by Steve Turner
Cash intended to reform, but he found his need for drugs a more powerful force than his determination to change. Amphetamines controlled his sleep pattern, his health, his eating habits, his temper, his sociability, his concentration, and his longings. He began to suffer from muscle spasms. Voices invaded his brain. He found himself embarking on marathon letter-writing sessions simply because he had no other way to rid himself of the artificially released energy.
A poem he wrote at the time, "The Cost in Life," expressed some of these inner tensions:
When I consider why that I
Live and love and work and die,
And know no more than most are told
Of new things . . . books and stories old.
And why my Maker lets me live
Why He gives the things he gives
For I don't follow many rules
I often walk the way of fools.
I often think, 'Lord, why allow
Me to live and prosper now?'
Then I know some time, some way,
He'll collect what I should pay.
Why does he not snuff me out
For I don't know what life's about
The debt I owe for sin is high
Still he lets me live, love, work and die.
Cash's friends and family found themselves dealing with two people, and from day to day, they never knew which one would appear. "You never knew what he would be like at breakfast time," says Johnny Western, "or even if there would be a breakfast." Saul Holiff remembers wonderful talks he and Cash had while driving back to Casitas Springs from LAX, in which Cash showed a clearheaded approach and a deep understanding of himself, but the next day he'd behave as if the conversation had never happened.
"John R. Cash was one of the greatest human beings who ever walked on the face of this earth," says Marshall Grant, who was often the person left to pick up the pieces. "But Johnny Cash was probably the greatest jerk that ever lived. He had become two different people. That's the way it was. You can't explain it any other way. He was one of the kindest human beings you could imagine and then something would trigger him and he'd come back in the room a totally different person. It would be a 180-degree change."
His relationships with women only added to the confusion in his life. In 1962 the Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle joined the Johnny Cash Show and he found himself attracted to June Carter. "Like anyone at the top in country music or in any other field, he set out to conquer whatever he could conquer. If he had the chances, he took them," says Saul Holiff. "I don't know of very many people either in country or any other field of music who remained chaste."
June took an almost motherly role with Cash, ironing his shirts, pressing his trousers, and making sure he ate properly. She discovered his drug problem when she came in the dressing room after they'd played a show in Macon, Georgia, and caught him with a handful of Dexamyl tablets. She then realized why he was always so intense, why he came offstage in a cold sweat, and why he drank so much liquid. She'd noticed similar behavioral characteristics with Hank Williams when she and the Carter Family had toured with him in the early 1950s. She resolved to stop Cash from going the same way as Hank.
She tried talking to him but to no avail. His determination to change—whether for his faith or his health—always gave way to his need for more drugs. She tried confiscating or hiding his stashes of pills, but somehow he always managed to find other supplies he'd squirreled away. When doctors arrived backstage with the prescription he needed to stay awake during long drives, fight stage fright, or lose excess weight, she tried to head them off, but Cash always found another doctor in another town who'd oblige.
June's partner in this clean-up operation was Marshall Grant. "June and I were the only ones who cared about him as far as keeping him alive," he says. "As far as everyone else was concerned, he was immortal. He wouldn't die. June and I have stayed up many a night just to keep in touch with him, to keep him alive and stop him [from] hurting anybody. She was an ally. We both fought hard. I don't know what we would have done without one another. I couldn't have done it by myself. She couldn't have done it by herself. We could barely do it together.
"When Johnny was on pills all of his closest friends would become his worst enemies, and all his worst enemies would become his closest friends. His worst enemies were the people who supplied him with the drugs. His closest friends were June and I. He came down on us heavier than everyone else combined because he knew that we were going to fight him tooth and nail to keep him off the drugs and keep him alive. Therefore we became his enemies. Now when he got straight, all of a sudden we would be his two best friends. That's the way it was."
