by Steve Turner
The abuse was a source of the pain that Cash was always trying to heal, but he learned things from his father—like respect for elders and love of his country—that he desired to emulate. However, Cash was determined to be different with his own children. He avoided violent punishments, praised them endlessly, and often professed his love. He preferred to correct their behavior by talking with them or writing them letters, even when they lived in the same house. Asked in 1979 how he'd like to be remembered in one hundred years, he said simply, "I'd like to be remembered as a good daddy."
Cash felt guilty that he hadn't been around as his girls grew up and worried that his behavior had negatively affected them. (By 1986, three of his daughters had already been married and divorced.) For a short time, he regularly sent questionnaires that required them to search through the Bible for answers. "I think it always bothered him that he had made some mistakes," says Tara. "Looking back I think that sending us these questions was a really sweet way of trying to get us to pay attention to what he was trying to show us."
John Carter was the main beneficiary of his improved parental skills, not only because he was taken on the road from earliest childhood and so enjoyed the company of both his parents, but also because Cash was able to do everything with him—from playing with toys on the living room floor to hiking in the woods and taking fishing trips in Alaska.
SINCE LEAVING THE BETTY FORD CENTER, Cash had been clearheaded enough to return to his manuscript about the apostle Paul, and in March 1986, he completed it during a writing stint at the farm in Bon Aqua, Tennessee—his two-story country retreat outside of Nashville. For someone used to telling stories in three verses and a chorus, a ninety-thousand-word novel had been an ambitious task. His favorite novelists were James Michener (The Source), Colleen McCullough (The Thorn Birds), Jack Higgins, and Stephen King. He was a great lover of historical fiction, and even in his last days was reading Aztec, by Gary Jennings, on a magnified image projector. He modeled his novel of the apostle Paul, The Man in White, on the biblical novels he'd first read when he and June married: The Robe by Lloyd C. Douglas, The Silver Chalice by Thomas B. Costain, and Ben Hur by Lew Wallace.
The publication of The Man in White coincided with news that Columbia would not renew its contract with Cash. After thirty-one years as a recording artist (twenty-eight of them with Columbia), Cash was suddenly a man without a label. Columbia's Nashville head, Rick Blackburn, cleaned house and Cash was one of the casualties. The reason was basic. Cash was no longer selling records in large volumes, and radio stations pursuing the coveted eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-old market share, didn't think a fifty-four-year-old (whose first hits appeared on the charts in the 50s), should top their playlists.
"They didn't care for what he was putting out," says Lou Robin. "When John's contract expired, Rick Blackburn called me and told me he wasn't going to renew it. I was a little surprised. I'm sure that Rick had been given orders from higher up."
It was 1986, and Cash's statistics as a solo artist didn't help his case. He hadn't had an album in the (pop) Top 200 since One Piece at a Time a decade before. Columbia argued that shifting demographics left little hope of a career revival, especially since his songs were plowing the same old furrows. He argued back that because Columbia lost faith in him, they stopped promoting him—so they were to blame for the poor sales figures.
Cash hadn't made it easy for himself. He'd clearly lost his enthusiasm for recording and often skipped the mixing sessions. Even his staunchest fans considered one of his last singles for Columbia, "The Chicken in Black," rock bottom (he actually dressed up in a superhero blue cape, yellow jersey, and tights for the video, which was shot at Citizen's Bank in Nashville). In 1988 he admitted to Bill Flanagan of Musician magazine that the song was indeed awful, but he blamed it on producer Billy Sherrill. "I hated it from the first day and I refuse to admit that I even know the words to it anymore. It was an embarrassment. Every once in a while I'll do something that embarrasses me, like anybody. It's good to let the people know you have a sense of humor."1
There may be some truth to the amended story since the B side of that release, "The Battle of Nashville," was an undisguised attack on the record company:
Many times I've regrouped my emotions
And smiled through the struggle and pain
And made believe I'm all together
Just like I'm doing again
But my little defeats keep on coming
Cause you keep on holding the line
I'm losing ground with you daily
And it's just a matter of time.
