by Steve Turner
Some of the most revealing footage Elfstrom shot on tour was of Cash backstage before and after concerts. At thirty-six Cash looked like a man in his prime. The gaunt and skinny look of his amphetamine days had been replaced by a full, solid face, powerful shoulders, and a slow, swaggering walk. It was as though this was the look he had always been meant to grow into, and he seemed far more handsome in his early middle age than he had as a teenager or a young man. He still twitched and scratched his neck but now with the natural energy of a man getting ready to meet his audience rather than the edginess of an addict. "Before he went onstage he was rolling everything through his head," says Elfstrom. "He was clearing his voice and psyching himself up. He was intense."
He also displayed a commendable courteousness to those who found their way backstage either to share their songs with him or to ask him to sing for them. In one clip, a singer called Buzz Martin comes by with a tape of his songs, and Cash gives him his guitar and asks him to play "the best song you've got that you think I might record." Martin responds by playing a song about his wife who he has nicknamed Biscuit, and Cash, after laughing throughout, commends him on his ability with words. Another young man comes by and asks him to play "Great Speckled Bird" for his girlfriend and Cash obliges.
In a longer sequence, an eighteen-year-old Canadian songwriter, Don Freed, plays him two Dylanesque folk songs that he had written, one of which was called "The Banks of Mariposa." Freed traveled from Saskatoon for this opportunity and came equipped with guitar, harmonica, and brace. Cash listens intently and promises to get him an audition with Columbia. Freed looks disbelieving but Cash assures him that he wouldn't tell him he liked a song if he didn't.
While Elfstrom shot this documentary, a film production team employed by the commercial company Granada Television, three thousand miles away in London, considered the idea of producing an arts program on Cash. Mostly in their late twenties, they were possibly the hippest group of creatives in British television, regarded equally with suspicion and envy for their links to the burgeoning underground scene of avante-garde films, radical politics, fashion, and rock music. Two of them, Jonathan Cott and David Dalton, contributed regularly to Rolling Stone. Geoffrey Cannon was the first rock critic for a British daily newspaper. As a team, they'd recently made a film about the Doors that spliced concert footage with news coverage of napalm falling on Vietnam and antiwar protesters being clubbed by police. They would go on to cover the Rolling Stones's momentous 1969 Hyde Park appearance following the death of guitarist Brian Jones. Their mission, they'd decided, was to show that rock music was both a commentary on and a cause of cultural change in the modern world.
"It was in this context that I had a bad idea," says Geoffrey Cannon. "In those days people like us thought of country as music for redneck hoedowns. But the journalist in me, that I tried to suppress, could smell a story. So I came into our office one November morning and asked Jo Durden-Smith, Jonathan Cott, and David Dalton to join me at the big round table and I said, I have a bad idea, but I know it will be a hit. How about getting Johnny Cash to do a second gig at Folsom Prison and filming i t ? '"
Cannon had half hoped his friends would nix the idea, but instead they showed mild interest and one found a number for Saul Holiff. Cannon phoned but was told quite firmly that Johnny Cash had no interest in revisiting Folsom Prison. "Having made the dud call, the idea began worming its way into my consciousness," says Cannon. "I began to see that actually this was a good idea. Nothing like a concert where a jailbird [sic] sang songs about desperation to no-hopers and lifers in prison had ever been transmitted on national network television and this was one of our touchstones. So a couple of days later I rang Holiff a second time. He was still polite and still not interested. Then just as I was going to say 'bye' he said, 'but Johnny is going to San Quentin. He'd be happy to make a film with you there.'"
San Quentin State Prison was bigger, older and even more notorious than Folsom. Perched on four hundred and thirty-two acres of land in Marin County and overlooking the San Francisco Bay near the San Rafael Bridge, it housed almost six thousand inmates and had a staff of more than fifteen hundred. As with Folsom, Cash was comfortable with it as a venue because he'd played there before, back on New Year's Day in 1959 when future country star Merle Haggard was one of the prisoners in the audience. This time Columbia was more than interested in capturing the concert for posterity. They asked Granada what sort of percentage they would like in the recording. The film's director, Michael Darlow, suggested to his boss, Cecil Bernstein, that they ask for 4 percent. "Bernstein said, I don't want that. Nobody's heard of Johnny Cash. Take £800,' " remembers Darlow. "That was the worst decision Granada ever made. When I told the guy from Columbia that we only wanted £800, he couldn't get off the phone fast enough."
