Johnny Cash: The Life

by Robert Hilburn

  In his uncertainty, Cash told himself it was time to try another live album—after all, he had done well with them before. Rather than a prison album this time, he wanted to record one of his shows in Europe, where audiences continued to be amazingly responsive, buying nearly a third of all Cash albums sold. Columbia liked the idea.

  For the new album, Cash chose London Palladium, one of England’s most celebrated venues. Besides the Tennessee Three, he was joined onstage at various points by June, the Carter Family, and Rosanne, plus Jerry Hensley on guitar and Larry McCoy on piano for two shows on September 21, 1975.

  The idea was to cover the various high points in Cash’s career, and the set list rambled all over the place, from Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” to Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee” all the way back to “Hey, Porter.” But the song that held Cash’s attention that day was one he had written three months earlier in New York City. It was a flimsy novelty about a bum who sees a strawberry cake at a fancy banquet in a hotel. Feeling he deserves a piece of that cake after all his earlier years of hard work, the bum grabs a slice and races away, enjoying every bite.

  As he often had in the past, Cash relied on his instincts. He felt that the song spoke to the resilience of the workingman and to the principle of fairness. Maybe so, but the song had no charm or punch.

  He decided to make it the title track and put two photos of himself on the back of the album eating strawberry cake.

  Released in early 1976, the album made the charts only briefly. With no game plan, Cash went into the studio with producers Charlie Bragg and Don Davis to work on the next album. In Grant’s words, “We were just plodding along,” until Davis gave Cash a tape of a quirky novelty song about an auto factory worker who falls in love with the fancy cars he’s making and, knowing he could never afford to buy one, starts stealing one piece of the car at a time from the factory until he has enough parts at home to build one of the cars for himself.

  It seemed like just the kind of poor-man-wins-out tale that Cash would have liked, but he put down the guitar after running through it once and told everybody he was going to go pick up John Carter at school. Grant stopped Cash and told him he thought the song sounded like a hit; he at least ought to give it a try. Cash countered by saying that Marshall liked the song only because he used to be a car mechanic himself. Still, he did record a quick version of “One Piece at a Time” that afternoon.

  Someone on the Columbia promotion staff heard the recording and played it for some DJs, then went back to Cash with good news. Everyone was flipping over the record. Cash agreed to release it as a single, but he didn’t have much faith in it. In his liner notes for the One Piece at a Time album, he seemed to be saying he was just spinning his wheels, wondering if anyone cared about his music anymore. As the single started climbing the chart in the spring, Cash crisscrossed the country on tour. He returned to Nashville just in time to learn that the record was number one on the country charts. It was his biggest hit since “What Is Truth.”

  As much as he rejected chart success as a measure of his work, Cash couldn’t help but be excited when “One Piece at a Time” hit the public nerve that he’d been hoping to strike with “Strawberry Cake.” “He was ecstatic, like a kid,” Rosanne recalls. “He felt so invigorated.”

  Cash knew he had been lucky. He hadn’t written the song, and he almost hadn’t even recorded it. Worse, he still didn’t have any ideas about what to do next. He wanted to take time off to focus on music, but he didn’t want to cut back on the amount of time he was spending with his family or decrease his charitable work or stop doing his Crusade appearances. The only thing left was to reduce his concert schedule, but that wasn’t really an option. His living expenses had expanded greatly during the superstar years, partly because he loaded his payroll with family members, aides, and household staff.

  Then, when the record royalties tailed off rapidly in the 1970s, Cash refused to make cuts in his payroll, which was why he needed all those concert dates to keep afloat. Despite the $100,000 paydays at Madison Square Garden and the Las Vegas Hilton, his grosses by 1975 were more commonly in the $10,000-to-$20,000 range. He felt like he was on a treadmill—and it would be a long time before he got off.

  Despite John’s good behavior during the early years of the 1970s, the adults in Cash’s inner circle lived with the fear that it was just a matter of time before he would succumb once more to amphetamines—and they were seeing warning signs of that relapse as early as 1975. “John’s behavior started becoming increasingly erratic,” Marshall Grant said. “He wasn’t missing shows like before, but he would go through periods where he was moody and distant. The pressures were building up, and they just overwhelmed him.”

