“David Green made it all sound so perfect,” Stielper says. “John and June could come off the road—a lot of expenses saved—and settle into Branson, in his own theater, where the people would come to him. At that point in his life—the Mercury relationship was dead, he was hemorrhaging money—it was too good to be true. And it was.”
With the opening of the theater set for spring of 1992, Cash continued to tour steadily in 1991. He spent most of May in Australia with The Highwaymen, then a week in June with the group in Las Vegas. After more than fifty shows on his own, including some in Europe, he re-teamed with The Highwaymen in November in the States. The only recording was for a Christmas album, which was released by Delta Records after Mercury passed. He and June spent the holidays in Jamaica, where he enjoyed many fun-filled hours on the golf course driving range—not swinging a club but driving a golf cart around at high speed while John Rollins’s son Ted leaned out of the cart and tried to grab golf balls off the ground. “It was best played when the driving range was active,” Rollins says. “We called the game ‘ball busters,’ and we both thought it should be an Olympic sport.”
II
Cash welcomed in 1992 with another major award. In an emotional ceremony on January 15 at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York City, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Introducing Cash, Lyle Lovett praised his music for helping show the world what happens when “rural sensibilities and values mix with an urban environment.”
For his part, Cash was on edge. He had never considered himself a true rock ’n’ roller, and he worried that performers who were closer to the rock tradition would resent his inclusion. Indeed, there was some public questioning of Cash’s credentials—enough for music journalist Karen Schoemer to write a stirring defense in the New York Times: “Mr. Cash’s voice has a somber, bracing dignity that seems willing to bend or flinch for no one. His songs take their imagery from American mythos: train wheels, state lines, prison walls, barroom brawls, cotton fields, rivers and floods as great as those that swept the Bible. His characters…live by a rigid code of ethics that harks back to the Old West, yet Mr. Cash gives them all a resonance that speaks to the rebellious spirit rock cherishes so dearly. Man in Black, outlaw of justice, friend to the downtrodden, Mr. Cash has always been poised on the cusp between right and wrong, shadow and light; he walks the line between country sincerity and rock and roll autonomy.”
To his relief, Cash found none of that questioning among the musicians and guests at the ceremony. He was touched by the warmth backstage of such major players as Keith Richards, John Fogerty, and record producer Phil Spector. Cash had spent the previous night working on a speech but ended up speaking extemporaneously. Rather than reflect on his own accomplishments, he thanked people who had helped him—especially Sam Phillips and Jack Clement. But he devoted most of his time, his voice quivering with emotion in places, expressing gratitude to the artists who had influenced him, country figures such as Hank Williams and the Carter Family, as well as blues and gospel artists, notably Sister Rosetta Tharpe. He also praised Alan Lomax’s field recordings in the 1930s and 1940s, saying, “I listened to those by the hour and by the day, and the week, and the month.”
On the day after the ceremony, Cash relaxed in his hotel suite, taking phone calls from well-wishers, including Bob Dylan, and joking with family members, including Rosanne, whose favorite moment was when her father joined a line of celebrated rock guitarists on a freewheeling version of Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.”
“That was the most psychedelic experience of my life,” Rosanne said, laughing so hard that she doubled up in the chair. “I mean, I’m the kid who wore a black armband to school the day Hendrix died…so the last thing I ever thought I would see was my daddy on a stage playing acoustic guitar on ‘Purple Haze.’”
Cash laughed along. “I got the biggest kick out of it [the jam] when Keith Richards saw that I was watching Fogerty to get the keys we were supposed to be playing and Keith leaned over and said, ‘Thank God you’re watching him, because I sure don’t know what the hell I’m doing either.’
“But you know what really blew me away? I was standing at the urinal in the rest room before the dinner and I heard this voice behind me singing ‘Loading Coal,’ which is probably one of the most obscure songs I ever recorded [from the Ride This Train album]. I wondered who in the world could be singing that song, and when I looked around, I saw Keith, and he had this big smile on his face. So I turned around and we sang the chorus together. That’s when I guess I knew everything was going to be okay.”
This was one time when Cash was not making up a story. Keith Richards once described himself as a Johnny Cash freak—to the point of paying him this remarkable compliment: “As far as early rock ’n’ roll goes, if someone came up to me and for some reason they could only get a collection of one person’s music, I’d say ‘Chuck Berry is important, but, man, you’ve got to get the Cash.’”
Cash was only a month away from turning sixty, but he was feeling briefly renewed. After two nights performing at the Trump Castle Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, he and June headed back to Israel to film an Easter TV special for the Nashville Network. When the cable channel eventually passed on the project, Cash and aides redesigned the footage into a forty-five-minute home video titled Return to the Promised Land, which was released in the fall of 1993 by Billy Graham’s World Wide Pictures. It was finally time for Branson.
Most of the complex in Branson was still in the early stages of construction, but the Johnny Cash Theater itself was scheduled to open on May 15, even though it looked far from finished when Cash did a national TV interview early that month with Larry King. Cash had been increasingly dubious about the project as he learned of various setbacks in construction. Still, he was prepared to fulfill his contract.