Within months of meeting, the relationship between June and Cash became a full-blown affair. Like Billie Jean, June was a woman who was perfectly at ease in the predominantly male world of music and had been married to a leading country performer. Both Johnny and June had as much to lose if news of their affair leaked out, so they were discreet about their movements, never staying in the same hotel rooms or allowing themselves to be photographed in amorous situations.
They both knew that what they were getting into was potentially dangerous. June was married to Edwin "Rip" Nix, a garage and body shop owner from Madison, Tennessee, but they'd drifted apart almost as soon as they were married in 1957. Part of the reason was that she was away from home twenty-five days of each month. Cash had four young children and a wife, who had yet to hear of his extramarital liaisons. Vivian knew that things weren't going well with Cash, and she genuinely wanted to know what was wrong and what she could do to fix things. She poured her heart out in poems that pleaded with God to make things right between them.
June felt her relationship with Cash was becoming too powerful to control. She had started writing songs with Merle Kilgore, who, as a writer, had recently enjoyed a big hit with "Wolverton Mountain," recorded by Claude King. The first song he and June wrote together was "Promised to John": "I'm promised to John / Can't you see that I'm promised to John?" Anita recorded it with Hank Snow on an album called Together Again.
"Then one day June came to me and told me that she was torn apart and just didn't know what to do," says Kilgore. "She said, 'That Johnny Cash is spookin' me. I am so in love, I don't know what to do.' I said, 'Well, have you got any ideas for a song today?' She told me that a friend of hers had just got divorced and had written her a letter. She went and got the letter and read it to me. It started I never want to fall in love again' blah, blah, blah, and then it said I hate love. Love is like a burning ring of fire.'" [Another version of the story says that the phrase was found in a book of Elizabethan love poems.] Kilgore liked the idea of a song that described passion as a ring of fire, especially as a commentary on what June was feeling at the time for Cash, but he knew that the title "Ring of Fire" had already been used by instrumentalist Duane Eddy and his band the Rebels on a 1961 single. Working for a company that owned the original publishing rights, he wanted to avoid any confusion and thus suggested "Love's Burning Ring of Fire" as a title.
While they were writing, Anita Carter was preparing an album, Folk Songs Old and New, and asked June if she had any new material. June told her about "Love's Burning Ring of Fire," giving her the impression that they'd completed the song, when the truth was they'd stalled halfway through. "June had put in the word mire and I had to ask her what a mire was," says Kilgore. "She said, 'You know, Kilgore. It's when you're stuck in the mud. Where I'm from if you're mired, you're stuck.' I said, 'That's not romantic' I learned right then never to start polishing a song before it's finished because creativity goes right out the window."
Because June had claimed they'd finished the song and Anita was ready to record, they had to complete it in a hurry the next day. "I started working on it," says Kilgore. "And when I got over to her house, we knocked that song out in ten minutes. But the word mire was still in it." Anita's version, produced by Jerry Kennedy, was released in November 1962 and Cash immediately
liked it. To avoid damaging June's chances of success, he said he would give it four months before he did a cover version. In the meantime, he claimed that he had a dream where he heard himself recording the song with trumpets—an unheard-of arrangement for country music at the time. The dream could have been suggested by something June said, because she based the tune on the swirling sound of music she once heard coming from a tiovivo (merry-go-round) in the town square of Villa Acuna, Mexico.
Cash desperately needed a hit. Despite being a remarkably popular touring act and an instantly recognizable name in American pop music, he hadn't had a single in the pop charts in nearly four years. "The Ways of a Woman in Love" made the charts in October 1958. Only two of his last twelve singles had even punctured the Top 100, and of his albums, only The Fabulous Johnny Cash made the Top 20. Blood, Sweat and Tears never climbed higher than eighty. "His voice was badly affected by his amphetamine use at this time, so he was finding it hard to get the right sound," says Kilgore. "His records weren't selling and he was in bad shape. Columbia was concerned that he'd lost it all. If you don't have hit records then you lose your audience. There's nothing like a hit to bring the people back."
