The Man Called CASH

by Steve Turner

  In May 1977, Hamon flew to Nashville and presented Cash with his associate of theology degree in a ceremony at the House of Cash. Cash gave a brief account of his conversion and performed a gospel song. Shortly afterward he approached Hamon to ask whether he could be ordained as a minister. "Johnny was going to Israel," Hamon says. "He wanted to baptize some people in the Jordan, and so we ordained him so that he would feel free to do it. A lot of people don't realize that he was really spiritual and that his spirituality and his life in Jesus Christ meant so much to him. People don't bring out that part of his life." Cash also used his new status as an ordained minister to conduct the weddings of a few close friends.

  Some people who'd known bad-boy Cash in his carousing days found the new religious, family-man version hard to take, preferring the irreverent, dangerous, and unpredictable man to the level-headed, abstemious one. "They'd rather I be in prison than in church," he admitted. They didn't like the fact that Cash no longer kept alcohol in his home, voiced disapproval of sex outside of marriage, and was on intimate terms with the political and religious establishment. These people felt slightly awkward because they no longer knew how to behave around him. Waylon Jennings commented to writer Peter Guralnick that Cash had "sold out to religion." The politically motivated folk singer Phil Ochs, who'd met Cash during his days hanging out in Greenwich Village, said, "He used to write a lot of good songs before he started hanging out with the wrong company there at the White House He was once one of the greatest living Americans. He now stands as proof that television can kill."

  By being a Christian in show business, Cash was performing a difficult balancing act, and there were few good examples for him to follow. He would be attacked by agnostics and atheists if he appeared too pious. He would be denounced by the religious community if he appeared too worldly. "There are times that I want to go off into the woods and cry, because what I feel is too big a load for me to carry," he once admitted. "We're only called to be Christians, and I don't feel any special calling, but I seem to have been given much by God. And much seems to be required of me."

  10

  The Beast in Me

  THE FIRST SIGNS OF A DISTURBANCE in Cash's otherwise placid new life came when he stopped attending Evangel Temple in 1977. The reasons he left are unclear, but he continued to grow uneasy with the way his celebrity status affected the church. Tourists came by to catch a glimpse of him and the church had to post signs forbidding photography inside the building. "We even had one guy who went to the altar to become a Christian," says Jimmy Snow. "John came up and knelt down and was actually praying with the man when the guy turned round and started to pitch him some songs. I couldn't believe it! John handled it very well."

  Now that he was ordained, Cash thought that the solution was to start his own church meeting at the House of Cash, but after a few months he faced similar problems there. "People came in flashing cameras," says Dr. Bill Hamon. "He felt so grieved because he thought it was dishonoring to God. He had a hard time going to any church without people taking advantage of him, so he closed the services down."

  After that he attended Hendersonville Church of God, pastored by John Cobaugh, who baptized John Carter Cash in the Jordan River when he was nine. Cobaugh also baptized Cash in the river that day, which was his third baptism. But his attendance there came to an end after about a year and a half, and he found himself again without a spiritual home.

  Although he struggled to remain involved in church, the discipline had helped stabilize his spiritual life. Belonging to a group and being accountable to a minister kept a check on his excesses, whereas solitary meditation in the woods involved no such responsibility. Organized Bible study at church was thorough and systematic rather than cursory and random. He acknowledged this when he was at Evangel Temple, saying, "My policy of aloneness and severed fellowship from other committed Christians would weaken me spiritually.. . . Jesus never meant for us to try and make it on our own. Missing it would leave me vulnerable and easy prey for all the temptations and destructive vices that the backstage of the entertainment world has to offer."

  In his second autobiography Cash remembered the early 1980s as the start of his drug relapse, but Marshall Grant says it began earlier, coinciding with the cooling of this intense evangelical period. Besides slowing record sales, there didn't appear to be any obvious triggers. He just started to scrounge pills from musicians he met on the road and was soon just as addicted as he had been in the mid-1960s. "If anything, it was twice as bad after he got back on in the late 1970s," says Marshall. "He would have been dead on more than one occasion if I hadn't have found him."

