Johnny Cash: The Life

by Robert Hilburn

  Four weeks after the release of American Recordings, Cash was back in Branson, where things were worse than ever. After a bitter public dispute—and subsequent lawsuit—with Wayne Newton, the developers stripped Newton’s name from the theater and announced plans to sell it. Until a buyer was found, the owners would continue presenting shows, including Cash, in the renamed Shenandoah South Theatre. The problem, Lou Robin says, was that the owners didn’t aggressively promote the shows or court the all-important tour bus group business.

  By the second engagement, which ran July 26 to August 13, Cash was doing matinee performances in the 2,500-seat theater for as few as 181 customers and evening shows for fewer than 300. The total attendance for the first week was 3,838. It didn’t help that Cash’s health was continuing to decline. He’d spend much of his day in bed, trying to save his strength for the shows.

  Still, there were special moments—including a return to Carnegie Hall on September 14, where Rosanne joined him onstage for a duet of “I Still Miss Someone.” It was a moment of healing for both of them, a break from the years of guilt on his part and resentment on hers. “As we sang together,” Rosanne said later, “all the old pain dissolved and the old longing to connect was completely satisfied under the lights and the safety of a few thousand people who loved us, thus achieving something I’d been trying to get since I was six years old. It was truly magic for both of us.”

  On that high note, Cash was soon in San Francisco, where he headlined at one of the nation’s most important rock showcases, the Fillmore West. Then it was back to Branson on October 6 for another unbearable ten days. Later in the month Cash taped his second guest appearance on the network TV drama Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, the story of a female doctor in the post–Civil War West; the Cashes would become close friends with Jane Seymour, the show’s star, and her husband, James Keach. While gathering information about Cash’s life for a film he wanted to make, Keach developed a strong point of view regarding his subject. “I think most artists suffer,” he says. “They feel ‘less than’ in some way or another. That’s what their writing is all about; they’re searching. John was a very shy, humble man who was searching for God and himself.”

  Cash also performed with Billy Graham at a Crusade in Atlanta and met up with The Highwaymen in Los Angeles to begin work on the group’s third album. Although the second album hadn’t done as well as the first, the group continued to do occasional tours, and they wanted a new album to promote those dates. After a week of recording, Cash headed back to Branson for the last time.

  Cash’s final Shenandoah South gig was supposed to have run from November 10 until December 8, except for a few days off, but he walked offstage for the last time Saturday night, November 19. He couldn’t take it anymore. He told Robin to cancel the rest of the engagement. “I have no plans to come back at all,” he said two days later in an interview with a Springfield, Missouri, newspaper.

  That Branson show turned out to be Cash’s final concert performance anywhere for the year. He wanted to relax and to think about what was closer to his heart: the songs for his next album. He got added stimulus when American Recordings was honored as the best contemporary folk album of the year at the Grammy ceremony on March 1, 1995, especially on a night when his old friend Dylan’s World Gone Wrong was voted the best traditional folk album. He liked the company he was keeping again.

  The truth, however, is that the Grammy was less important to him than seeing his son’s friends all of a sudden growing more interested in him. That was a big deal. Says Rubin, “that’s what really excited him. He felt like an artist again.”

  II

  There was never a doubt that Cash and Rubin would do a follow-up album, but they did need to deal with the question of format. With the success of the debut CD, the conventional choice would have been to come back quickly with another collection in the same solo acoustic style. Cash certainly had a world of fruitful material to draw from. One thing that impressed Rubin and Petty was Cash’s extraordinary knowledge of songs in various genres, from country and blues to gospel and folk. It reminded Petty of the equally astounding musical knowledge of another legendary music figure he worked with extensively in the late 1980s: Bob Dylan.

  “They both know hundreds of songs,” Petty says. “If you’re sitting around picking or playing music for fun, they will go through tunes as far back as sea chanteys and Scottish folk songs and hymns and deep into the blues. It just boggled my mind how many songs each of them could play at will. I can only imagine what it was like when they got together. Bob and I had many talks about how much he looked up to Johnny, how he felt he was the genuine article. That might have been where I really got into John’s Sun stuff. Bob just loved it. The same with Johnny. He adored Bob. It really was like they were brothers or something.”

