by Steve Turner
"I think he was always interested in what was happening at the younger end of the market," says Rosanne. "He always loved being around young people. He said he learned more from nineteen-year-olds than people his own age. I'm sure that when I started having success that was a catalyst for him."
Toward the end of 1981, Cash faced two setbacks. In September, while walking through the animal park he'd created across the street from his lakeside home, he was attacked by an ostrich he'd named Waldo. Apparently the ostrich had recently lost his mate in the cold weather, and when the bird became aggressive, Cash attempted to ward him off with a long stick. Thinking he was being attacked, Waldo struck out with one of his feet and caught Cash on the right side of his stomach, cutting the skin open above his leather belt and breaking two ribs. As he fell, Cash landed on a rock and broke three more ribs.
He went to the hospital but kept the incident quiet, mostly to avoid the embarrassment of having been floored by a big bird. Though the idea of the broad-shouldered Man in Black being kicked into submission by an irate ostrich could have been the theme of a novelty song that Jack Clement might have written for Everybody Loves a Nut, the accident had serious and long-lasting consequences. Cash began taking painkillers and gradually, over the months, upped his dose until he was hooked. As he once explained it, "The label says one tablet every four hours but you eventually find you're taking four tablets every one hour."
Then Cash went to Cinnamon Hill for the Christmas holidays. On December 21, just as he and June sat down to dinner with their guests (his sister Reba and her husband Chuck, friend Ray Fremmer, John Carter, and his friend Doug Caldwell), three men with stockings over their heads burst through the open doors and demanded all their money and valuables. One carried a machete, one a knife, and the third a gun. They initially demanded one million dollars and said, if they didn't get it, they'd kill one of the family members. For four terrifying hours the thieves held them hostage, forcing them to lie on the floor. While two men guarded the group, the third escorted each of them, in turn, around the estate, demanding an inventory of the property most worth stealing. Finally the thieves bundled them into a basement storage area and escaped in June's Land Rover with an estimated fifty thousand dollars in haul.
They freed themselves from the room by battering down the two-inch-thick mahogany door with a coat tree and summoned the police. Almost immediately, the authorities caught two of the men trying to board a plane to Miami at Donald Sangster International Airport. They apprehended the third suspect in Jamaica on January 5, but he was killed while resisting arrest. The two men who were jailed later died trying to escape. A rumor circulated that authorities allowed the escape to facilitate a speedy but legal solution to the potentially embarrassing situation for the Jamaican government. Prime Minister Edward Seaga apologized personally to Cash for the ordeal.
The experience shook Cash, especially because the gunman had selected eleven-year-old John Carter as his intended murder victim. He'd remained extraordinarily calm though, and his lack of panic probably ensured their safety. Their homecoming must have been particularly joyous when they returned to Nashville on January 9 for a ceremony renaming a five-mile stretch of Gallatin Road (between Drake's Creek Lane and Shute's Lane) Johnny Cash Parkway.
In 1983 Cash returned to producer Brian Ahern, who tried to revitalize his sound by bringing him out to Hollywood to record with some of the city's top session musicians, including drummer Hal Blaine, guitarist James Burton, bass player Jerry Scheff, and fiddle player David Mansfield. The title track, "Johnny 99," and the opening track, "Highway Patrolman," both came from Bruce Springsteen's recently released, stripped-down recording Nebraska, which, ironically enough, had been written by Springsteen after repeated listens to Cash's early Sun recordings.
Springsteen, a longtime Cash fan, also wrote about blue-collar life, social entrapment, and the need for redemption. "I think Springsteen says it better than any of us did," Cash said.
He's the master of these kinds of songs. He's such a prolific writer. I guess youth has got a lot to do with it. When I was in my twenties and thirties I was writing more. It's not that I don't have the inspiration, it's just that when I write something I'm more thorough than I ever was. They take me longer to finish. In the fifties I would leave them exactly as they came to me, but now I'm aware of the competition of writers like Bruce and so I work on every line until they're to my total satisfaction. I want my songs to be as good as theirs.