  Oddly enough, as this new decline set in, Cash developed a passion to write about the apostle Paul. His final course at Christian International School of Theology on the life of Paul had captured his imagination. Undoubtedly he saw himself in the story of this passionate Jew who persecuted Christians before undergoing a profound spiritual transformation while traveling the road to Damascus.

  Initially Cash envisioned a film, The Reborn Man, and then that idea changed into an idea for a novel, The Gospel Ship. Describing the apostle to Country Music People, he said Paul was "a man who suffered and hurt, but who was also highly spiritual. A man who had the strength of body and the power of will to overcome every obstacle in his path in order to accomplish his desired mission. He was always looking for new ground to cover and new places to go."1 It sounded uncannily like a description of Johnny Cash.

  Ironically, just as he began to explore the life of the man who recorded New Testament theology, Cash was almost always too stoned to put his own ideas on paper in a cohesive way. He read books, studied the Bible, and he even sought the wisdom of Bible scholars and the knowledge of historians, but he couldn't focus his mind long enough to create a narrative flow. Embarrassingly for Cash, Billy Graham would sometimes announce from the podium in front of mass audiences that his good friend Johnny Cash was writing a book about the apostle Paul and that he expected it to be one of the best books on the apostle.

  On August 16,1977, Elvis Presley died of a heart attack at his home in Memphis. At forty-two, he was only three years younger than Cash. His bloodstream contained a cocktail of eleven drugs. Hearing of the death, Cash issued a formal statement:

  June and I loved and admired Elvis Presley. We join his family, friends, and loved ones in mourning his death. He was the King of us all in country, rock, folk, and rhythm and blues. I never knew an entertainer who had his personal magnetism and charisma. The women loved him and the men couldn't help watching him. His presence filled every room he walked in. He, of course, will never be forgotten, and his influence will always be felt and reflected in the music world.

  For someone whose career had started alongside that of Elvis's and who had shared a manager, producer, friends, dressing rooms, and stages with him, Cash seemed oddly detached. According to Marshall Grant, this was partly due to the fact that Cash was back on the pills himself and incapable of deep emotional feelings.

  It was also partly due to the fact that the two men had never had a close friendship. They last met in Hollywood in May 1960 when Elvis was filming GI Blues on the Paramount lot and Cash was living in Encino. Richard McGibony (the songwriter friend who put up Cash's bond when he was arrested in Lafayette, Georgia), recalls Elvis being in Nashville in the 1970s and wanting to see the house on Old Hickory Lake, but Cash deliberately avoided him. "He just took off with me," he says. "He told me that Elvis and his goons were coming over but that he didn't want a whole lot of people hanging around."

  The rivalry that had started in 1954, when Elvis cut his first record with Sun, had continued through the years. Freddie Bienstock managed the music publishing company Hill and Range. Not only did the company have a British publishing deal with Cash, but Beinstock also collected songs for Elvis Presley, whose companies Elvis Presley Music and Gladys Music were held by Hill and Range. The one thing that Bienstock recalls about his many meetings with Cash is his curios
ity about Elvis and his success. "I think that to some extent he resented my relationship with Elvis," he says. "Even though Johnny wrote most of his own songs, he always thought I was giving the best songs to Elvis."

  Drugs dulled Cash's conscience—he engaged in his most excessive behavior only when drunk or high. When asked to explain his fall from grace in the 1970s after telling the world that he'd cleaned up, he said, "I never lost my faith during that time but I lost my contact with God because anyone on drugs or alcohol chronically [sic] becomes very selfish. You don't think about anyone else. You think about yourself and where your next stash is coming from or your next drink. I wasted a lot of time and energy. I mean, we're not talking just days but months and years."

  In the summer of 1978 Mother Maybelle's health deteriorated sharply. She had problems with her thyroid, circulation, and bladder, and the doctors predicted that she wouldn't outlive the year. They were right. She went to bed on the night of October 22, after playing a game of bingo and watching a rerun of "Bonanza" on TV, and didn't wake up. Cash had lost not only his mother-in-law and musical colleague, but his fishing buddy and one of his most dear friends. Three months later she was followed in death by Sara Carter, the last living member of the original Carter Family, thus closing a great chapter in the history of American music.