And the Battle of Nashville is raging
There's a troubling deep in my soul
Here's my swan song for Music City
Cause my forces are out of control
I have hoped against hope that you'll love me
And my heart won't give up the fight
So the Battle of Nashville continues
And pray you'll surrender tonight.
("The Battle of Nashville," 1984)
Despite the layoff from Columbia, Robin remained upbeat with the press. He said that they already had a lot of interest from other labels and reminded them that Cash was far more than just a recording artist—he was a touring performer, a TV host, an author, and a movie actor. On August 2 1 , Cash signed a new deal with Polygram Records in Nashville, to release his records on the Mercury label.
Polygram Nashville's president, Dick Asher, and vice president of marketing, Steve Popovich, both got to know Cash while working for Columbia. Their view was that Cash was a prestige artist and that the association with him would be good for their Mercury label. They also thought Cash could sell some records if handled well. "We knew that Columbia was about to drop him," says Popovich. "There was a change about to happen. As Rick Blackburn put it, the torch was about to be handed to another generation. I was always totally against this idea of getting rid of these older artists. They were the people who had built country music and they had millions of fans."
For his first Mercury album, Johnny Cash Is Coming to Town, he worked again with Jack Clement, whom he regarded as something of a talisman in his career but others thought had steered him away from his vision by going for the lightweight and the obviously commercial. Clement had produced "Ballad of a Teenage Queen" and "I Guess Things Happen That Way" when Sam Phillips lost interest in Cash at Sun, helped restore Cash's reputation at Columbia with his work on "Ring of Fire," and was around to supply songs for Everybody Loves a Nut after Cash was arrested. He produced The Adventures of Johnny Cash. He was almost family.
David "Fergie" Ferguson, an engineer who played an important role in the last ten years of Cash's recording life, came along as Clement's assistant. "He wanted attention," says Ferguson. "Columbia had slammed the door on him. He was happy to have a new buddy engineer and to be working with Jack Clement again. He recorded the songs he wanted to record and was happy to be sparing no expense on recording and to be able to use any instrumentation he wanted to. He loved all that. He was having a good time but he was disappointed because every time we recorded something nobody would do anything with it. He made great records but nobody would push them. That's the pity of it." Interviewed in 2000, Cash confirmed that working with Jack Clement in the 1980s was "the happiest period of my recording career."
Johnny Cash Is Coming to Town was promoted as Cash's comeback album, but in 1988 he commented, "That's what they said, but that album didn't make it very big. If I'm going to make a comeback recordwise, I've still got that comeback to make. But meanwhile I'm doing what I enjoy; so what's the difference? I've always done what I wanted to do. I've never looked at the charts and grieved because my name wasn't in there."
Cash's next recording was an album of duets, Water from the Wells of Home, which started with a song he recorded with June, "Where Did We Go Right?" followed by the title track, co-written with John Carter. Also on the record were songs with Roy Acuff and Glenn Campbell. "Then I was in
the studio and Waylon came in, so Waylon and I did a duet," he said. "We got talking about other people I'd like to sing with; so I got Emmylou Harris and Hank Williams Jr. I have a track cut for my daughter Rosanne and the Everly Brothers."
When last at Cinnamon Hill he'd been visited by Tom T. Hall and Paul McCartney, and the three of them had written a song, which was also included on the album. When Cash was next in England he recorded it with the former Beatle at his studio in the West Sussex countryside. "It sounds terrific," Cash said the next day. "We were at my house right after New Year having one of our all-night singin's and guitar pulls on the front porch. We'd been singing for about six hours and the moon started setting and Tom T. Hall had this idea for a song called 'New Moon over Jamaica.' We wrote the song together."
The late 1980s also, unfortunately, marked the start of Cash's serious health problems. On May 16,1987, while playing a concert in Council Bluffs, Iowa, he stopped in the middle of his second song. He started to talk to the audience but found his speech slurred and indecipherable. Realizing something was horribly wrong, June stepped forward from the wings and escorted him backstage, where he remained for ten minutes. When he reached the coronary unit of Mercy Hospital, doctors there diagnosed an irregular heartbeat. The concert was cancelled. Photos of him coming offstage show him staring wildly, looking confused and afraid.
