The Man Called CASH

by Steve Turner

  The California tour, which started in Salinas, was booked by a young Santa Barbara-based promoter named Stew Carnall, who'd become interested in Cash after hearing "Hey! Porter" playing on a jukebox in Phoenix, Arizona. Carnall came from a wealthy family and had been educated in the best schools. Well spoken, Carnall had cultivated tastes and drove an El Dorado convertible. He believed that there was an untapped market for country music in the central farmlands of California, which were filled with Midwesterners who'd migrated westward in the 1930s and 1940s.

  The California dates were unlike anything Cash had played in the South.

  Instead of concert halls, he and the Tennessee Two performed in large ballrooms in towns like Modesto, Vallejo, and Niles, where the opening act usually consisted of a country band playing dance music. Ralph J. Gleason, the most perceptive pop cultural commentator of the period and later the inspiration behind the founding of Rolling Stone magazine, attended one of the California shows. An early champion of the beat poets, Bob Dylan, and San Francisco psychedelic rock, Gleason was one of the first critics to treat popular music as an art form rather than as "mere entertainment." In the December 16, 1956, edition of the San Francisco Chronicle he wrote: "During the past week, Cash has been playing one-nighters in California . . . and if the reaction of the crowd at the performances is any indication, Presley has a rival. Like Elvis, Johnny Cash sings and strums a guitar, but unlike Presley there are no bumps and grinds in his routine. He is a fair-to-middling country guitar player himself and composed the words and music to the first four tunes he recorded."2.

  Although the California tour lasted for only ten dates, Carnall liked Johnny's act so much that he negotiated with Bob Neal to buy 50 percent of his management contract for five thousand dollars, plus 7 percent of Cash's next annual gross. Neal would continue to manage the business side from his base in Memphis and Carnall would, in effect, become tour manager, handling the day-to-day business on the road.

  Naturally, as Cash's popularity grew, the touring intensified. He also appeared on TV shows such as Country Style USA and Ranch Party, and made a ten-show commitment to the Jackie Gleason Show. After returning from his twenty-four-day tour of Canada in May 1957, he complained to Ted Freeman about the stress of his schedule: "I'm twenty-six pounds lighter and ten years older. We averaged four hundred and twenty miles per day, and I AM TIRED and sick."

  There were no tour buses, personal assistants, road crews, or short-hop flights for touring artists in those days. All travel was by road, and since the interstate network hadn't yet been constructed this meant slow driving down two-lane blacktops. Because of the many long distances between gigs, they often drove at night, taking turns at the wheel. If they were lucky, they'd arrive at the motel early enough to catch a nap.

  In July 1957 while touring Florida with Patsy Cline, Ray Price, Ferlin Husky, Faron Young, and Hank Thompson, Cash first encountered the overworked traveling performers' panacea: the drug amphetamine. The small tablets, which immediately increased alertness, could be obtained legitimately with a prescription. Not only could the drug sharpen the senses while banishing tiredness, but it could sustain an all-night song-writing session or add some sparkle to an after-show party. To many country stars of the 1950s, amphetamine seemed like a blessing.

  During World War II, soldiers used Benzedrine tablets to combat fatigue, heighten endurance, and elevate their mood. After the war, amphetamines became particularly popular with long-distance truck drivers, students studying for exams and people trying to lose weight. A simple complaint about anxiety, excessive tiredness, or obesity to a GP usually resulted in a prescription. The short-acting tablets created effects that lasted for four hours. The long-acting capsules worked for up to twelve hours.

  Although the drug seemed to produce energy out of nothing, it in fact created a fast track to the body's natural stores by overstimulating the central nervous system. It initiated an emotional roller-coaster ride that began with sudden elation and a rise of confidence, progressed through a period of euphoria, and then ended with restlessness followed by fatigue. The choice, then, was whether to fall into a deep sleep that could last for as long as seventeen hours or to take another pill and repeat the cycle.