There was something ironic about Cash, the great innovator, trying to emulate the work of artists who'd originally been inspired by him. Cash's own writing barely came through on his recordings. Of the five albums from Silver to Johnny 99, he'd contributed only seven songs and increasingly relied on the work of younger songwriters like Tom T. Hall, Rodney Crowell, and Billy Joe Shaver.
He still hadn't abandoned his acting ambitions. In 1981 he'd received a lot of critical acclaim for his role in the CBS-TV movie The Pride of Jessi Hallam, which focused on the problem of adult illiteracy. In 1998 he appeared in Murder in Coweta County, a made-for-TV movie based on a novel about a sheriff who attempts to bring a corrupt Georgia land baron to justice. Cash had spent seven years trying to get a network interested in filming this story.
On November 10, 1983, while in Nottingham for the tenth stop on a twelve-show European tour, Cash began hallucinating from the combination of drugs and alcohol. Back in his hotel room with June, he became convinced that the wooden wall panels concealed a pull-down bed. June told him not to be ridiculous, but Cash was so sure of what he saw that he began repeatedly punching the wall, because the "bed" wouldn't budge.
He hit the wall with such force that he cut his hand. It became so swollen and infected that, by the time he returned to Nashville three days later, he required surgery. Checking into Baptist Hospital for the operation, he learned that he had a much more serious condition—he was suffering from internal bleeding and needed his duodenum and part of his spleen, stomach, and intestines removed.
Although he'd packed his own stash of Valium and Percodan, these pills became unnecessary once doctors prescribed morphine. Besides relieving his pain, the drug gave him intense hallucinations. He began imagining the hospital as a gigantic plane taking off, circling through the air, and landing. At times he'd react so violently to his imagined flight that he'd flail his arms and knock down the poles holding the IV drips.
Meanwhile, those closest to Cash used the opportunity to make plans to admit him to the Betty Ford Center. A doctor from the center flew to Nashville to facilitate an intervention. In his private hospital room, his inner circle attempted to show him, in the clearest terms possible, the effect his selfish behavior was having on those he loved and who loved him. His wife, mother, and children all participated, each having written out a specific example of how his drugs had affected them.
"We had to tell him how he was hurting us," says Rosanne. "We told him that it was making him seem distant from us. We told him that we couldn't connect with him when he was in a state like that, that we didn't like the way his personality had changed, and that we all worried about his health and were afraid that he was going to die." John Carter told him how humiliated he had felt when he brought a friend home and his dad was stoned.
The challenging session concluded with a simple statement from the doctor: "We all want you to go to the Betty Ford Center." Cash was humbled. He knew that the statements they'd read to him weren't written out of vengeance but out of love and concern. He agreed to go. "It was pretty heavy," says Rosanne, "but he just sat there and nodded."
Treatment at the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, California, close to Palm Springs, is based on a Twelve Step philosophy. After a complete medical and psychosocial assessment, doctors and patient devise an individualized plan. Patients live in a dormitory and receive no privileges, regardless of their status in society. Celebrity or not, Cash had to make his own bed and vacuum his own room. When he and fellow guest Elizabeth Taylor pla
nned a New Year's Day party complete with ordered-in delicacies, the head of the center stepped in and banned it. "Neither of them was used to having anyone tell them what they could or couldn't do," says Lou Robin's wife, Karen, who visited Cash during his stay. "But they got through it. June was surprised that Johnny acquiesced so quickly."
The Twelve Step philosophy requires that addicts acknowledge that they cannot control their own lives without recognizing "the Power greater than ourselves." The Betty Ford Center distinguishes this "spiritual" approach from a "religious" cure. The center's literature emphasizes, "Particular religions, while honored, are separate from the treatment experience, and no specific religion is promoted." When it refers to "God" the philosophy is quick to add "as we understand him."
