Once again, those around Cash were hoping that a corner had been turned. Less than six weeks later, however, he was in California during a tour break when he apparently fell asleep at the wheel of his camper, flipping the vehicle over on a highway near his house. He was cited for not having his driver’s license with him. Newport wasn’t until July 24, four months away, which left Holiff and Grant and the others with plenty of time to worry: Which Cash would show up?
Chapter 15
Newport, Bob Dylan, “Ira Hayes,” and Ballads of the True West
I
UNLIKE CARNEGIE HALL and the Hollywood Bowl, where all you had to do was rent the facility for the night, musicians had to be invited to play Newport. George Wein, a jazz pianist turned concert promoter, had operated the popular Newport Jazz Festival for years before starting the folk spinoff in 1959. In both ventures he was widely admired for choosing performers for their artistic credentials, not simply their record sales. Pete Seeger was a member of the original board of directors of the festival, which quickly became a crown jewel of the folk circuit.
While Holiff looked at Newport as part of his commercial strategy, Cash saw it as another chance to define his musical identity, and he spent days drafting set lists, searching for the right combination of songs. Considering all the time he spent with June, it’s understandable that he opted for a Carter Family song. When it came to his own recordings, the last thing he wanted was a greatest hits package; there’d be no “Teenage Queen” on a bill with Dylan. In the end, he didn’t even include “Ring of Fire.” The titles that were penciled in and erased from his worksheet leaned toward songs he felt strongly about, such as “I Still Miss Someone,” “Busted,” and “I Walk the Line.” He wouldn’t finalize the exact list until the day of the show. For the most part, the more than 225 musicians appearing at Newport, many of them amateur or semiprofessional, had grown up in the Southern folk culture. In putting together his set, he wanted to demonstrate his musical kinship with them.
In his overview of the 1964 festival, New York Times critic Robert Shelton stressed the populist spirit of the affair: “Prison-born work songs or blues were not merely interpreted this weekend, but were also brought here by singers who had been in the jails of Louisiana and Texas. Many of the performers had waged their personal war on poverty long before it became national policy. An effort was made throughout the festival to show the meaning of folk music in the lives and milieus of the people to whom it was not just a diverting intellectual game, but a vital form of cultural expression as well.”
For all the daring of Ride This Train and Blood, Sweat and Tears, Cash’s best work on the Columbia label had gone largely unnoticed by the cultural elite, as represented by such tastemakers as the New York Times and Time magazine, and aside from Shelton, there had been little media interest in the Carnegie Hall show.
But Newport was different. In the media’s eyes, there was a seriousness and historical measurement at work that deserved attention. Even if key publications chose not to send their own critics or correspondents to the festival, editors and critics would all read Shelton’s review of it and often base their future coverage of the artists on his recommendations. Thanks largely to Dylan’s appearance, there was so much interest in the bill that Newport smashed its 1958 attendance record of 57,000 fans when over 70,000 paid to see one or more of the weekend shows.
With all that at stake, Cash’s nerves started getting the best of him, which meant taking pills. He was scheduled to perform the night of Friday, July 24, on a bill with Joan Baez, the Chad Mitchell Trio, and Phil Ochs, but he was in such wobbly shape, he missed his flight from the West Coast. Holiff must have thought, Here we go again! Fortunately, Holiff was able to talk Wein into moving Cash’s spot to Saturday night, when he’d share the stage with Peter, Paul and Mary, who had replaced the Kingston Trio as the most successful folk group in the country.
Some of the festival veterans—aware of Cash’s history of missing shows—were miffed at Cash’s lack of professionalism, and Pete Seeger reflected this in his sarcastic introduction.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the next performer was supposed to be on the program last night, but he couldn’t get here,” Seeger told the audience. “He was way out on the West Coast and he found that, somehow, you can’t get from Nevada to Newport, Rhode Island, in one day. But he did get here tonight.” Cash wasn’t apologetic for his no-show on Friday. Without a word to the audience, he opened with two songs from his Sun Records roots—“Big River” and “Folsom Prison Blues”—before turning to “I Still Miss Someone.”