Darlow and producer Jo Durden-Smith flew out to California and met up with Cash before a show in San Diego. "One of the first things I did was to ask him if he'd be willing to write a song about San Quentin in the way that he'd written one about Folsom," says Darlow. He told Darlow, in no uncertain terms, exactly what he could do with his idea. "I was crestfallen. June came over to me and whispered in my ear, That means he'll do it.' I fell in love with her at once!"
They went on to San Quentin ahead of the concert, which was scheduled for February 24, 1969, to film the prison and interview inmates. "It was full of chaos, the whole thing," says Darlow. "I went to see the prison governor and he wanted to know what was in it for them. I did a deal where he got a cabinet radiogram and the prison got a sound system. Then twelve hard guys came and told us that we needed protection, and the senior guard advised us to accept their offer. So these guys looked after us, and they became the twelve guys in the front row at the concert!"
Darlow and Durden-Smith wanted make a documentary that, like the Doors film, interspersed social realism with art to underline the connection. They interviewed men on death row and were impressed with the stories told by the prisoners Durden-Smith became so engrossed in some of their situations that years later he returned to write a book about one of its inmates: Who Killed George Jackson?
"There was enormous tension in the prison between blacks and Chicanos, and it got quite difficult," says Durden-Smith. "In a sense the eventual film got transmuted and slightly bent off course. I think we had started off with a notion that San Quentin was somehow a place where 'tales of regret and love and death and murder come home to roost.' The truth is, it wasn't exactly a country-and-western prison, so the music and the prison don't mix exactly. It was a bit of a mismatch but, nevertheless, not a bad film."
Bob Johnston remembers that the tension at San Quentin surpassed that at Folsom. "All the guards were nervous," he says. "They thought that there was going to be a riot. He [Cash] said that when he was singing 'Folsom Prison Blues'and the men were up on the tables yelling when they were only supposed to clap sitting down, he realized that all he had to say was, 'Let's go!' and there would have been a full-scale riot. He told me after, I was tempted.' I mean, if there was ever a three-word sentence pregnant with meaning, it was that one. People got carried away." Ralph Gleason, who reviewed the concert for Rolling Stone, observed: "What he did was right on the edge. If he had screwed up one notch higher the joint would have exploded. He knew when to stop."
This is an opinion shared by Darlow. "He knew exactly what he was doing," he says. "He would take it up to a certain point and then he'd take it down because the guards were getting really jumpy. It was all an act. All that stuff on the record was kind of fixed because he made very sure that the camera was on him before he said anything. He was very skillful."
Other than repeating "Folsom Prison Blues" he presented a different set than the one recorded at Folsom, with the added spontaneity of playing recently written songs. "Starkville City Jail," about his arrest for picking flowers in Mississippi, he'd written the night before the show, and he played "San Quentin" since Darlow suggested it two days before. The words of "A Boy Named Sue"
had been given to him by Shel Silverstein at a songwriters party at Old Hickory Lake just five days before, where Graham Nash had premiered "Marrakesh Express"; Bob Dylan "Lay, Lady, Lay;" Kris Kristofferson "Me and Bobby McGee;" and Joni Mitchell "Both Sides Now." There was no tune; so he propped the lyric sheet on a music stand and asked the band (which now included guitarist Bob Wootton, who had replaced Luther) to improvise behind him as he sang it for the first time.
"I knew pretty much what he was going to do in the concert, but I didn't know about 'A Boy Named Sue,'" says Darlow. "He just told me that he had something new that he was going to try."