Under his deal with Green, Cash would perform ninety-four dates between May and December, sometimes a matinee as well as an evening show. He was guaranteed $30,000 per day and 35 percent of box office grosses if receipts totaled $65,000 for the day. The main lure continued to be the break from highways and airports. Cash planned to be joined onstage in Branson by June, the Carter Family, John Carter Cash, and a four-piece band that included W. S. Holland.
Because Cash wouldn’t be appearing there full-time, Green asked Lou Robin to book some other acts to fill in the vacant nights. Among those Robin signed were Wayne Newton, who had been a huge draw for years in Las Vegas and was a real coup for upstart Branson, as well as magician David Copperfield, rock veterans the Everly Brothers, and such country stars as Eddie Rabbitt and Crystal Gayle. But it was all for nothing. The theater wasn’t ready by May 15 or July 15. In August, Green threw in the towel and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
The news jolted Cash. He worried that his reputation would take another hit, because many people in Nashville, not realizing he hadn’t actually invested in the project, would see Cash Country as his failure. He also felt bad for the workmen and suppliers who hadn’t been fully paid. Even before the official bankruptcy, Cash was angry—doubly so because he had been seduced into what he had come to see as a demeaning career move. In a May 30 letter to Marty Stuart, he took a slap at the pandering entertainers and undemanding audiences he saw in the tourist center: “If he (or she) is an entertainer each show should be opened with the line—‘Good evening. Elvis will be out a little later.’”
With his plans suddenly up in the air, Cash headed to New York in mid-October to appear on Late Night with David Letterman and then pay tribute to Bob Dylan during a televised thirtieth-anniversary salute to the singer before sixteen thousand people at Madison Square Garden. During the show, whose cast also included Tom Petty, Eric Clapton, and Dylan, John and June sang “It Ain’t Me, Babe” to a warm response.
Then, unexpectedly, Branson came calling for a second time. A federal bankruptcy judge approved Green’s $4.1 million sale of the property in November to Branson-based developers, who announced they hoped to be
gin hosting shows at the theater the following spring. Jim Thomas, one of the new buyers, had doubted that Cash would want to perform at the theater because of his hard feelings from the Cash Country experience. But he was wrong. Cash still needed the money, and his body was pleading for a break from the road. As Cash continued to tour on his own and with The Highwaymen, Lou Robin worked out a deal for him to play the newly renamed venue which was now set to open in the spring of 1993: the Wayne Newton Theatre.
What proved to be the most important thirty-day stretch in Cash’s career since Folsom began in early February 1993 with an encounter in Dublin with the Irish band U2 and ended with his meeting an admiring record producer in California.
Cash had first met Bono in the late 1980s when Jack Clement brought Bono and bassist Adam Clayton by Cash’s house for dinner. In most cases when Cash met with admiring young rock musicians, including the Beatles in San Francisco in the 1960s, the visits were pleasant, but little more than that. It was different with U2, especially the group’s young lead singer. A bit like Cash himself, Bono was at once respectful and rebellious.
Cash had liked the way this articulate and entertaining young man was interested not just in music but in history and spirituality. Cash ended up talking about Saint Paul with Bono that night at dinner and gave him a signed copy of Man in White. The pair even tried writing a song together, titled “Ellis Island,” though they never finished it. Cash enjoyed it when Bono good-naturedly challenged his claim that he was descended from Scottish royalty, insisting instead that Cash was Irish. Recalling the meeting years later, Bono says, “I told him there was this large Cash family in Ireland and they all looked exactly like him.”
The Irishman’s favorite moment came at dinner. “We were all holding hands around the table and Johnny said the most beautiful, most poetic grace you’ve ever heard. Then he leaned over to me with this devilish look in his eye and said, ‘But I sure miss the drugs.’ It was that contradiction that I admired about his music as well. It was hard and it was caring, it was about sinful behavior and devotion.”
Bono and Clayton had such a great time that the band paid homage to Cash in their Rattle and Hum album package with a huge photo of them in the Sun studio just beneath a framed photo of Phillips and Cash.
In the early weeks of 1993, Bono was working on a song, originally called “The Pilgrim,” for the band’s upcoming Zooropa album. The narrative was inspired by a character in the Book of Ecclesiastes—specifically a sinner’s lonely, tortured search for wisdom and faith. To freshen the story, Bono gave it a futuristic spin. The band had the melody down, but Bono wasn’t pleased with the words or his vocal. When he heard about Cash’s upcoming concert date in Dublin, he realized the song would be perfect for Cash. Changing the title to “The Wanderlust” and then “The Wanderer,” Bono wrote the final version of the tune with Cash in mind.
On the day of Cash’s Dublin show in February, Bono invited him to join U2 in the studio to record the song. He was flattered but anxious. It had been three years since he’d had a meaningful solo recording session, and here he was with the biggest rock band in the world. To make him even more unsettled, the band’s swirling, highly layered techno-ish sound was a long way from boom-chicka-boom. Was he really right for this song? Was the band just trying to be nice and help him gain some attention?
