Johnny Cash: The Life

by Robert Hilburn

  As the weeks went on, Butler kept thinking that “Lucille,” with its underdog viewpoint and unchecked emotion, would have been a good choice for Cash. “It was what country music storytelling was all about,” Butler said. “I don’t know if his version would have been as big as Kenny’s, but it made me think about John, and so I just called him. I thought maybe I could find another big song for him. He was as nice as could be on the phone. It was as if nothing had ever happened. We decided that day to get back together.”

  Four weeks after Elvis’s death, Cash and Butler began work on a new album in Nashville. The material was a mix of Cash songs and tunes Butler had found. The producer sympathized with Cash’s decline on the charts. “With some artists, all they want to talk about is ‘Will this song be a hit?’ They’d record anything if they thought it would sell,” Butler said. “But John wasn’t like that. His writing was a little off by this time, but he still was not one to jump on a bandwagon with a bunch of people because this would give you a number-one record. If he didn’t believe in something…he wouldn’t do it—and that’s what I loved about him.”

  During this period Butler realized that Cash’s creative instincts were being drained by his hectic schedule.

  “I could see that John was getting worn down by all the touring and other obligations,” Butler recalled. “I’m sure he would rather have spent the time working on his songwriting, but that’s a star’s life, and maybe after all these years, he didn’t have that much to say as a writer. It happens to everyone at some point. The question is whether you can ever regain that touch, and I’m sure John spent a lot of time thinking about that.”

  Butler noticed a difference between Cash’s attitude toward his own songs on the new album and the pair’s early albums together. “Before, he would come in with his songs and get right to work on them,” he said. “Now, it was more like, ‘Here’s something I wrote. What do you think?’ The desire was there, but some of the confidence was gone.”

  By most standards, I Would Like to See You Again was one of Cash’s best albums of the 1970s—in a class with Hello, I’m Johnny Cash and The Last Gunfighter Ballad, and probably more overtly commercial than either. The high points included the title song as well as “There Ain’t No Good Chain Gang,” an explosive, outlaw-rich duet with Waylon Jennings, and “Who Is Gene Autry,” a song Cash wrote to explain to his son his childhood love for Autry and other cowboy movie stars. Cash sounded as if he was enjoying himself again in the studio.

  Butler knew from the moment he finished the “Chain Gang” track that the song was going to be the first single from the album. In his eagerness for a hit, however, he put too much radio-friendly embroidery on the title track to make it feel like vintage Cash.

  Cash devoted most of November to shows in Europe and the Midwest before filming Thaddeus Rose and Eddie, a TV buddy movie for CBS co-starring Bo Hopkins and featuring June and Diane Ladd. In an Associated Press review that ran when the film aired the following February, Jerry Buck urged viewers not to miss it. Calling it a “diamond in the rough,” Buck said the film “will remind you of ‘Marty,’ brought up to date and set down in Texas.”

  This gave the Cashes much to look forward to as they headed to Jamaica in December. John Carter was nearing seven, and he remembers his father on those mostly carefree days at Cinnamon Hill. “He would do a lot of writing down there,” Cash’s son recalls. “He would get up, have breakfast, and then go out on the back porch, and he would either write or he would just spend time in prayer. After that he’d rest for a while or go off and spend time outdoors. Then he wrote again at night. He loved writing, whether it was a song or a story or just thoughts about his life or his faith.”

  Cash was in Las Vegas at a Billy Graham Crusade when the new single was released the first week in February. Feedback from radio was quick and positive: the “Chain Gang” single had entered the Billboard country charts. It would eventually climb to number twelve, his best showing—aside from the gimmicky “One Piece at a Time”—since “Any Old Wind That Blows” in 1972. The album followed early in April, and while sales were promising, they weren’t spectacular. “Even if it didn’t do all that we wanted, I think it caused a lot of good buzz among radio programmers and around Nashville,” Butler said. “I’d like to think it sort of made John viable again, which meant we were in perfect shape to make another advance with the next album. John went off to Europe on tour and I started looking for some more songs.”

  Cash enjoyed playing before new audiences, and Lou Robin was always looking to brighten the itinerary. His coup on the April 1978 European swing was to book a series of concerts in Prague, where Cash recorded a live album—a retrospective of sorts featuring such favorites as “Big River,” “Ring of Fire,” and “I Still Miss Someone.” The album was released to good response in Czechoslovakia and throughout Europe.

  While Cash then toured the States during May, Butler kept looking for material, but it was tricky because he was also looking for songs for Kenny Rogers, who’d just scored his third number-one country single. If he found a great song, which one would he give it to? Butler was faced with that dilemma when he heard Don Schlitz’s song “The Gambler,” a very catchy number about lessons in life. If Butler hadn’t been working with Rogers, he might have thought of Cash. But either because he felt that Rogers’s voice fit the song better or simply because Rogers was the hotter artist, Butler recorded the song with him, and he loved the result—only to learn that higher-ups at United Artists were cool toward it. “I told several people at UA that this could be a major record for Kenny,” said Butler, “but they didn’t agree with me and I took it to John.” Cash had already recorded a few tracks for the new album before going into the studio with Butler on July 6, 1978, to record “The Gambler.” Butler was surprised by two things. First, Cash was spacey during the session, and second, he showed no interest in the Schlitz song. Marshall Grant later pointed to that session as the moment when Cash’s pill use again became alarming. “He had been keeping things pretty much under control,” said Grant, “but he just seemed to cave in.”