  Rubin, however, didn’t want another acoustic album. He envisioned John working with a band this time, and Cash was all for it. He even had a band in mind: “How about Tom’s band?” Rubin called Petty, but he didn’t want just Tom’s band, the Heartbreakers. He also wanted Tom, not only for his musicianship, but for his spirit; he knew how much Cash liked him.

  “Rick calls me at home and said he’s going to make an electric record with Johnny and that Johnny wants to use my band,” Petty says. “Rick also wanted me to play bass because Howie [Heartbreaker bassist Howie Epstein, who had been going with June’s daughter Carlene for years] was not in great condition. I said, ‘When do we start?’”

  When work on the second album began in Los Angeles, Rubin noticed two major changes in Cash. “The great thing was John’s confidence was back,” Rubin says. “He was full of ideas. But I also noticed he was beginning to have some serious health issues. I had seen an occasional hint of it before, but it was far more apparent on the second album. There were times when he just had to stop recording and take a rest. I could see something was wrong.” One mounting problem, especially troublesome for a singer, was asthma.

  “John’s health problems did accelerate, and [it] probably seemed to Rick that it all happened at once, but the damaged facial nerve was excruciating from 1995 on, and the pain was constant,” says Mark Stielper. “He could barely exist, which just makes the work he produced so much more compelling,”

  Marty Stuart was also struck by Cash’s fragile state. Ever since his move into a solo career and subsequent divorce from Cindy in 1988, Stuart hadn’t seen much of Cash, but the rapport was still strong when they met, quite by surprise, on a flight to Los Angeles. By the time the plane landed, Cash had enlisted Stuart to play on the Rubin sessions. Stuart loved the first album—“It was pretty brilliant…the whole idea of a boy and his guitar sitting there, the right choice of songs”—but he wasn’t totally surprised by the album’s quality. He always believed that Cash could someday reclaim his early greatness.

  “The guy I saw in the Rubin sessions was a guy who was given a second chance, or maybe the third chance in his career, and he recognized the moment and took advantage of it,” he says. “His artistry was firing again. But I also saw old age and sickness finding its mark and putting a cloud over the proceedings, and it broke my heart. Some days were better than others at the session. I know he was using the pills again, but I would have taken whatever I needed, too, to reduce the pain. He was pretty good most of the time at covering it up, but there were times when he just couldn’t go any more, and he’d say, ‘I’ll deal with this tomorrow.’”

  Even after they agreed on the concept for the second album, Cash figured he and Rubin would revisit some of the many songs they had left over from the earlier sessions, but Rubin wanted to start fresh.

  “Johnny liked the first album when we finished it, but I don’t think he was convinced that anyone else would care,” Rubin says. “But the reaction to him—again from young people, especially—brought a new excitement as we went into the second record, and I wanted to use that excitement to come up with new ideas. I figured the material left over from the first album wo
uld eventually find its way into an album, but not yet.

  “My goal was still to get him to be the best artist he could be again, to make him believe that we were going to make the best album he had ever made. That was a mind-blowing idea to him because he really believed his Sun Records and the early Columbia albums were his best work, that nothing came close to that. I kept saying, ‘Okay, but let’s do something better than that. That was a hard hurdle to get over. It took time, but I think he eventually did start believing in it.”

  Before the first session, the pair exchanged notes and tapes for weeks while searching for new tunes, and they had a bevy of choices. Petty had observed their enthusiasm for finding songs during the making of the first album. Rubin and Petty went out to dinner one night with Cash, and he played old Hank Williams radio broadcasts while they were in the car. “Johnny would go on and on about how much he loved this song or that one and Rick kept saying, ‘Write it down, write it down,’ so they wouldn’t forget to try it.”

  By the time the sessions started, Cash and Rubin had a pretty good idea of what numbers they wanted to record. “Some songs were obvious, but the more we did together, the more I realized what a great interpreter Johnny was, and I looked for things that would be a real stretch,” Rubin says. Though Cash’s own suggestions had been the heart of the first album, he was eager for more of Rubin’s suggestions. During that first session Cash smiled and told Petty, “I want to make a record that will offend Johnny Cash fans.”