For Cash, who naturally interpreted the Twelve Steps within a Judeo-Christian framework, nothing clashed with his convictions. The first step forced him to admit his powerlessness over his addiction. The second step, accepting that the "Power" could restore him, led naturally to the third step, in which he had to commit to turning his life over to the "Power." The program sounded as familiar as the voice of Hal Gallop back in Dyess or Jimmy Snow in Madison. He thought he'd learned this lesson in Nickajack Cave the day he'd wanted to end it all.
The fourth step required him to take a moral inventory before he could, as the fifth step, admit to himself and one other person the nature of his wrongs. By the sixth step he had to be ready to have these defects (or sins, as he would have seen them) removed, and by the seventh, he had to ask the "Power" to do so. So far it was almost like an altar call.
The eighth step involved listing everyone he'd harmed and being willing to make amends. Actually making those amends completed the ninth step. For the tenth step he had to take another personal inventory and admit any further wrongs and for the eleventh step he had to solidify his bond with the "Power" for guidance and strength. Finally, he had to apply these principles to every area of his life and seek to carry the message to others in the same situation.
He stayed at the Betty Ford Center for forty-three days. After three weeks, he found himself coming alive and enjoying the journey of self-discovery. During Family Week he was joined by June, John Carter, manager Lou Robin, and agent Marty Klein, who sat in on sessions in order to monitor progress. "We had to go through all the procedures that they were doing over five days," says Robin. "In some of those sessions people laid their souls so bare it was embarrassing. The idea was that they would get up in front of the public and talk about themselves. It was a big step."
Lou Robin picked up Cash from the center upon his release and took him straight to a hotel restaurant in Palm Springs, where they were joined by Gene Autry. Cash had lost weight, looked more fit than he had in years, and had all the zealousness of a convert to a new way of life. After reuniting with June in L. A., he played a concert that night with Waylon Jennings at the Universal Amphitheater and afterward tried to persuade Jennings to give up his cocaine habit. "I just want you to see my bright, brown eyes to show you what can happen," he told him. "If you ever want help, I know what to tell you to do."
According to Karen Robin, the new Johnny Cash took some getting used to. "Johnny and June had to work on their marriage after he came back from Betty Ford," she says. "He wanted her to be totally accepting of him right away, and she had to tell him to hold back because she wasn't used to him being like this—so sober and lucid all the time and so excited by what he had learned. I think at first she didn't trust him to have changed so totally, but then she realized that he really had turned a corner. It was quite wonderful."
11
Riding the Highway
EVERY YEAR SINCE 1976, Cash hosted a Christmas special for TV. The first one, "Johnny Cash at Home," featured various sites around Hendersonville, including the House of Cash and his farm, Bon Aqua. Guests included Roy Clark, Tony Orlando, Merle Travis, Barbara Mandrell, and Billy Graham. Subsequent specials were filmed either at studios or partly on location: Israel (1977), Scotland (1981), and Memphis (1982).
In 1984 the special aired from Switzerland, where Cash ended a ten-date tour in Europe. His special guests, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Toni Wine, Connie Nelson, and Jessi Colter, flew in and stayed at the Montreux Palace Hotel on Lake Geneva. At the press conference, the inevitable question was asked: why a Christmas special from Montreux? What was the significance? "Because this is where the baby Jesus was born," deadpanned Waylon.
The special in Montreux laid the groundwork for a country music supergroup made up of Cash, Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson, and Waylon Jennings later known as the Highwaymen. The music producer for the TV show, Chips Moman, had, in October, begun recording an album with Cash in Nashville. "We were passing the guitar around, and John asked Willie why he'd made duet records with everyone in the business but him and suggested that they should do one," says Kristofferson. "Willie said that, if that happened, I should be there to pitch songs because, although Willie wasn't wild about my voice, he loved my songs."
