years, Saul Holiff has announced his resignation, effective December 9, 1973,” the statement began. “Holiff and Cash are parting on completely amicable terms after having shared, over the years, many ups and downs, and ultimately much good fortune together. Holiff’s reasons for the severance are based mainly on the fact that he has a very young family that, due to prolonged absences from home owing to business and travel obligations, he has seldom had the opportunity to see their formative years. He hopes to spend a great deal more time with his family, and to reduce his active role in show business to one of semi-retirement.”

  The Canadian Jew and the fundamentalist Christian had struck many as an odd couple in Nashville, where signs of anti-Semitism were not uncommon. So there were inevitable whispers of anti-Semitism in some industry quarters when the relationship started to crumble. But those whispers diminished when Cash turned to Robin, also Jewish, to manage him.

  On November 3, Record World, one of Billboard’s rival music trades, reported the resignation and announced that Robin and Tinkley would continue to represent Cash for concerts and other personal appearances,
while Marty Klein, of the Agency for the Performing Arts, would represent Cash for TV and movies.

  But the news getting back to Holiff was that people connected to Cash were scoffing at the resignation story. The truth, they said, was that Holiff was fired. Furious, Holiff wrote a letter to Cash’s sister Reba, who helped oversee the House of Cash operation. “I take umbrage at your spreading false information,” he insisted. “As I am sure you know, I resigned of my own volition which, of course, was verified by Johnny’s letter to me. It is unfair and unwarranted to give anyone an incorrect version.”

  About the break, Robin declares, “Bottom line, I think they got to a point where they had just had enough of each other.”

  In later years Cash was generous with his praise, frequently lauding Saul as the man who’d lifted his career aspirations. He and June would also invite him to Jamaica for a visit.

  III

  Cash’s recording career continued on a downward spin. While he toured Europe, Australia, and the States in the closing months of 1973 and into 1974, Columbia continued to release albums, desperately hoping something would catch on. Unfortunately, the label wasn’t given much to work with. As he often did when searching for a hit, Cash resorted to something that had worked for him before. In Johnny Cash and His Woman, he tried, among other things, to recapture the magic of “Jackson” by recording another Billy “Edd” Wheeler novelty titled “The Color of Love,” but the song had neither the same humor nor the same drive. Similarly, the couple unsuccessfully aimed for the spirit and tone of “If I Were a Carpenter” with another Wheeler duet, “The Pine Tree.”