As soon as Cash read the lyrics, however, he began to feel at ease. Talking about the song later, he said, “It’s the search for three important things: God, that woman, and myself.” He delivered each line with a conviction and empathy that rivaled his performance on “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down.” These weren’t his words, but they were his story:
I went out walking through streets paved with gold
Lifted some stones, saw the skin and bones
Of a city without a soul
I went out walking under an atomic sky
Where the ground won’t turn and the rain it burns
Like the tears when I said goodbye.
Yeah, I went with nothing, nothing but the thought of you.
I went wandering.
I went drifting through the capitals of tin
Where men can’t walk or freely talk
And sons turn their fathers in.
I stopped outside a church house
Where the citizens like to sit.
They say they want the kingdom
But they don’t want God in it.
I went out riding down that old eight-lane
I passed by a thousand signs looking for my own name.
I went with nothing but the thought you’d be there too
Looking for you.
I went out there in search of experience
To taste and to touch and to feel as much
As a man can before he repents.
I went out searching, looking for one good man
A spirit who would not bend or break
Who would sit at his father’s right hand.
I went out walking with a bible and a gun
The word of God lay heavy on my heart
I was sure I was the one.
Now Jesus, don’t you wait up, Jesus, I’ll be home soon.
Yeah, I went out for the papers, told her I’d be back by noon.
Yeah, I left with nothing but the thought you’d be there too
Looking for you.
Yeah I went with nothing, nothing but the thought of you.
I went wandering.
Bono has frequently said there’s a moment during the band’s best nights onstage when the feeling in the venue is so joyful that it’s as if God is walking through the room. Bono and Cash both felt that spirit during this session.
“To me, Johnny Cash—with all his contradictions—was a quintessential character of the scriptures, or at least the characters in the Bible that interested me,” Bono says. “I remember at Trinity College [in Dublin] when someone put out a pamphlet pointing out how flawed all the people in the Bible were….David was an adulterer, Moses was a murderer, Jacob was a cheater. These were some wild blokes. Well, one day someone put out the same pamphlet, but wrote on it something like ‘That’s why I’m a believer. If God had time for these flawed characters, then God has time for me.’ And I think Johnny and I shared that view.”
At the Dublin concert, Cash brought Bono, The Edge, and Larry Mullen on stage that night to sing “Big River” with him.
Despite the excitement of the session, Cash left Dublin in much the same melancholy mood that followed the Grammy Award ceremony. The brilliance of the song made him feel all the more uncertain about his place in the music world. He couldn’t even imagine U2 actually putting the track on the album, and he thought about calling Bono to say he’d understand if the band wanted to redo it with Bono’s voice. But Bono beat him to the punch. He called to assure Cash that the song was going to be on the album. “I felt like it was a real connection, a very spiritual thing,” Cash said of his work with U2. “These guys are really spiritual people. I also loved the way they reached millions of people with their message.”
Heading back to the States, Cash tried to prepare mentally for what he expected to be the last chapter of his musical career: his Branson debut in May. But first he had some more tour dates, starting with a couple of routine club stops in California—the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco on February 26 and the Rhythm Café in Santa Ana the following day. For someone used to playing 18,000-seat arenas in both regions, the size of the clubs—about 550 seats each—was too significant to ignore. But Santa Ana was where he met Rick Rubin.
Chapter 32
Rick Rubin
I
THE ONLY CHILD OF AN upper-middle-class family from Long Island, New York, Rick Rubin grew up on hard rock and punk, but his entry into the record business was via hip-hop, a genre he became obsessed with while a pre-med student at New York University in the late 1970s. He especially loved the way DJs in clubs came up with dynamic sounds by “scratching”—rapidly twi
sting and turning vinyl recordings on spinning turntables. When he noticed that rap recordings lacked that club energy because producers used real musicians instead of turntable DJs, Rubin began making records in his NYU dorm room employing “scratching” and other bits of turntable wizardry. The difference was immense.
After gaining attention around New York City when the first record he produced was a huge club hit, he teamed with a bright young entrepreneur named Russell Simmons to start Def Jam Recordings, which they would build into the Motown of hip-hop. At Def Jam, Rubin produced such hit acts as the socially conscious Public Enemy and rap ’n’ punk rockers the Beastie Boys. In the early 1990s, wanting to expand his musical terrain, he moved to Los Angeles, where he won even more success and acclaim working with rock and heavy-metal acts, including the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Slayer, and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. By his late twenties he was being hailed as his generation’s Phil Spector.
The path to Cash grew out of a desire to set new challenges for himself. Instead of working just with youngish rockers, he wanted to connect with someone who was “great and important, but who wasn’t doing their best work. I wanted to see if I could help them do great work again.”
Cash was skeptical when Lou Robin told him a rap producer wanted to make a record with him, but he figured, what the heck. He invited Rubin to come to the show at the Rhythm Café, about an hour’s drive south of L.A. When the burly young man with the long, unruly beard and gentle, Zen-like manner walked into the dressing room, Cash didn’t know what to make of him. Cash later described his first impression of Rubin as “the ultimate hippie, bald on top, but with hair down over his shoulders, a beard that looked as if it had never been trimmed and clothes that would have done a wino proud.”
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