  In December 1978 he and June took part in the "Billy Graham Christmas Special" and in March and June of 1979 he appeared at Billy Graham crusades in Tampa and Nashville. In December 1979, he released the gospel double-album A Believer Sings the Truth, which contained the last recordings he'd done with Jan Howard.

  Columbia chose to celebrate Cash's silver show-business anniversary in 1979, although it had actually been only twenty-four years since his first release on Sun. His recording career was clearly flagging, and his music had become formulaic and uninspiring. He'd made his name with the boom-chicka-boom sound and seemed afraid to move too far from it lest he lose his distinction. Columbia decided to put him in the studio with Brian Ahern, a Canadian producer who had built his reputation working with Emmylou Harris and who had a sharp ear for delicate sounds.

  The resulting album, Silver, turned out to be one of Cash's better recordings. His voice had a fresh clarity, and there was a vibrant quality to Ahern's instrumentation. In addition to the familiar guitars, bass, and drums, there were flourishes of fiddle, banjo, trumpet, and even flugelhorn.

  Silver was the last Cash album that featured Marshall Grant. By early 1980 he'd been fired from the band that he'd helped form in 1954 as a twenty-six-year-old mechanic. Though Cash fired off the bitter letter that formally terminated the partnership, Marshall shared the feeling that things were at an inevitable end.

  Cash had his reasons for releasing Marshall. Wanting to grow musically, he thought that Marshall's style of playing was restrictive. He also decided that Marshall had become too controlling. He became suspicious that Marshall was not acting solely in Cash's best interests, and had become alarmed by the power Marshall wielded, taking on the responsibilities of a tour manager.

  As he slipped back into his drug habit, Cash probably also resented Marshall's attempts to restrict his pill-popping. Marshall had absolute disdain for drug abuse and little sympathy for those who partook. For him it was a simple question of restraint. "There was no excuse for it," he says. "I'm seventy-five years old and I've never tasted a drop of alcohol. I've been in the business fifty years and that's the proof that you can do it if you have the fortitude. If you want to make something of yourself and come back to your family then that's what you've got to do. It's a matter of self-control. That's all it is. That applies to everybody."

  Earl Poole Ball recalls the incident that he believes finally severed the relationship between Cash and Marshall. "They were all on the tour bus and Johnny was studying a map to find the place that we were going," he says. "Marshall then grabbed the map and said, 'Here. Let me show you where it is,' and I think that was just the topper on whatever else was going on. I think Johnny felt that he was losing control of his organization. Sometimes people have known each other for so long that they just can't sit down together and talk things out."

  From Marshall's point of view, Cash needed controlling. Marshall believed that he and June were the only people totally committed to saving Cash from himself, and that because they frequently had to step between Cash and the object of his selfish desires, they took the brunt of his venom. In many ways the men were diametric opposites—Cash being ruled by instinct and Marshall by reason. "He was at his worst at that time, even though they tell me that after I left the show he got even wilder," says Marshall. "June couldn't do anything with him and no one else cared."

  The formal end for Marshall came by letter via Cash's sister Reba. Ironically, it arrived at Marshall's home in Mississippi just as Marshall and his wife returned from buying Cash his silver anniversary gift. The cold dismissal angered Marshall and triggered an exchange of letters. "I got a rude letter from him," he says. "In fact, I got a lot of'em. But I sent him a couple too. It was an unfortunate situation."

  In June 1981, Marshall filed a $2.6 million lawsuit in federal court, charging Cash with breach of contract and slander. The pivotal breach of contract allegation centered on a claim that Cash had promised Marshall one hundred thousand dollars per year for the rest of his working life. The slander charges emerged from statements supposedly contained within the letters. Near the same time, in a separate suit, three relatives of Luther Perkins asserted that his estate had not received its full share of royalties.