His producer, Don Law, was having an understandably hard time persuading Columbia in New York to keep investing in Cash. His contract, which had been renewed after one year in the middle of 1959, would expire at the end of 1963, and it was clear that if Cash didn't have a breakthrough hit in the next few months, they wouldn't renew him.
One day, Kilgore mentioned over lunch with Jack Clement that Cash was having problems getting the right sound in the studio. "Jack said, I can get the sound back.' I said, 'Really? He's doing a song of ours called 'Ring of Fire.' I wish there was a way that you could produce it.' He said, 'There's no way Columbia will let me anywhere near Johnny Cash. Don Law has an iron hand over him.'"
Kilgore repeated this conversation to Cash, who said, "You know what, Merle? I know Jack Clement can get my sound back. When you said that, it put chills all over my body." Clement was living in Beaumont, Texas, where he was doing well for himself as a producer. He'd had a hit with Dickie Lee's "Patches," had the publishing for George Jones's "She Thinks I Still Care," and had written the follow-up "The Girl I Used to Know."
Clement recalls, "I was in the bathtub and Johnny called me and said that he wanted me to come to Nashville and help him produce this song that June Carter and Merle Kilgore had done. He told me he'd had this dream about the song having trumpets on it. So I came to Nashville. We got a studio and hired two trumpet players. Don Law was a nice guy, but he'd just sit around and do what he wanted to do. He was registered as the official producer, but I was the one who ran the session. I came in and told them to change microphones on the drums and told the horn players what to play. I hummed it and they wrote it down. I played my guitar on it and led the band. I thought it all sounded pretty neat, but a few weeks later when I kept hearing it played on the radio all the time I thought, 'Hey! That was good!'"
Though the song was about a relationship, its central image was ambiguous. The "fire" was most obviously the heat of passion but could also have referred to the dangerous nature of the particular liaison or even to the fire of punishment. This latter interpretation gained strength from Cash's intonation of the phrase "down, down, down" which seemed to indicate the fires of hell. The Mexican trumpet sound, unprecedented in country music at the time, added to the impression of heat and passion.
Released in May 1963, "Ring of Fire" reached number seventeen in the singles charts, and two months later a "best o f album, also called Ring of Fire, reached number twenty-six in the album charts. For the time being at least, Johnny Cash's recording career with Columbia was safe.
7
Busted
THE PROGRESS OF THE CARTER - CASH RELATIONSHIP could be charted through the music they made together. Just before June and Kilgore wrote "Ring of Fire," she and Cash arranged and adapted "The Legend of John Henry's Hammer," recording it in June 1962. Later that month he cut the first Cash-Carter song, "The Matador," as well as one he wrote with June's father, Ezra, "Who Kept the Sheep?" A month later he was special guest for a day-long Carter Family album session.
Vivian first became aware that something was happening on June 15, 1962, when Cash made his debut at the prestigious Hollywood Bowl in a show that Saul Holiff billed as The First Giant Folk, Western, Bluegrass Spectacular. It featured Cash with the Carter Family, Johnny Western, Merle Travis, Stuart Hamblin, Patsy Cline, Gene Autry, Gordon Terry, Roger Miller, Flatt and Scruggs, and others. Vivian dressed up the girls in their Sunday best and went along with Roy and Carrie Cash. "We all went backstage after the show," says Kathy Cash. "I'll never forget it because Mom had brought it up often since. We were standing there waving good-bye to Dad, and he kissed us all, got into his car, and then June [with Luther and Marshall] jumped into the car right next to him and waved to us. Mom was furious. She and Grandma were fit to be tied. That was when she started falling apart."
There was naturally a lot of guilt involved in the relationship. June felt guilty that she had already been through two marriages. In fact, she felt so guilty that when she divorced Nix on the grounds of "irreconcilable differences" she waited weeks before she told her parents. Cash felt guilty about his adultery and the fact that he was deserting his children in their formative years. Drugs and drink helped dull his conscience and curb his fretting, but June was already doing her best to stop his drug habit by searching his pockets and relentlessly discussing his problem.