  Once Cash and Rubin agreed on a song, they’d play a recording of it for the musicians. Then the musicians would gather in a circle and work for a half hour or so on an arrangement, with Cash singing along. Then they’d begin recording, usually wrapping up the song within two or three takes.

  “Those were wonderful sessions,” Petty says. “Everything was so loose and natural. If I happened to be fooling around on the organ, Rick might hear something and say, ‘Keep doing that on the next song.’ That even happened when we played this old country song, ‘Kneeling Drunkard’s Plea.’ I barely know how to play the organ, but Rick liked something and he said, ‘Play some churchy thing,’ and I just kind of went into this sound and it ended up on the record.”

  The album’s musical backing proved revelatory, providing explosiveness on the upbeat tracks that made you wonder what Cash might have sounded like in the 1970s and 1980s if he’d had a driven, world-class band behind him. “Country Boy,” a song of his from the 1950s, rocked with the stinging force of the Allman Brothers, or maybe even Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited days. For many longtime Cash fans, the music was breathtaking. It’s no wonder Cash’s vocals felt inspired.

  As the sessions proceeded, Petty questioned some of Rubin’s choices, including “Rusty Cage,” a howling expression of personal affirmation written by Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell, who stood with Kurt Cobain as one of the leaders of the grunge movement in rock. Even Cash wondered about Rubin’s judgment as he listened to the dark, relentless drone of the Soundgarden recording in which Cornell’s words were largely reduced to an inaudible scream. “That song was the point where I thought Rick had lost his mind,” Petty says later. “When he played it, I thought there’s no way in the world we are going to be able to make that work. I said, ‘Rick, this isn’t going to work.’ But Rick got a guitar player and played ‘Rusty Cage’ the way he imagined Cash’s record would sound.”

  Seeing that Cash still wasn’t sold, Rubin, who had no experience as a singer, sang the lyrics so Cash could better envision the final recording. “If Johnny felt the words were right—that they were a story he could tell—I figured we could figure out a way to support those words musically, and ‘Rusty Cage’ was an example of that,” Rubin says. “When Johnny actually heard the words, he was down with it.”

  No one was more pleased with the recording than Cornell, a longtime Cash fan. “I was simply knocked over that Johnny Cash would record a song that I wrote,” he said. “I remember when my brother brought home At San Quentin when I was nine. We listened to it over and over for about a year. Short of the Beatles covering a song that I wrote, it was the biggest fan experience I’ve ever had.”

  But one Rubin song that no one accepted was the unlikely choice of an old Robert Palmer pop-rock tune, “Addicted to Love.” Though Cash good-naturedly attempted a vocal, there was so much ridicule from Petty and the others that Rubin quietly put the track on the shelf.

  As the recording continued off and on into 1996, Cash was steadily crisscrossing the country doing the old songs—from the Primadonna Casino just outside Las Vegas and the Silver Star Casino in Philadelphia, Mississippi, one week to the University of Michigan and the Sheraton Hotel ballroom in Honolulu, Hawaii, another week. Then it was back into the studio, where, in addition to Petty and Stuart, he was backed by Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell, keyboardist Benmont Tench, and drummer Steve Ferrone.

  When the sessions ended, Rubin and Cash picked fourteen songs from the thirty or so they’d recorded and decided to title the album Unchained, after one of the songs. The tune, an expression of Christian humility and gratitude, was by Jude Johnstone, a little-known Nashville songwriter who was friends with Cash’s daughter Kathy. Cash loved the theme, and Rubin thought the title fit the spirit of Cash’s renewed artistry and image. In the cover photo by Andrew Earl, Cash looked less theatrical than on the first record; dressed in his usual black, he stands by a weathered old barn, his hair almost totally gray rather than dyed black. This photo didn’t telegraph “outlaw” so much as “seasoned old musician.” Additional photos inside the album booklet showed Cash looking every bit his sixty-six years—and then some.