  Gordon Terry, a fiddle player then working with Faron Young, gave Cash his first tablet. They had just finished a show in Miami and had 340 miles to cover before the next day's date in Jacksonville. That night, Terry was driving Young's limousine just ahead of Luther Perkins, who was driving Cash's car. In the early hours of the morning both vehicles pulled over to take a break, and Terry walked over to Luther and offered him a small, white pill that he said would keep him awake and alert for the rest of the journey. Cash asked if they were dangerous. Terry told him that he'd never suffered any side effects—a view shared with the medical community at that time. One country singer received his supply from his father-in-law, a leading surgeon in California who believed that amphetamine was a wonder drug. Merle Kilgore remembers a Nashville doctor who would visit clubs in Printers Alley and reward musicians whose performances had drawn particularly rapturous applause by thrusting a prescription for Obedrin in their hands.

  Cash swallowed a pill and settled back in the car. Within half an hour his fatigue had given way to wide-eyed verbosity, and when they arrived in Jacksonville he was in no mood to take his customary nap. The next night he found Terry and got another pill to help him through the show, and he eventually came down the night after that. While he felt exhausted, Cash nevertheless believed that he'd discovered something that could only enhance his career. "I thought God had sent them to me to help me," he later admitted.

  By nature a shy, reflective man who hated small talk and the false bonhomie of show business parties, Cash suddenly found himself becoming garrulous and entertaining in company. Amphetamines sped up his thoughts, and he found himself making bizarre mental associations that even affected his performances. Gone were the preshow nerves, replaced by a stage presence that emitted an almost superhuman power. His previously halting delivery of lines between songs eased into a smooth patter. He began his habit of sometimes picking his strings high up on the neck and slinging the guitar over his shoulder like a guerilla's rifle when not playing. There was an electricity in his performance that mesmerized audiences. Marshall Grant, who usually chewed gum on stage, bobbed up and down as he slapped his bass, and Luther Perkins stood bolted to the spot looking nervously to his right as if in need of approval for every note he played.

  Though he was not breaking any laws, and at that time had no reason to believe he was sustaining long-term damage, Cash kept his amphetamine consumption private. Vivian didn't know to blame the drug for the long nights he spent in the den alone rather than in bed with her. Sam Phillips didn't detect any change in Cash's behavior during his recording sessions at Sun. But Marshall Grant, who didn't smoke or drink alcohol, was well aware that something was amiss. Cash's timekeeping became erratic, his conversation often veered suddenly toward the surreal, his vocals suffered, and his weight dropped, leaving him looking permanently drawn.

  "By the later part of 1957 I knew that something was wrong," says Marshall. "I didn't know what it was. I didn't know anything about drugs. It was bad and getting even worse and one night we were backstage and I was looking for him to go on when I went through the door into his dressing room and found him with his head tipped back and a handful of pills. He dropped one and it rolled across the floor. That's when I knew that it was drugs."

  Despite the dried-up mucous membranes, occasional concert cancellation, or lapse into incoherence, "the going up," as Kris Kristofferson would later put it, seemed "worth the coming down" during the first two years of Cash's amphetamine affair. Lying in the back of the car with his notebook or prowling the corridors, guitar in hand, before showtime he was getting ideas for more and more original material. He wrote "Give My Love to Rose"—about an escaped prisoner's last wishes for his family—after meeting a former San Quentin inmate who asked him to
pass on a message to his wife the next time he was in Shreveport. In a dressing room in White Plains, New York, after reading a story about himself titled "Johnny Cash Has the Big River Blues in His Voice," he had the idea for "Big River," which tells the tale of someone pursuing a woman down the length of the Mississippi.

  Although the songs contained the familiar themes of loss and longing that permeated Cash's country music and the blues, Cash's simple, direct delivery often disguised a poetic depth. He had an ability to effortlessly incorporate assonance, alliteration, and internal rhymes without drawing attention to his technique. He also had no problem incorporating his ideas into an overarching metaphor rather than settling for the plain description of emotion. Lines such as "I taught the weeping willow how to cry / And I showed the clouds how to cover up a clear blue sky" ("Big River") showed a lyrical richness that preceded folk rock by at least eight years.