In November 1963 Cash recorded "Understand Your Man," a vitriolic song directed at Vivian and set to a tune borrowed from Bob Dylan's "Don't Think Twice."
Don't call my name at your window as I'm leavin'
'Cos I won't even turn my head.
And don't send your kinfolks to give me no d— talkin'
'Cos I'll be gone like I said.
You say the same old thing that you've been sayin' all along,
So just lay there on you bed and keep your mouth shut 'til I'm gone.
No don't give me that old familiar cryin,' cussin' moan
Understand your man
0, understand your man
"I remember lying in bed listening to them fight in the middle of the night," says Kathy, "and I would think, oh boy, this is tiring! Every time he came home I would beg to go and spend the night at Grandma and Grandpa's house. My mother thought it was terrible that my dad would come back and I'd want to leave, but it wasn't because he was around but because I was tired of hearing them fight in the middle of the night and keep me awake."
Cash clearly felt that he was a misunderstood man—that Vivian not only didn't understand the demands of his work but couldn't accept his mercurial artistic temperament. June, on the other hand, he felt loved him for who he was. Being on the road was second nature to her because she had known no other life. She not only knew who all his musical heroes were, but she had met and worked with them, and, most important of all, she tended to be strong in exactly the points where he was weak. She was extroverted, steadfast, and abstemious, whereas Cash was introverted, unstable, and indulgent.
"June was a very basic person," says Harold Reid, who joined the Johnny Cash Show as a member of the Statler Brothers in 1964. "She didn't drink. She didn't do drugs. She came from pretty much the same stock that the rest of us came from but she was strong enough, as we were, not to do these things. John saw that strength in her and she was able to help him. In the long run he had to do it himself, but she gave him the strength to stand up on his own feet."
June's roots also appealed to Cash. Through his relationship with her he was connecting with one of American music's most traditional and influential families, and he enjoyed the cachet that came with that. He loved listening to Mother Maybelle's memories of how the Carter Family songs were collected, or discussing history, theology, and literature with June's father, Eck. He reveled in visits to Maces Spring, the small mountain community where A. P. Carte
r had lived and started his collecting.
Until the urban folk revival, Mother Maybelle and her singing daughters languished in semi-obscurity. Helen and Anita were raising children, and although Mother Maybelle still appeared at the Opry, she had no recording contract and was working as a nurse for the elderly. Badly affected by the success of rock-'n'-roll, country music had undergone a makeover in which the rough and primitive was being supplanted by the smooth and sophisticated. The fiddle and the autoharp were being replaced by the piano, drums, and even orchestral strings. What became known as the Nashville Sound was typified by people like Jim Reeves, Patsy Cline, and Don Gibson, who could take country music and make it sound like pop music.
Educated baby boomers reacted against what they considered to be production-line pop and sought out music that they found more authentic because it had more human fingerprints on it. They wanted music unsullied by commercial considerations and, consequently, more honest about basic emotions and more attuned to universal needs. The Newport Folk Festival, where folk musicians shared stages and workshop areas with gospel, country, and blues musicians, typified this mood. Mother Maybelle made her Newport debut in 1963 at the invitation of the New Lost City Ramblers.
Cash instinctively identified with the folk revival movement. The music that touched his heart most had always been that which was a genuine expression of the joys and travails of life—music composed out of a surfeit of emotion rather than to fulfill the demands of a newly identified market. Little wonder that he responded so enthusiastically to Bob Dylan's album The Freewheelin Bob Dylan on its release in May 1963. Dylan was drawing water from the same well, citing Hank Williams and Leadbelly among his influences. Cash began writing letters of encouragement to Dylan, and Dylan, who'd been a fan of Cash's music since he first heard it on the radio in the 1950s, wrote back.