  In the old days, Grant was close enough to Cash to go to him with his concerns, but the men had grown apart, and he didn’t want to risk alienating his boss even more. “Besides, John would have just brushed me off,” Grant said. “He had a way of just slamming the door on unpleasant topics.”

  The gradual separation dated back to the late 1960s, when Cash began to feel that Grant was being condescending when confronting him regarding drugs. Cash appreciated all that Grant did as his lieutenant on the road, but he thought that the group’s success was going to Grant’s head, giving him a self-assurance that was grating. Whenever Grant would brush aside Cash’s requests or rebuke him in public, Cash took it as a sign of disrespect. Lou Robin noticed the pair’s tense moments and envisioned a blowup ahead.

  Robin was more concerned with Cash’s conduct. He had heard all the war stories from the 1960s and he, too, noticed that Cash was starting to act strange, and was sometimes unreachable for days at a time between tours. “There were some days when he was just irrational,” Robin says, pointing to the Strawberry Cake album as an example. “As time went on, you could see it in the shows. He did them by rote a lot of nights when he was on pills. I’d make sure he didn’t do interviews because we didn’t want people seeing him in that condition. But all this was gradual. It didn’t really get bad until the late 1970s.”

  Robin often went to June for insight. “I’d say, ‘What do we do about this or that,’ and June would say, ‘It’s him. Not much we can do about it until something disastrous happens.’” Robin’s wife, Karen, who became close to June during the hours together on the road, believed that Cash’s slide from sobriety started with wine. “He knew the horrors of the pills and he really tried to avoid them, so he found another escape,” she says. “He really got into it, learning about wine and building this big [collection]. It doesn’t matter if it’s alcohol or amphetamines when you have an addictive personality, and eventually he couldn’t resist the pills any longer.”

  Chapter 26

  Losing the Muse

  I

  THE MAN IN BLACK WAS such a beloved figure as the decade passed the halfway mark that it was hard for outsiders—or even some insiders—to imagine that anything essential was missing in his life. But there was. The all-important affirmation that the music had brought him had slipped away. “The biggest problem,” Grant insisted, “was we weren’t making good records.”

  How far had he fallen in terms of sales?

  Between the day in 1971 when the TV show went off the air to the end of 1976, Conway Twitty, Merle Haggard, Charley Pride, Loretta Lynn, Sonny James, Charlie Rich, Tammy Wynette, Dolly Parton, Ronnie Milsap, George Jones, and Don Williams all had at least five number-one singles each—a collective eighty-two singles at the top of the charts. Cash had just “One Piece at a Time.”

  Desperate to gain his creative momentum, Cash worked hard on the Last Gunfighter Ballad album in July 1976. He spent more time than usual thinking about what songs he wanted to include on the album, and that reflection led back to his childhood days and the sentimental Gene Autry hit he listened to countless times on the family radio: “That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine.”

  Not everything that found its way onto the album worked, but there
was energy in most of the tracks and a conviction in Cash’s voice that made the album one of his best of the 1970s. In addition to the title tune by Guy Clark, Cash’s own “Ridin’ on the Cotton Belt” was an ode to watching his daddy ride the rails which felt true, and there was an undeniable tenderness in “Cindy, I Love You,” a song he wrote for his daughter’s eighteenth birthday.

  “We were in the green room at the Merv Griffin TV show and Dad asked me what I wanted for my birthday, which was coming up, and I told him I’d love a song,” Cindy says. “He said, ‘That’s easy,’ and he went away for about ten minutes. Then he came back and said, ‘Do you want your birthday present early?’ There were about twenty people in the room, and there wasn’t a dry eye when he finished. It was so lovely. In fact, I was a little disappointed when I heard the record itself, because there were all these other voices on it. I liked it better when it was just him singing to me.”