Cash's publicity team attributed the incident to exhaustion from his heavy schedule of recording, touring, and signings for A Man in White. Lou Robin confirmed that, though he had no history of heart problems, he did suffer from high blood pressure. He spent two nights in the hospital and then flew back to Nashville. He didn't play again until June 13.
In March 1988 he checked into the Eisenhower Medical Center in Palm Springs, California, to be treated for laryngitis and bronchitis. Then, on December 13, he went to Baptist Hospital in Nashville for a routine checkup and learned the following day that he had a 90 percent blockage at the junction of two coronary arteries supplying blood to his left ventricle. He needed immediate bypass surgery.
His operation started at 8:00 a.m. on December 19 and lasted for two hours. According to Cash, he smoked a cigarette thirty minutes before being given the anesthetic. Surgeons used blood vessels from his chest and leg to bypass the blockage. Waylon Jennings, who'd undergone the same operation exactly a week before, was resting in a private room after coming out of intensive care on December 17. Roy Orbison had died of a heart attack on December 6 at his Hendersonville home. Cardiologist Dr. Charles E. Mayes noted that the age and lifestyle of the singers probably contributed to their heart problems. Jennings was fifty-one, Orbison fifty-two, and Cash fifty-six.
Cash entered intensive care listed as "stable but critical" but then developed pulmonary problems over the weekend. Journalists were called and asked to prepare Johnny Cash obituaries, while June asked Lou Robin to fly in from L.A. on Christmas Day. Though apparently alert and able to watch television, he'd nevertheless suffered a setback. He wasn't discharged from the hospital until January 3, when he vowed to waiting journalists that he was going to change his lifestyle by exercising and giving up fatty foods and cigarettes. "It has been a great soul-searching experience for me," he said. "I never want to go through it again."
Cash didn't return to work until March 6, 1989, when he began recording a second album with Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson, and Waylon Jennings. His first concert since the heart operation came four days later at the Embassy Theater in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and he continued touring for the rest of the year. In Paris in May he was admitted to the American Hospital with what was described at the time as "a torn ligament," but which was in fact a life-threatening chest condition. "He was booked at the Zenith Theater and the doctors told him that whatever it was could have started a chain reaction and that he shouldn't perform," says Lou Robin. "They said it could kill him, but he played it anyway, and in fact he played for longer than he usually did. That's the way he was when someone told him not to do something. Then, after the show, I took him back to the hospital and he was kept in for three days."
In August, Cash was forced to cancel three dates in Washington and Oregon because of bronchitis and respiratory infections. On November 19, he entered Cumberland Heights Alcohol and Drug Treatment Center for a two-week course of "relapse prevention therapy." Thankfully, he recognized the warning signs of a potential relapse after the heavy doses of painkillers he'd taken following surgery, and took precautionary measures.
The words "Johnny Cash" and "hospital" were popping up together in headlines with worrying frequency. Many of his friends date his serious decline in health not to his heart surgery but to what initially appeared to be a minor problem. In January 1990 he had an abscessed tooth removed in New York, and instead of healing smoothly he developed a cyst between his gum and his jaw. Later in the month he required oral surgery to scrape the cyst from his jawbone. On February 7, while at the Grand Ole Opry hosting a TNN tribute to country music broadcaster Ralph Emery, he had to stop two-thirds of the way through the taping because of the extreme pain in his jaw. Concert appearances from February 15 to 24 had to be cancelled.
Despite the lingering pain, Cash appeared at the Country Radio Seminar at the Opryland Hotel on March 1 to take part in the first Highwaymen press conference. The group performed new songs, announced its new album Highwayman 2, and promoted its first tour—which would begin March 3 in Houston, Texas, and end March 17 in East Lansing, Michigan. Discussing the four personalities in the group, Kristofferson said, "Willie's the outlaw coyote, Waylon's the riverboat gambler, and John's the father of our country. I'm still trying to get over the image of being their janitor."