  Indeed, his songs contributed indirectly to the folk rock movement. Bob Dylan heard Cash's songs on his radio in Hibbing, Minnesota, as a high school teenager and they became his early inspiration. He loved the primal imagery of "Big River," later describing it as "words turned into bone." In 2002, when asked to contribute a track to the Johnny Cash tribute album Kindred Spirits, Dylan chose "Train of Love," saying by way of introduction, "I used to sing this song before I ever wrote a song."

  Though Sam Phillips produced "Big River," "Train of Love," and "Give My Love to Rose," Cash felt that Phillips had lost interest in him and wanted to concentrate on his latest discovery, Jerry Lee Lewis, who'd had hits with "High School Confidential," "Whole Lot of Shakin' Going On," and "Great Balls of Fire." When Phillips's newly hired trainee engineer Jack Clement took over the April 1957 session to record "Next in Line" and "Don't Make Me Go," Cash knew for sure. His comment on the listless "Next in Line," made in a letter to Ted Freeman, summed up his feeling about the new direction. "I don't particularly care for it," he said, "but it's getting good radio play."

  Jack Clement was a local boy who'd done a four-year stint in the army before his discharge in 1952. He played music in the evenings and on weekends, taught dance for six months, spent two years at Memphis State University thinking he might become a journalist, and then started work with a building supply firm. As a sideline, he produced demo tapes in a friend's garage. When he took one of these tapes to Sam Phillips in June 1956 to have it mastered, the producer offered him a job. At that time the label employed only three other people—an office manager, a secretary, and an engineer from a radio station also owned by Phillips.

  "It was a pretty crude setup when I went to work there," says Clement. "The desk was a basic audio console made for radio stations by RCA. It wasn't fancy, but it was good. If you wanted echo you had to have a separate microphone and run it through a separate tape machine. We only had six microphone inputs, so if you wanted echo on the voice that used two of them and if you wanted echo on something else that would use up two more. The sound could be balanced but it all had to be done live. You could add things, like we often did with vocal groups, but you couldn't take things away."

  Albums had little importance in the 1950s and typically included some recent singles plus filler tracks. Cash's debut album, Johnny Cash with His Hot and Blue Guitar, which was also the first album Sun had ever produced, had four previously released sides and was bulked out with eight sides recorded by Clement, only one of which, "Country Boy," was a Cash original. He recorded two gospel songs, "I Was There When It Happened" and his own "Belshazar," which was later dropped.

  Even though Cash's church attendance had waned, he still used church teachings as a guide. In particular, the Christian tradition of tithing influenced him to tithe 10 percent of his musical output by making one in ten of his releases a gospel song. Had "Belshazar" remained on the album, he'd have been up to date on his tithing—for by now he'd released twenty tracks for Sun.

  "He did put out this gospel song, but he didn't do a whole album of them because Sam didn't want him to," says Clement. "Sam knew that it wouldn't sell. He wanted to keep the momentum going and he knew that a gospel album would divert sales. Gospel wasn't what Johnny Cash was known for. Starting to do gospel would have diluted his impact. I don't think Johnny Cash understood that. I did."

  Almost everyone at Sun had a strong fundamentalist church background. Elvis had been raised in the Assembly of God, and one of his earliest professional ambitions was to join the Songfellows, a junior gospel quartet designed to feed the long-established Blackwood Brothers. Carl Perkins grew up reading the Bible and singing gospel. Sam Philips liked to pontificate on theological matters, especially after a drink or two, and his language at times seemed to come straight from the King James "Authorized" Version of the Old Testament.

  The artist most tortured by the apparent conflict between rock-'n'-roll and religion was Jerry Lee Lewis, who had been raised in the Assembly of God and had attended Bible College for a brief time. He sometimes argued that by playing rock-'n'-roll he was "dragging people to hell." Jack Clement remembers engineering the session that produced "Great Balls of Fire," when the singer had such an attack of conscience that he threatened to abandon the session. "Great Balls of Fire," filled with sexual innuendo, also alluded to the coming of the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost.