He didn’t look good. With his drawn face and his unfocused manner, he resembled a man on a wanted poster, and his tenacious gum chewing suggested a casualness that struck some as downright rude. As much as he wanted the folk audience endorsement, he was so doped up that he came across as distant, almost condescending, as he looked out at a sea of mostly college kids no older than twenty-two.
However prickly his manner, Cash’s voice was in good shape, rugged and authoritative.
According to observers, the crowd was caught up from the beginning. These college students had been listening to Cash’s songs for years—especially the Sun ones—and they welcomed a bit of rock ’n’ roll flash and aggression into the show. When he asked for a glass of water after his customized version of the folk standard “Rock Island Line,” someone in the audience asked if he didn’t want something stronger. “No,” he replied. “I don’t drink anymore.” Pausing, he added, “I don’t drink any less, but I don’t drink any more.”
Then he got serious.
“Got a special request from a friend of ours to do a song tonight and I’m very honored,” he said. “I ain’t never been so honored in my life. I’m so honored I can’t [inaudible]. Hey, Bob. My good friend, Bob Dylan. I’d like to do one of his songs….We’ve been doing it on our shows all over the country…and trying to tell the folks about Bob. We think he’s the best songwriter of the age since Pete Seeger.”
He then launched into “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” changing Dylan’s “babe” to “gal” and adding his own tagline to the song: “I said just forget it from now on, Sugar, it’s okay.” After reaching back for “I Walk the Line,” Cash got to the centerpiece of his set: “The Ballad of Ira Hayes.”
“Ira Hayes was a great hero,” he told the audience. “The song was written by Peter LaFarge. It’s my latest recording on Columbia. We don’t try to be overly commercial with our records, but if you like it, it’s Columbia CL 1283.”
The order number was just made up, but Cash sang the song with a commitment and purpose that transformed his set. It was the moment he had been waiting for. This was his message for Newport. This was who he was and what he believed in. Cash closed with the Carter Family’s “Keep on the Sunny Side,” toning down the sing-along feel of the tune to emphasize its original spiritual foundation. Then he was gone—just twenty minutes, but charismatic and inspiring.
“Ira Hayes” was a revelation for an audience that knew Cash chiefly for his hits, as good as “I Walk the Line” and others were. Again, his early days at Sun helped him here. He was to this young audience a link to rock’s magical beginnings—the larger-than-life figure who once stood with Elvis and Jerry Lee. It was thrilling to discover him still relevant and dynamic.
Some of the old-line folkies were skeptical when Wein added this country star to the Newport bill, but the musicians embraced him warmly. Performers came from all over the festival grounds to watch his set. Afterward, they rushed up to congratulate him backstage. “No matter where you were or what you were doing, every musician that was there came to watch Johnny perform,” folksinger Tom Paxton said. “Just a magnificent performance,” George Wein declared.
For Grant, the concert was another example of Cash’s ability to reach out and connect with audiences, however diverse. Whether he was singing to soldiers in Korea or convicts in California, blue-collar workers in the Midwest or now college-age fol
k fans, Cash was welcomed as a comrade. “People believed in Johnny Cash,” Grant said. “They didn’t just like his music. They believed in him.”
Cash’s chief memory of the post-show activities was a gathering in a hotel room with Dylan and Joan Baez, who were so happy they “were jumping on the bed like little kids.” They traded songs for hours. At one point, Baez turned on a tape recorder and Dylan played two songs for Cash, “It Ain’t Me, Babe” and “Mama, You’ve Been on My Mind.” In return, Cash gave Dylan a guitar.
In his Times review of the Newport festival, Robert Shelton singled Cash out: “The Nashville star closed the gap between commercial country and folk music with a masterly set of story-telling songs.”
The cultural elite had spoken: Johnny Cash was a major artist. He was on his way to becoming the most important figure in country music since Hank Williams.