The Highwaymen, bound together by mutual respect and shared history, also maintained a sharp sense of rivalry expected of four men at the top of their profession sharing the same stage. "I think they enjoyed being with each other," says guitarist Reggie Young, who was the musical director for the tour, "but one of them would always be trying to outdo the other. There were some big egos involved. When the four of them sang parts of the same song they'd do joke things to throw the others off. For example, Willie would deliberately sing behind the beat so that it would throw Waylon off, and when Waylon came in he'd come in wrong."
Kristofferson, though not that much younger than the others, didn't get into the business until a decade later and always had the most jitters. He never quite got over the fact that the other three were already well established in their careers when he was still cleaning their cigarette stubs out of the studio ashtrays. Willie had written "Crazy" for Patsy Cline, Waylon had given up his seat on Buddy Holly's fatal last flight to the Big Bopper, and Cash had toured with Elvis. "For me, it was like being up on Mount Rushmore," he says. "It was like these legendary people were up there along with the janitor."
Cash played the tour in terrible pain, but he didn't discover until its end that the surgery had weakened his jaw so much that he'd accidentally broken it while eating a steak. He cancelled his European tour scheduled to start on March 22. The surgery to mend Cash's jaw proved unsuccessful, and he was forced to cancel the rescheduled European tour altogether.
The repeated operations and original damage to Cash's jaw, altered his appearance. The lower left side of his face seemed permanently swollen, and he developed a habit of leaning it into his collar when being photographed. The nerves in his jaw had also been permanently damaged, and he said it left him feeling like a blowtorch was being held to his chin.
ON MARCH 11, 1 9 9 1 , Cash's mother, Carrie, died at the age of eighty-six, six weeks after coming out of a hospital where she was being treated for cancer. It was a bitter blow for Cash, who cried publicly for the first time that anyone could remember. His mother had been the biggest single influence on his life. She had not only encouraged his music and taught him about Christian faith—both through her Bible reading and the example of her life—but she had convinced Cash that his voice was a gift from God.
By all accounts, sh
e led an unwaveringly dedicated Christian life and no one has a bad word for her. Rosanne remembers her as incredibly longsuffering. "As far as I know she was a saint," she says. "She was very much like my dad in that she suffered silently. She never said anything. She avoided confrontation at all costs." Marshall Grant recalls that "Carrie Cash was a wonderful lady who really knew no wrong and loved her family beyond anything. She was a gracious lady."
Carrie remained cheerful and optimistic despite the hardships of her life in Kingsland and Dyess, her husband's alcoholism, and Jack's unexpected, early death. She stood by Cash throughout his battles with drugs and yet didn't hesitate to wag her finger at him, reminding him of marital vows when he began his affair with June in the 1960s. Fortunately, she lived to see her son survive all the calamities and emerge as one of the best-known Christian laymen in America.
Cash, for his part, never forgot the debt he owed his mother. He knew that the best part of himself came from fulfilling the vision she'd had back in postwar Dyess, when she told him that God's hand was on him and that he had a special task to carry out. So convinced was he of her vision that it kept him going during the darkest days of his life. From the bowels of Nickajack Caves where he considered suicide, to the bed in intensive care after his double-bypass operation, the same thought stayed with him: "I can't die yet because God has more things for me to do."
Carrie was a constant presence in Cash's career. When he sang gospel songs and hymns, he was singing the songs she'd taught him to love. She twice played piano on the Johnny Cash Show and added vocals in the studio. Cash even wrote the sleeve notes for Silver as a letter to her, remembering the day she told him, "God has his hand on you, son." The letter ended: "There hasn't been a day passed in the last thirty years that I haven't recalled that scene in the kitchen with you, Mama, and the things you said and how you said it as if you knew. I remember that afterward, I nodded my head and almost said, I know it, Mama,' but I didn't. I just started singing. Now, after twenty-five years in the profession, I think maybe my voice is still suitable at times to be played on the radio. You still like it, don't you Mama? That's what matters to me."