  Beyond Beck’s “Rowboat” and the Cornell number, most of the remaining songs were old Cash favorites. They ranged from the Hawaiian-flavored ballad “The One Rose,” which he first heard on a Jimmie Rodgers record, to “I’ve Been Everywhere,” the Hank Snow hit. Cash’s only new composition was “Meet Me in Heaven,” which was inspired by the inscription on his brother Jack’s gravestone.

  One of the collection’s strongest tunes was the title track from Southern Accents, Florida native Petty’s 1985 concept album about growing up in the South. Near the end of the sessions, Cash thanked Petty for his work on the album and apologized for not having recorded any of Petty’s tunes. When he asked Petty which one he should add, Petty told Cash he didn’t need to do that—he already had plenty of good songs. Overhearing the conversation, Rubin suggested “Southern Accents” and talked an embarrassed Petty into singing it. Cash was hooked on the opening lines:

  There’s a southern accent, where I come from

  The young ’uns call it country

  The yankees call it dumb.

  At the end of the song, Petty remembers with a smile, “Johnny looked at me and said, ‘I’ve got to record that. It’s better than ‘Dixie.’”

  While he waited for the release of the album in November, Cash was back on the road, this time a mix of prestigious locales, including the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles and the Fillmore West again in San Francisco, and lots of less glamorous meat-and-potatoes venues in secondary markets. During the shows, Cash’s health problems continued to mount.

  On December 7 Cash, though suffering from the flu, was feted in Washington, D.C., at the Kennedy Center Honors along with four others—playwright Edward Albee, jazz saxophonist Benny Carter, actor Jack Lemmon, and dancer Maria Tallchief. “To say the least, it’s been a good party and a long ride,” Cash told a New York Times reporter.

  By that time Unchained had entered the pop charts, but its showing was disappointing. It stayed on the key Billboard pop chart only two weeks, peaking at number 170. After two months, sales were less than for American Recordings for the same period. One reason was that most of the music press largely passed on the album, partly because they had seen the earlier album as part of a larger human interest story. American Recordings had also given a lot of young music writers an excuse to write about someone who was an early hero for ma
ny of them. In some ways, they felt that they had already given Cash his due.

  The fact that the first album wasn’t a big commercial hit also made media exposure for the second album less likely. There, too, was disagreement over the music itself among the few critics who did review Unchained, even though it was, in many ways, a more personal and affecting collection. Rubin wasn’t discouraged; he viewed Unchained as simply the second step in a building process. He continued to believe the best was yet to come.

  Cash was back on the concert trail in 1997. He spent most of April in Europe, and then returned to the States, where on May 12 in New York he taped an episode of VH1’s Storyteller series with Willie Nelson. On the show, they sang some songs and talked about their experiences. Rather than use the platform to showcase his current work, Cash sang only “Drive On” and “Unchained” from the two Rubin albums. He and Nelson focused mainly on vintage material, from Nelson’s “On the Road Again” to Cash’s “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town.” After more U.S. dates in May and June, Cash toured Europe again in July, rightfully took it easy during most of August, and then went back out on the road, touring in a big way in September and October, playing such varied spots as the House of Blues in West Hollywood, the Mid-South Fair in Memphis, and the University of New Mexico.

  One of those dates—October 4 at the House of Blues—proved to be a godsend for June. Vicky Hamilton, a young record executive and talent manager who had played a key role in the development of the flamboyant glam-rock bands Mötley Crüe and Guns N’ Roses, told Rubin backstage how much she enjoyed June’s moments in a lively guest spot. She was especially moved by the couple’s duet on “Far Side Banks of Jordan” and loved the way June literally kicked John in the butt during a vigorous rendition of “Jackson.” Rubin told Hamilton that she ought to make a record with June. Hamilton’s reaction: no way. She didn’t know anything about country music except what she had heard as a child in Charleston, West Virginia. But Rubin kept pressing her. “You’d be perfect, you’re a coal miner’s daughter,” he said. “Go talk to her.” Hamilton was intrigued, but also intimidated. She knew enough about country music to realize that John and June were icons, and she did little more than nod hello as she and June passed on the stairs. Later that night, Rubin told June about the conversation and gave her Hamilton’s number.