II
Cash wasn’t testing “Ira Hayes” at Newport. He had such faith in the song and its message that he had already finished a concept album about the treatment of Native Americans. Folk music had already adopted the civil rights movement as a cause: Dylan and Baez sang at the historic March on Washington in the summer of 1963, during which the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. gave his landmark “I Have a Dream” speech.
There was, however, little outcry about Indian rights. Cash had already written one sympathetic song about Native Americans, and he found in “Ira Hayes” a song that didn’t merely touch on the Indians’ plight but exposed it in modern times. Bigotry wasn’t just an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century problem, he felt; it was a twentieth-century disgrace. The more he thought about the song, the more he saw it as the foundation of an entire album.
Eager for additional inspiration, he visited Ira Hayes’s mother on the Pima reservation in Arizona. The woman was so touched that she gave Cash a small black stone that became translucent when put under a light. Known as an “Apache tear,” the stone held deep symbolism in the Pima culture, and Cash had it mounted in a gold chain and hung it around his neck. He wore it on the day he recorded “Ira Hayes” in the first week in March.
Cash invited Peter LaFarge to attend the session. Like Dylan, the songwriter had been a fan of Cash’s since the Sun days, and he was flattered that Cash was recording the song. While LaFarge was in Nashville, Cash spent hours with him, going over other songs with even more tenacity than he had shown during the Ride This Train period.
It was easy to see why Cash and LaFarge would connect. They were about the same age (LaFarge was a year older), shared an empathy with Native Americans, and they viewed music as their life’s mission, a validation. They also shared a restless, illicit-substance-fueled wild streak that made observers fear they could both self-destruct.
Yet there were differences. Compared to Cash, LaFarge was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. His father, Oliver LaFarge, was an anthropologist who was educated at Harvard and whose roots in America went back to the Mayflower. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1930 for a novel, Laughing Boy, a trailblazing love story that treated Native Americans with dignity rather than depicting them as villainous or backward. He eventually served as head of the Association on American Indian Affairs.
After his parents divorced in 1935, Peter’s mother, who was independently wealthy, moved with him and his sister to Colorado, where she bought a four-thousand-acre ranch and remarried. Restless and independent as a teenager, Peter joined the rodeo circuit and then went into the Navy. Returning to civilian life, he tried to build a career as an actor and playwright in New York City. He was in his late thirties when he finally got turned on to the burgeoning folk scene, finding in the music of Cisco Houston and Woody Guthrie a focus on history and social purpose that enabled him to put into song his feelings about life in the West and about Native Americans.
Not fully understanding LaFarge’s history, Cash saw him as an authentic voice of the Indian people, someone who had experienced much of the discrimination he wrote about. “Peter was very proud of his heritage and he was adamant about the wrongs that his people had suffered over the years,” Cash mistakenly said of him. In return, LaFarge would salute Cash in an essay for the May 1965 issue of the folk magazine Sing Out! He declared that Cash had the “heart of a folksinger in the purest sense.”
In putting together the album he titled Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian, Cash turned to four other LaFarge compositions: “As Long As the Grass Shall Grow,” which criticizes American presidents through history for breaking treaties time and again; “Drums,” a proud salute to American Indian culture over the years; “White Girl,” a look at the prejudice that thwarts a relationship between an American Indian and an Anglo; and “Custer,” a savage portrait of the general who was treated in school textbooks as a hero for his slaughter of Native Americans.
To that foundation Cash added two of his own songs, “The Talking Leaves,” another look at government betrayal, and “Apache Tears,” a tale of suffering which likely was inspired by the stone he received from Ira Hayes’s mother. The final song, “The Vanishing Race,” was credited on the album to Johnny Horton.
When it came time to go into the studio, Grant and the others were on edge. They knew how much this album meant to Cash, but they had seen him blow off so many sessions that they wondered if he could pull himself together this time. Grant feared the worst when Cash entered the studio on June 29. He still looked gaunt and pale, his eyes sunken. “You can see it all in that cover,” the bass player said, referring to the photo on the Bitter Tears jacket. “Look at it closely. Look at his face, skin, bones, his elbow; that’s what we’re dealing with.”