  The album’s defining moment was “Far Side Banks of Jordan,” a beautiful, spiritual-tinged love song that he learned from the Oak Ridge Boys, who had replaced the Statler Brothers as part of the touring troupe. Written by Terry Smith, a Nashville schoolteacher and part-time songwriter, the song told of a husband and wife being reunited in heaven. Cash had recorded the song by himself nearly a year earlier, but it wasn’t until he turned it into a duet with June that it caught fire. The magical part was when June sang about promising that if she died first, she’d wait for him on the far-side banks of Jordan—all the more powerful because no one expected June would die before John.

  Of the sessions Grant recalled, “Maybe he was just feeling good after ‘One Piece at a Time,’ but you could see the difference. He didn’t look lost. He was there before some of the musicians and eager to get started on the next song.”

  But Cash’s next album was a disaster creatively—revealing his difficulties, amid the pills and other priorities—in maintaining a strong creative focus.

  Even before the Last Gunfighter album was released in February 1977, Cash was thinking about a follow-up. It wasn’t lost on him that Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard had both just released hit concept albums (the spiritual-edged LP The Troublemaker and My Love Affair with Trains, respectively). Maybe it was time for him to do another one. As he crossed the country on tour in the fall of 1976, he thought about his nonstop lifestyle and imagined it would be a good theme to use to connect another series of stories about people and places around the country. In quiet moments on the road, he began sketching out ideas for the album that he’d call The Rambler.

  As in the sixties, he would link the eight tunes with dialogue, this time between the Rambler (played by Cash) and the Fisherman (played by Jack Routh, who was married to Carlene from 1974 to 1977).

  He had only three of the songs in the can before breaking for a nine-day tour of the Northeast and Canada. Things progressed smoothly until the troupe got to New Haven. Grant, who had been pleased with how well John was performing on the tour, found an incoherent Cash that afternoon in the dressing room.

  “Why, John?” Grant asked, in a rare confrontation. “You’ve had all these good years. You’ve got the world by the tail. You’re the man in country music. You have a great family, a great wife. You’ve got everything a man could possibly dream of. Why have you turned your back on them?”

  Grant said Cash sarcastically replied, in effect, “Mind your own business.” A few hours later, Grant was disheartened when Cash stepped into the spotlight and turned toward him. Cash was in even worse shape than he had been earlier in the day. But as Grant had seen so many times before, however, Cash’s blurry state didn’t keep him from putting on an entertaining show.

  “No one in the audience—or in the cast and crew, for that matter—noticed anything unusual about John that night,” Grant said. “No one but June. She looked so sad onstage, and her eyes said it all. She and I looked across the set at each other, each of us silently asking the other, Are we going to go through this again? Is this what’s going to happen?”

  As Cash returned to the studio in February and March for more work on The Rambler, the sales verdict was in on The Last Gunfighter Ballad, and once again, the news was not good. Despite the album’s rewarding moments, the LP did as poorly as Look at Them Beans and Strawberry Cake. The One Piece at a Time album had been an exception, not a turnaround commercially. The Rambler again pointed out the price Cash was paying for not having a strong producer. The dialogues between songs were clumsy—truly rambling sketches that bordered on condescending in their clichéd homespun philosophy. Worse, the songs felt superficial. Cash wasn’t writing about love or pain or loneliness or adventure with the fierce, sometimes helpless resolve of his best years. Even the arrangements on the album felt stock, with one echoing the bass-heavy outlaw sound associated with Waylon Jennings. The whole thing felt like a crass product.

  The Rambler was another failure when it was released that summer, which must have been confusing to Cash. He’d made a terrific album in Last Gunfighter and a poor one in The Rambler, and they both fared almost identically on the charts. Gunfighter spent seven weeks on the charts, peaking at twenty-eight, and Rambler remained on the charts for eight weeks, reaching number thirty-one. It didn’t seem to matter what he did.

  Depressed, he didn’t go back into the studio for another six months.

  It was during this break from recording that Cash learned that Elvis Presley had died of a heart attack on August 16 in Memphis at the age of forty-two. “June and I loved and admired Elvis Presley,” he told the press. “He was the king of us all in country, rock, folk, and rhythm and blues. I never knew an entertainer who had his personal magnetism and charisma. The women loved him and the men couldn’t stop watching him.”