The idea of the country supergroup may have come and gone had Cash not recorded Willie's song "They're All the Same" three weeks after returning to the States. The next day he cut Kristofferson's "Here Comes That Rainbow Again." While still at Moman's Nashville studio, Willie and Kristofferson, on the spur of the moment, called in Waylon to cut some tracks with them. Backing them were some of Nashville's most experienced session musicians, including keyboard player Bobby Emmons and guitarist Reggie Young. Before Christmas the quartet had recorded ten songs, including "Highwayman," a 1977 song by singer-songwriter Jimmy Webb that they'd played together informally in Switzerland.
"One thing led to another and the next thing we knew, we had an album," says Willie Nelson. "Then we found ourselves playing together onstage and having a . . . lot of fun. We are all fans of each other's work and that's why I loved it. I could stand onstage with three guys I really admired and respected and listen to them perform." The resulting album, Highwayman, and the title single both topped the country charts in 1985.
Work on Cash's album Rainbow was temporarily suspended, first for Highwayman and then for Heroes, an album of duets with Waylon, which Moman also produced. They didn't pick back up on Rainbow until after their debut concert at Willie's Picnic, an annual concert and cookout, in Austin, Texas. Almost immediately after the final session, Cash returned to Sun Recording Studio for the first time in twenty-seven years to record The Class of '55, a nostalgic album with Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, and Jerry Lee Lewis that was released by Polygram.
Another reason Rainbow took so long to produce was that Columbia had lost faith in Cash as a solo artist. By playing with the Highwaymen, he received some much-needed attention and even sold some other albums. Released without any promotion, Rainbow consequently died a quiet death. When interviewed years later, Chips Moman was convinced that it had never been released. Kris Kristofferson, who had two songs covered on it, has still never heard it. He was particularly puzzled when he read that Cash called "Here Comes That Rainbow Again" (the song that gave the album its title) his favorite song, when as far as Kristofferson knew, he had never recorded it.
"The album was released but Columbia buried it," says Lou Robin. "Rick Blackburn, who was running the company in Nashville, was not interested in the stuff that John was doing and he was acting like 'judge, jury, and executioner.' When I sent him the final mixes he probably put out twenty thousand records, which is like one in every record store. It certainly wasn't going to be promoted."
BY THIS TIME RAY CASH had become seriously ill. Confined to his home in Hendersonville, he had almost completely lost his sight. Cash did a few scattered shows but managed to stay nearby much of the time, making the film The Last Days of Frank and Jesse James with Kristofferson and Waylon in and around Nashville.
Ray Cash had mellowed over the years, and the tough drinker who'd done so much to belittle his son was gone. He, now, without pretense, summoned his children and grandchild
ren to pray and sing gospel songs to him on his deathbed. "He was very sincere," says his daughter Joanne. "He asked us with tears. I feel assured in my heart that he made things right with God."
On December 23, at the age of eighty-eight, Ray Cash died. Courtney Wilson officiated at the funeral, which took place at First Baptist Church in Hendersonville. His gravestone held the same question engraved over his son Jack's final resting place: "Will You Meet Me in Heaven?" Cash had ambiguous feelings about his father's passing. On one hand, he had lost the man from whom he had inherited so much of his temperament, but on other hand, he was now finally free of the man responsible for so much of his self-doubt.
While he was alive, Cash showed his father nothing but the greatest respect—almost as if "honor thy father and mother" was the one commandment he was determined not to break. He never spoke publicly about his father's violence, verbal abuse, or drunkenness. Instead, he always appeared to go out of his way to shower his father with praise for his hard work, sacrifice, exemplary military service, and love of country. Whenever Cash introduced the song "These Hands" onstage, he always dedicated it to his father.
A decade later, when he wrote his autobiography, Cash, he made the startling confession that he rarely thought about his father anymore, and even though he passed the cemetery where his father was buried almost every day, he didn't visit his father's grave any longer. He told how his father never praised him until he became a star, and even then he never brought himself to tell Cash that he loved him. Cash revealed some of his violent behavior but made a point of remarking, "He never laid a hand on Jack or me either."
His father ruled supremely in the home. Questioning his behavior constituted insubordination. "The father was a pretty strong personality," says Saul Holiff. "I would say that Johnny was always intimidated by him."