Despite his appearance, Cash was ready for the test. He had arranged his schedule so that he would have three days free before the session—just to rest. It worked. Grant would later marvel at how focused his friend was. “Sometimes when we went into the studio, he was still searching for what he wanted to do,” Grant said. “He’d try one thing, then just the opposite. He’d come up with a song, and then go on to another. But this time, he knew what he wanted. It was John at his best.”
III
After the runaway success of “Ring of Fire,” Cash believed that he’d be on the charts with every new release. “The Matador” and “Understand Your Man” were solid hits, so he couldn’t believe the feedback from Columbia promotion men in mid-June 1964: DJs weren’t playing “The Ballad of Ira Hayes.” Billboard expected so little of the record that the magazine didn’t write about it all—the first time that had happened to Cash.
He was angry, not just at the DJs but at his record company. Likely egged on by Holiff, he didn’t feel that the company was promoting the record hard enough. He still believed that if Columbia had done more for “Busted,” he might have had the Top 10 hit in 1963 rather than Ray Charles, whose highly orchestrated version came out a few months later. He didn’t want to miss out again with “Ira Hayes.”
When Holiff pressed Columbia, the radio promotion staff told him the song was too long; for programming reasons, DJs preferred records that ran two to three minutes, and “Ira Hayes” ran just over four. But Cash didn’t accept that excuse; Marty Robbins’s “El Paso” ran more than four and a half minutes, and DJs jumped all over it.
Cash’s single did show up on the Billboard country chart—which was based on sales and radio airplay—on July 11, but at an unspectacular number forty-two. By contrast, “The Matador” and “Understand Your Man” had entered the same chart at number twenty and number thirty, respectively. “Hayes” climbed to number eighteen two weeks later before falling to number twenty. To reverse the slide, more radio airplay was deemed essential.
Hugh Cherry, a veteran country DJ with a maverick spirit to match Cash’s, shared Cash’s fury. Cherry, who wrote the liner notes for the Bitter Tears album, believed that the Columbia promotion staff was, in essence, missing in action. “They were gutless,” he said. “They found a lot of resentment from country DJs over the subject matter; they feared their conservative
listeners would tune out, so they buried the record, and Columbia just rolled over. They could have pressured them in all sorts of ways, but ultimately they decided against it because they didn’t want to alienate the program directors.”
While Holiff vowed to keep working on the label, Cash struck out on his own by contacting Johnny Western, who, with partner Pat Shields, had set up a radio promotion company called Great Western Associates in Los Angeles.
“Johnny wanted us to do what the record company should have done—going back to the disc jockeys and fighting for the airplay,” Western says. “We sent another copy of the single to every DJ we had in our address file, regardless if it was a big station or a little station. Johnny felt so strongly about the song he came over to the office and signed dozens and dozens of personal notes to disc jockeys, saying things like ‘I really need your help on this one, pal,’ and ‘Give it a shot. Love, Johnny.’”
Included in every packet was a four-page brochure with the photo of the flag being raised on Iwo Jima and lines from the songs on the front and the slogan “NOBODY BUT NOBODY MORE ORIGINAL THAN JOHNNY CASH” on the back. Inside, the brochure contained a transcript of an editorial that ran on country radio station KHAT in Phoenix, praising Cash for doing a “magnificent job in recreating” the tragic story of Ira Hayes: “We wonder if, in years to come, people from all over this great nation of ours, when they visit Washington D.C. and pause before the statue of the Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima, won’t softly start humming ‘The Ballad of Ira Hayes.’”
The mailings were tied to a full-page ad Cash took out in the August 22 issue of Billboard magazine attacking radio’s resistance to the record. During what he admitted was a substance-induced rage, he drafted an open letter to all the disc jockeys who weren’t playing the record, especially those at pop stations.
Johnny Cash: The Life Page 29