  In the weeks that followed, Cash thought a lot about Elvis. Some of his deeper feelings came out in an interview. “I always felt bad,” he said, “that he got so popular and so sought after that he had to close his world around him and exclude so many people. So, I have to say the Elvis Presley that died, I didn’t know him very well.”

  True enough; Cash had lost touch with Elvis. He had never really gotten over his suspicions about Elvis and June, but the main thing that haunted him in the summer of 1977 was the question of their legacies. It wasn’t so much a matter of who had the most success or impact as it was a question of whether they had both squandered their talent. Cash had watched with everyone else as Elvis became a bloated and lazy performer, sometimes moving about the stage in a dazed, drugged fog—and the image hit too close to home. It saddened him to see Elvis go out so badly. He wondered about his own future.

  Far from the musical spotlight, Cash found a new cause. His fascination with Saint Paul increased dramatically when he read The Life and Epistles of St. Paul by W. J. Conybeare and J. S. Howson as part of the final reading list for his Bible course. In hours he might have devoted to his music in the past, he now read profusely, especially enamored with such works as The Apostle, a 1943 novel by Sholem Asch based on the life of Saint Paul, and an acclaimed 1972 biography, also called The Apostle, by John Pollock, a Cambridge-educated clergyman who was also Billy Graham’s authorized biographer.

  Cash spent hours roaming through bookstores, including his favorite, Foyle’s, in London, looking for more books or articles on Saint Paul. Among books he pointed to favorably was Frederic William Farrar’s two-volume set, The Life and Work of St. Paul. He frequently turned, too, to the hundreds of books, many of them about religious subjects, which he had inherited following Ezra’s death in 1975.

  To learn more about Paul and Jewish laws, Cash asked Karen Robin, a convert to Judaism, for assistance. “We used to go to religious bookstores and I would pick out books for him that I thought he should read, about the religious laws and why Paul did certain things,” she says. “On the road to Damascus, Paul became a follower of Jesus. John identified with that conversion and wanted something like that to happen to him. And in the writing of the book he came to a better understanding of h
imself.”

  Cash slowly began to think of the apostle as a hero—intrigued by this highly educated Jew’s transformation from a fierce persecutor of Christians to the most famous of Jesus’s followers. He first thought of writing a formal biography but worried that he wasn’t a good enough biblical scholar and decided to write Paul’s story as a novel.

  “He was invincible,” Cash later wrote about his subject. “He made it his life’s mission to conquer and convert the idolatrous, pagan world over to Jesus Christ. And he did everything he planned that he lived long enough to do. He smiled at his persecutions. He was beaten with rods, with the lash, with stones; he was insulted, attacked by mobs, and imprisoned; his own people hated him. Yet he said, because of Jesus Christ, he had learned to be content in whatever state he was!”

  II

  Hearing about Cash’s recording hiatus, Larry Butler felt that his friend could use some help in the studio. An easygoing guy, Butler had recovered from the frustration of not being paid normal producer rates for his work with Cash. (He claimed he was underpaid by a “low six figure” amount.) He genuinely liked Cash, and he was looking for a challenge.

  In their time apart, Butler had taken over as head of the Nashville division of United Artists, where he signed Crystal Gayle and Dottie West, before starting his own production company. His biggest coup was getting Kenny Rogers to sign with UA and concentrate on country music after his modest success with the pop-rock group the First Edition. Like so many of the top male country stars, Rogers, who was six years younger than Cash, didn’t write songs. But Butler didn’t see that as an issue; he’d find hits for the Texan.

  Butler’s faith in Rogers paid off in the early months of 1977 with Rogers’s version of “Lucille,” a devilishly catchy Roger Bowling–Hal Bynum barroom tale about a hardworking family man pining for a woman who’s walked out on him and their kids at an already low point in their lives. The single went to number one on the country charts and number four on the pop charts, but those numbers don’t begin to reflect its impact. It seemed as if country and pop radio stations were playing “Lucille” nonstop, thanks to the sentimental story and an infectious chorus that was hard to shake.