The shaved-headed but bearded Silverstein was a versatile writer and hard to categorize. To children he was the author of Uncle Shelby's Story of Lafcadio, The Lion Who Shot Back (1963), and The Giving Tree (1964). Readers of Playboy knew him as a cartoonist. The folk crowds of New York and Chicago knew him as the composer of "The Unicorn" (recorded by the Irish Rovers) and "25 Minutes to Go" (recorded by Brothers Four as well as Johnny Cash). Uniting all his work was a quirky view of life and a love of long and strange titles.
"A Boy Named Sue" told the story of a father who named his son Sue, knowing that he'd be teased and ridiculed as he grew up and would therefore develop tenacity to survive. The prison crowd hung on every word and exploded at the punch line. Released as the first single on the Johnny Cash at San Quentin album, it rose to number two in the singles charts—his best position ever. Cash developed ambiguous feelings for the song. Though he naturally enjoyed its staggering success, he didn't relish the idea that his most commercially successful song was a novelty number written by someone else.
The Granada Television documentary was screened in Britain during April 1969, before the single or the album had been released, creating a sense of anticipation. The American networks didn't pick it up, probably because the combination of Cash's salty language and the sympathetic portrayal of death row inmates was considered unsuitable for a mainstream audience. "I think that the film was quite pivotal in the Johnny Cash revival," says Durden-Smith. "He was someone who had become quite forgotten. In all the fuss about the Beatles and the Rolling Stones he'd got left behind. The fact that he was on network TV may have been something of an indication that hip young things in Britain were shooting Johnny Cash and that he therefore might reach a much wider audience."
Holiff also thinks that the documentary was crucial. It not only helped to push the album (and the single) in Britain, but it showed what a charismatic and televisual performer Cash was. Soon after, he was approached by ABC to see if Cash would be interested in becoming a summer replacement for Hollywood Palace, a fifteen-show run transmitting from June through September. The accepted wisdom was that few people watched summer television, which made it the perfect time to try out new shows. Holiff accepted the offer with two provisos: first, that Cash would only do the shows if they could be filmed on his home turf at the Ryman Auditorium, and second, Canadian Stan Jacobson, who'd made a 1967 CBC special about him, would produce the shows. ABC agreed to both conditions.
Although Cash had done a lot to get his life back in order, it was still a battle to stay completely free of drugs. "When the TV series was scheduled he was as wild as a guinea," says Marshall Grant. "However, anytime he wanted to come back down he could do it. He'd do what he needed to do and then he'd get blown out again. He wasn't drug free during the TV show years but he had it totally under control. Six months before they started filming he looked like death warmed up, and he gained weight and he looked excellent."
Filming began in April 1969 and the schedule was tough. Rehearsals took place on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays, and tapings (an average of two shows a week) were on Thursdays. Weekends were kept free for Cash's concert commitments. Cash planned to keep the show fresh and to use it to introduce acts that the average American viewer may not have seen. He wanted to use his privileged position to shake up mainstream television entertainment, and in this he was initially successful. His opening show coup was having Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell perform. On subsequent shows in the summer series he did duets with the likes of Merle Haggard, Buffy St. Marie, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Mama Cass, Odetta, Gordon Lightfoot, and Linda Ronstadt, none of whom were then household names and who all came from the folk, blues, or country tradition. These choices won him new friends who saw him as a man willing to take risks.
Rick Rubin, his future producer, was then a six-year-old living on Long Island. "I was only a kid, but he definitely made an impression on me," he says. "He had an accent that was very unusual to hear on TV in those days. Also, he looked cool. He had a presence that was different from anyone else."
Bono, later to become part of U2, was a nine-year-old living in Ireland. "People will tell you that this was when Johnny Cash sold out," he says. "But that's not right. The Johnny Cash Show on TV was an amazingly generous act, a great gift to the world. Bob Dylan goes on and on about this. It saw him moving from the fringes to the center of the stage. I used to see those shows in America, and that's when I became a fan."
Nick Cave was a twelve-year-old living in Australia. "I used to watch it with my parents," he says. "Up until that point I had basically been listening to children's music. Then I started to watch the Johnny Cash Show and from somewhere way down I understood that this music was talking about something different. To my young mind, Johnny Cash appeared to be an outlaw. His voice had so much weight. The idea of this guy doing songs that were about God, murder, and love, and getting away with it, seemed like some kind of an achievement."