  Cash's lawyer at that time, James Neal, the famed Watergate prosecutor, responded to Marshall's suit by arguing that a partnership never existed and that Marshall had been fired because he wasn't willing to learn songs or attend rehearsals. All that Grant will say of the matter now is that some of the news reports were inaccurate and that toward the end of Cash's life the two of them were reconciled. The case was settled out of court.

  Marshall also sought to have Cash barred from using the names "Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two" or "Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Three" because he considered himself an essential part of both bands. Whether in response to Marshall's action or not, Cash reformed his band, adding guitarist Marty Stuart, bassist Joe Allen, and trumpeters Jack Hale Jr. and Bob Lewin. He named it Johnny Cash and the Great Eighties Eight. He was ready to expand the basic sound identified with his music.

  In the midst of all these troubles, Cash was elected into the Country Music Hall of Fame, receiving his award from Kenny Rogers on October 13,1980. In his acceptance speech, he thanked his mother for her faith in him and encouraged younger artists not to "get caught in a bag" but to do things their own way. He added a warning that he hoped that he would provide them with competition for some years to come. At the age of forty-eight he was the youngest person ever to be elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame.

  Throughout the early 1980s, Cash flailed around in search of a new musical direction, seemingly unsure of where to land. He tried a back-to-basics approach with Earl Poole Ball as producer on Rockabilly Blues, but although the album received critical acclaim, it flopped commercially. "We had a lot of good songs," says Ball. "I thought that it was one of his better albums, but Columbia didn't get behind any of the three singles."

  Cash then tried his other traditional approach—an album of Christmas carols embellished with an orchestra and chorus—before trying his luck with veteran Nashville producer Billy Sherrill, who'd had great success sweetening up country music for the pop market with hits like Tammy Wynette's "Stand By Your Man" and Charlie Rich's "The Most Beautiful Girl." The resulting album, The Baron, was disappointing, and Cash regretted being pushed into recording such unsuitable material. He didn't have a hand in writing any of the songs, although Sherrill cowrote the title track and one other. "Sometimes you go in a direction that your producer convinces you that you need at the time," said Cash. "I listened to too many of those people. I know what I want when I get in the studio and I let too
many people tell me otherwise."

  Even while recording with Sherrill, Cash continued to cut tracks with Jack Clement, his long-trusted friend who'd supported him at so many other difficult junctures in his career. Cash remained virtually absent as a songwriter, coauthoring only one song. In retrospect, Clement believes that he overproduced The Adventures of Johnny Cash. "I put way too much echo on," he says. "I just love putting echo on Johnny Cash sessions, because it didn't matter how many instruments you put in there, his voice would still boom out. We used to call him Captain Decibel."

  Although he'd always studiously avoided hijacking the latest musical trend, Cash had always been open to new ideas, never forgetting that in 1954 as the new boy on the block, his style had been discarded as too simplistic by traditionalists of the time. His daughter Rosanne, who'd moved to Nashville after graduating from high school in 1973 and joined the Johnny Cash Show, was by 1981 an accomplished recording artist. Her album Seven Year Ache produced by her husband at the time, Rodney Crowell, had gone gold. June's daughter Carlene, who'd also been part of the show, moved to London and married British musician Nick Lowe, who later produced her albums Musical Shapes and Blue Nun.

  Through Rosanne and Carlene, Cash met a generation of musicians in the vanguard of the postpunk era, musicians who'd taken advantage of the spring-cleaning effect punk had to experiment with less obviously commercial forms of music. Nick Lowe played a crucial role in what, for convenience, became known as New Wave music. He cofounded Stiff Records, produced Elvis Costello's first five albums, wrote "What's So Funny 'Bout (Peace, Love and Understanding)" and with Dave Edmunds formed the band Rockpile. On one of his visits to Carlene in London, Cash cut a version of George Jones's "We Oughta Be Ashamed" with Costello (discovered in Cash's tape vault after his death and due to be released by Costello in 2004) and Nick Lowe's song "Without Love."