  Everyone in the studio thought “The Gambler” sounded more like a hit than anything they had recorded in ages, but Cash had trouble getting it on tape. “He kept going into the bathroom, and every time he’d come out, he would be a little higher,” Grant recalled. Finally, Cash uncharacteristically started arguing with Butler about the song and the arrangement. Given Cash’s dislike of the song, Butler quickly sent word to UA that he had also recorded the song with Cash, implying that the label had better hurry up and release the Rogers version before Cash could have a hit with it.

  While UA weighed the future of “The Gambler,” Butler continued to work with Cash through August on their album, Cash’s mood shifting greatly from session to session. It was around this time that Jack Clement gave Cash a song, “Gone Girl,” which Cash wanted to use as the title song of the album.

  Cash felt safe and entertained when he was around his old Sun friend. He also felt that Jack had good karma. He seemed to be reaching for that karma when Clement played the same guitar on “Gone Girl” that he’d used on “Big River.” While some tracks turned out well, especially a version of the Rolling Stones’ “No Expectations” and Cash’s own “I Will Rock and Roll with You,” it wasn’t enough. Many of Cash’s vocals sounded listless and tired, leaving the tracks flat. The most obvious example is “The Gambler,” which offered none of the carny salesmanship of Kenny Rogers’s version.

  Caught under Clement’s spell, Cash wanted “Gone Girl” to be the first single and then be followed at some point with “I Will Rock and Roll with You.” There was no sign that he was counting on “The Gambler” as a single.

  But Cash was angered when Rogers released “The Gambler” and it started streaking up the charts.

  John felt that Butler had sold him out, according to Robin. “Once he recorded the song with John, Butler shouldn’t have let UA release the Rogers record. That’s the ag
reement you have in the studio. If Kenny was going to release it, there’s no reason Butler should have even brought it to John.”

  “I was the culprit,” Butler acknowledges. “I was the bad guy with John, but I believed in the song. Kenny did want to put it out.”

  Meanwhile, for all Cash’s faith in “Gone Girl,” the single went only to number forty-four on the country charts. “I Will Rock and Roll with You” did a little better, but that was nothing next to “The Gambler,” which won a Grammy for Rogers as country song of the year.

  The touring schedule was especially intense following the “Gone Girl” sessions, with Cash sometimes doing two shows a day to pick up extra money. Oddly, he did little to curb his expensive lifestyle. At one point during the “Gone Girl” sessions, he decided to take everybody in the band and their wives to Israel so they could visit the Holy Land—and he wanted all thirty or so people to fly first class and stay in the best hotels.

  “On one hand, he was out there working as much as he could to meet his large payroll,” said Marshall Grant. “On the other, he was spending more money—even if it was out of the goodness of his heart.”

  It was a pattern of spending and giving that John Carter saw often as a teenager.

  “My parents were always big spenders,” he once remarked, pointing to the time when his mother paid $12,000 for a leather handbag in an exclusive New York City shop. Each of their vacation homes—from the New York apartment to the estate in Jamaica—was filled with “massive pieces of furniture, side tables, dressers, and cabinets, each overloaded with Mom’s things. She owned more sets of fine china than most people could use in a lifetime.” June also loved collecting rarities and antiques. “She had hundreds of pieces of Wedgwood crystal and various patterns of Spode china, antique Chinese pottery, and hand-painted and unique stoneware.”

  At the same time, he added, they were never slow to give—from their pocketbooks or their hearts.

  “On a New York street, I was with Mom when a homeless lady asked for money….[June] reached into her pocketbook and pulled out a $100 bill….She was always giving spontaneously, and she gave most of all to her family.”

  Cash appreciated expensive things, but he would have been happy in the quiet of the farm or the Port Richey house. June was the one who wanted the finer things—and John felt she deserved them. Besides, it wasn’t the luxuries that caused Cash to struggle with finances much of his life; it was the large payroll. From the final “Gone Girl” session on August 29 to the end of the year, he did thirty shows in nineteen cities, and there would have been more except for the break he took to tape another Christmas TV special—and the week of cancellations after the death of Maybelle Carter on October 23.

  Death seemed to be all around him—from Elvis to Glen Sherley to Eck, and now Maybelle, whom he had come to depend on as much as his own mother. As he headed into the final weeks of the year, Cash was at his lowest emotional point, career-wise, since the 1960s.

  In the brief amount of time he did have at home, he spent a lot of it with his mother and speaking on the phone with Billy Graham. Cash had given his life to Christ, and he tried to spread the word in his music.

  What had he done wrong?