The summer series coincided with the release of Johnny Cash at San Quentin, which soared to the top of the album charts. "Normally a summer replacement show like this would have died a quiet death," says Holiff. "But the hit single and album meant that people started watching the show in summertime. The idea of being at the Ryman Auditorium clicked, and people from all walks of life seemed to find his charisma very appealing." Happy with the summer ratings, ABC picked the show for the next season starting in January 1970 and lasting for seventeen shows.
They kept the format of the show consistent. Cash sang a selection of his better known songs, performed duets with guests, and then one with June, and for the finale, he would join the Carter Family and the Statler Brothers for a gospel song. The caliber of guests remained high with appearances by Ray Charles, Judy Collins, Roy Orbison, Roger Miller, Waylon Jennings, Burl Ives, Roy Acuff, and others.
In the middle came "Ride This Train," a filmed section focusing on a particular aspect of Americana: the Wild West, trains, religion, prisons, hobos, cotton picking, rivers, or the land. Cash, usually dressed in period costume and, in a relevant location, would talk to directly to the camera from scripts prepared by, among others, Merle Travis. Two or three pertinent songs underscored the narration.
This segment became his favorite part of the show and, according to producer Stan Jacobson, was the most popular with viewers. It helped position Cash as a curator of American traditions and a preserver of stories. "The train in the title became a symbol," says Jacobson. "We were saying to people—ride with us along this trail and we'll take you anywhere. These segments were really like the first videos."
Although Cash had a lot of control over the content of the shows, television naturally demanded some compromises. The greasy-haired punk with the irreverent line of banter at Folsom and San Quentin had to be cleaned up a little for family viewing. Instead of the dark three-piece suits he usually wore onstage, he started to wear long gambling jackets that he'd designed himself, shirts with ruffles and even bow ties. Instead of greasing his hair back, he began having it blow-dried and lacquered. He learned to fix the camera lens with a loving look and deliver prescripted lines. Even his once spontaneous welcome of, "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash" became ritualized into a James Bond-like opening sequence as he whirled round each week and delivered his signature greeting. "He learned the craft of performing on television as he went," says Holiff. "He learned how to smile differe
ntly. It took a lot of courage to do what he did and to do it well. The fact is that he was able to withstand the garbage that came out of New York about how he should do it, who his guests should be and all that."
Although the Johnny Cash Show wasn't designed to rehabilitate Cash, it did. The bad guy who stomped out lights, used profanity, kicked photographers, and smuggled drugs slowly transformed into a good guy who loved his wife, praised the Lord, and upheld the values of decent Americans. "The Man in Black became an embodiment, like Gary Cooper, of the American male's most flattering picture of himself," wrote Jack McClintock in Family Weekly. "[He was] the strong but gentle man who came from nowhere, excelled through talent and effort, indulged a spiritual weakness and was nearly ruined by it, but kept the faith and triumphed through strength and the help of a good woman."1
Stan Jacobson describes what he believes was the unequivocal reason for the success of the show: "Johnny, at the time," he says, "became the voice of America. He became the voice of a nation. It was during the Vietnam War when there were huge divisions, often along generational lines, but the older country music people loved him and so did the youth of America. The young people believed him. They saw him as a bit of a rebel and they liked that."
Kris Kristofferson, whose career got a further boost after appearing on the show in April 1970, watched the change from close quarters. When he first wrote home in 1966, bragging to his mother that he'd met his hero, Johnny Cash, she wrote back saying she was shocked that her son still idolized a man who everybody else just thought of as a dope addict and a felon. "By the time he did his TV show he was such a figure of stability," says Kristofferson. "It was like he was the father of our country. He was Billy Graham's friend. Presidents had respect for him. It was wonderful to see my mother change. I got an honorary doctorate from Pomona College, where I had gone to school, and John and June attended the ceremony. John had written her a letter and she came up to him and gave him a big hug. She was quite proud."