  A theological argument between Lewis, Sam Phillips, and visiting singer Billy Lee Riley broke out in the control room—all of it preserved for posterity on tape by Clement. Phillips argued that rock-'n'-roll, by bringing pleasure to people, continued the healing ministry begun by Jesus Christ. Lewis considered the sound "devil's music" and said he would only bring damnation on himself by playing it. In the end though, despite his apparently strong theological objections, Lewis finished the session, probably with an added edge coming from his convictions that he was demon possessed.

  Most of these men still considered themselves Christians because they hadn't denied any key doctrines, but the teachings of the Bible no longer shaped their behavior. As Lewis once said, they thought religiously but they didn't walk religiously. They still recognized the importance of church, but few of them went to services. Regular Bible reading and prayer got lost somewhere between the traveling and recording. Elvis once went to his pastor and said, "Everything you told me to do, I haven't done. Everything you told me not to do, I have done. And I'm an unhappy man."

  Religion for these men shifted from a way of life to a largely sentimental or nostalgic feeling. It reminded them of better, less complicated times and enduring values. When they were troubled they'd think back to their times at church. When they were touched by remorse they'd make vows to God to walk the straight and narrow. Hank Williams, the prototypical Southern backslider, gloried openly in the sins of the flesh and then wrote songs like "When God Comes to Gather His Jewels" and "I Saw the Light." Ira Louvin of the Louvin Brothers wrote guilt-inducing gospel songs even though he was a wife-beating alcoholic. Cash was different. He never had a crisis of conscience over recording secular music and his affection for the message of gospel music remained genuine.

  On August 13, 1957, at a party in California following a TV appearance, Cash met Don Law, a British-born producer, who invited him to consider signing with Columbia Records when his contract with Sun expired at the end of July 1958. Law, a highly respected music-industry veteran, had started back in the 1920s when recording was done directly onto hot wax. Law recorded the now-legendary sessions with blues musician Robert Johnson in 1936 and 1937 that captured such classics as "Ramblin' on My Mind," "Crossroad Blues," and "Hell Hound on My Trail." He also recorded Bob Wills and Gene Autry. He appreciated the direct and uncomplicated nature of Cash's voice and his openness to new ideas.

  Cash didn't need a lot of persuading. He knew that his recording career was stagnating at Sun, and he didn't appreciate the fact that Sam Phillips wanted Clement to "freshen up his sound" for the teenage market. He'd also still harbored resentment toward Phillips for not allowing him to record an album of gospel songs. Then the
re was the question of money. Columbia offered to pay 5 percent of the retail price of a record in mechanical royalties rather than the 3 percent of 90 percent of retail that Sun offered. In addition, being a major company guaranteed that Columbia would be more rigorous in its accounting than a small independent.

  "Sam was stealing us blind," says Marshall Grant. "We couldn't get the royalties from him. Another thing was that Sun was still more or less a regional label. After Elvis left and we left, it got a lot of recognition nationwide and finally world wide, but that wasn't the case when we were there. It went to Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Kentucky. That was about as far as it went."

  When Phillips got wind that Cash was thinking of leaving, he took it as a personal snub. He didn't know that Cash had already struck a secret deal with Columbia in November 1957 that would become effective immediately upon termination of his Sun contract in July 1958. Nothing Phillips could now offer him would make him stay. "Sam Phillips loved Johnny Cash," says Jack Clement. "He respected him a lot more than the other characters because he was a real gentleman. Sam was always raving about how easy he was to work with. He loved his singing. He would talk about the authority he had in his voice and how people trusted him. I was really surprised when he left. I think it was based on a misunderstanding. He thought that Sam no longer had time for him."

  The remaining singles Cash recorded for Sun only convinced him that he'd made the right decision in leaving. Although commercially successful, they compromised his vision. His raw sound was being padded out with drums, piano, and overdubbed background vocals. Instead of the stark and unusual points of view in songs like "Folsom Prison Blues" or "I Walk the Line," he was being given lyrics about dating and young romance. Thirty years later, Cash still complained about its overdubbed vocals: "All that junk on it. That ruined it for me." However, Cash would develop a working partnership with "Cowboy" Jack Clement that would last for the rest of his life.