  Chapter 27

  The Pills Return and All Hell Breaks Loose

  I

  JOHN CARTER CASH KNEW ABOUT PILLS. One of his earliest memories on tour was the medicine bag that his mother carried from town to town. “My mother and aunts had enough over-the-counter and prescription pills to fix any given ailment,” he said. “Everyone’s big black bag was filled to the top, hard to close because of the plethora of bottles crammed inside. It was a standing joke about the road group: everyone was always looking for the perfect pill, the one that would fix everything at once.”

  Carlene agreed, calling the medicine bag an old Carter Family tradition. “When I began to travel, I got myself one. Everyone had a pill to mend everything. If you were constipated, there was a pill for that. If you were in pain, there was a pill for that. Long drive? Sleepy? There was a pill in the medicine bag to keep you awake. Exhausted and still couldn’t sleep? There was a pill for that, too.”

  Like almost everyone in country music, June took her share of pep pills in the 1950s and 1960s, but no one paid much attention—especially in contrast to the rampaging Cash. Well, almost no one. In her memoir, Vivian Cash wrote that her daughters found June’s actions strange during their early visits to Hendersonville. “They described her as arriving at the breakfast table, incoherent and confused, eyebrow pencil scrawled over her forehead, and clearly not ‘right.’ And as the years went by, they would tell me of June passing out or fainting from taking too many pills…or saying things that didn’t make sense—like the time she was certain she had zebras in her head. The girls would come home and laugh about it, but it wasn’t funny to me.”

  Whatever June’s pill intake was in the 1960s, it pretty much dwindled to nothing, along with John’s, in the early 1970s. As June approached fifty, however, she felt old and “busted down.” Despite being enough of a realist to know that nothing is guaranteed, she still couldn’t help believe that her and John’s blessings—highest among them John Carter and their devotion to Christ—wouldn’t give them at least a few years of peace. She had fought so hard and so long to provide a future for her two daughters and to keep John healthy and content.

  Just when it looked as if everything was comfortably in place, June realized that John had fallen back into bad habits—not just pills but also, she suspected, infidelity. Unlike in the 1960s, when she’d gone to war over his drug use, she was more cautious this time. She, too, began increasingly to reach into her medicine bag for pills to calm her. When Marshall Grant and Lou Robin came to her for help in getting John straight, June remembered the explosive breakups and long periods of separation in the 1960s and realized that she couldn’t stand that kind of pain again. For better or worse—and she put it in exactly those terms at times—she was still Mrs. Johnny Cash. She didn’t want to risk losing her family and her identity.

  When times seemed darkest, John and June found a shared strength in their faith, especially when they would appear in the Billy Graham Crusades and at concerts sponsored by other evangelical figures. It wasn’t surprising, then, in the closing weeks of 1978 that Cash thought it was time to do another gospel album. It would be his most ambitious album since The Gospel Road.

  Cash was sensitive to the complaints that he wasn’t simply singing gospel music, like other country music stars, but was alienating part of his audience by aggressively proselytizing.

  “All I was trying to do in those records was express my faith in the hope it might provide inspiration to others,” Cash said late in his life. “God looked through a lot of sins to find the goodness in my heart and he could do the same for others. If someone was looking for hope, I was trying to offer it. I never meant to say to anyone that my way was right and their way was wrong. That was not my role.”

  In a letter to Rosanne at the time, he spoke about his declining popularity, but voiced no regrets. “I did a lot of things in the last few years that turned a lot of my country fans off. But I expected it. (1) I wrote a book (and I’m writing another one). (2) We made a movie. (3) I made public professions of faith in God thru Jesus Christ. Boy, that one really turned a lot of people off, which thrills me to death. (You aren’t a good Christian unless you suffer.)”

  As he imagined it, the new album would be another two-record set of spiritual songs, and he’d bring together June, Anita, Helen, and Rosanne, plus his old standby Jack Clement. He knew Columbia might balk, so he wasn’t thrown off stride when the label showed no interest. He had another plan ready.

  “We asked Columbia if they would let him record it for another label, and the company had no objection—as long as it didn’t interfere with John giving them another, non-gospel album soon,” Lou Robin says. “That’s when we signed a small deal with a new label in town, Cachet.”

  To make sur
e no one would think he was leaving Columbia, Cash quickly announced that he was set to begin recording another Columbia album in February—an album that would mark Cash’s twenty-fifth anniversary in the music business. Hence the title, Silver.

  Knowing that he would be concentrating on the gospel album, he needed a strong producer to work with him on the Silver collection, and he turned to Brian Ahern, who had produced several of Emmylou Harris’s excellent early albums. Cash knew that Ahern, who also worked with Anne Murray and had a reputation as notoriously independent, was no label stooge. He could count on Ahern to represent him at meetings with the label. Cash hated business meetings—and he understood that any meeting with a record company executive was business. “I’d sit through those meetings and I’d forget I was even in the music business. I felt I was in the selling business.”

  He specifically never wanted to sit through another meeting like the one in the early 1970s when he was focusing on gospel music. As he related the story, a label exec told Cash he should “stop going to church and go back to prisons.” It may have been a joke, but Cash never forgot.

  The gospel album became even more poignant and personal for him when Sara Carter, the last surviving member of the original Carter Family, died on January 8 at her home in Northern California. She was eighty.