Johnny Cash: The Life

by Robert Hilburn

  By now there were more offers coming in for concerts and TV shows than Holiff could handle. Cash moved on from Carnegie Hall to England for a tour, during which he recorded the Holy Land songs for a radio special that would air after the album was released in December. He then returned to the Midwest for a series of dates that concluded with a benefit for Native Americans.

  Because of Bitter Tears, Cash had been approached even before the Folsom success to do a benefit that was scheduled for December 9 at the St. Francis Mission on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. On the following day he visited the site of the Wounded Knee Massacre, where in 1890 some 150 men, women, and children of the Lakota Sioux were killed and 51 wounded by members of the U.S. Seventh Cavalry. During this and other selected dates during the year, he was accompanied by a film crew who were gathering footage for a public television documentary, Johnny Cash: The Man, His World, His Music, by director Robert Elfstrom.

  When Cash sat down for his annual New Year’s Eve reflections, he was too close to the situation to appreciate fully that he had just finished one of the most remarkable years in pop history. He’d not only made what is perhaps the greatest country album ever—a work so powerful and rich that Rolling Stone magazine would one day name it one of the hundred best albums regardless of genre—but also recorded a gospel album that was light-years away from the conventional collection of hymns. Country music is filled with tales of Saturday night sin and Sunday morning salvation, but no country artist had ever addressed the subjects so forcefully in back-to-back packages.

  Cash didn’t forget the dark times—the death of Luther and of family friend Jimmy Howard, and the Orbison fire—but he felt that he had finally turned a corner in his life. Holiff was telling him he might get movie offers, and maybe even his own TV show. He was slowly emerging from the long nightmare of pills. And he had June. He decided he wanted to write down his New Year’s Eve thoughts for the first time.

  In a six-page note addressed “To myself” on the stationery of his House of Cash publishing company, he began: “I feel that this year, 1968, has been, in many ways, the best year of my 36 years of life. It has been a sober, serious year. And probably the busiest year of my life, as well as the most fulfilling.”

  He cited several significant moments, from his marriage to June and the Holy Land trip to the Folsom concert and the sold-out shows at Carnegie Hall and the London Palladium. He even mentioned that his concert fee had shot up from $4,000 to $12,000. He cited Wounded Knee and fishing on Old Hickory Lake, Ezra Carter, and the documentary as high points in his year.

  What the letter didn’t convey was his personal hunger and his fears—a craving in his own life for the redemption he outlined in his music. Looking back in 1972 on that note and others he wrote in 1969, 1970, and 1971, Cash dismissed most of them as superficial, too focused on material matters rather than on spiritual health.

  “Yes, congratulations John Cash on your superstardom. Big deal,” he wrote in 1972.

  “True you must be grateful for God’s showers of blessings, but regardless of all you have been quoted as saying to the contrary, you are too excited over your personal wealth, career successes and other vain, fleeting things.

  “OK.

  “I hereby resolve, asking God’s help, that I shall court wisdom more and more in this my 41st year. Especially heavenly wisdom.”

  The shift in his emphasis was profound. He highlighted the change in thinking in his 1975 autobiography, Man in Black, where he focused on his spiritual rededication. In it he referred to New Year’s Eve 1968 as a turning point in his life. Once again, he took poetic license. Rather than reprint the actual 1968 letter, he wrote a new letter expressing what he felt he should have written the first time, and he passed it off as the original.

  It read: “Dear Cash, Let’s look at 1968. You did all right in a lot of ways. You blew it in others….You stayed off pills but you’re still awfully carnal. You know what those little vices of yours are. Get to work on them before they multiply and lower your resistance to other temptations, like pills for instance. You still think about them from time to time. You need to pray more. You hardly ever pray. Big deals ahead in 1969, possibly a network TV show, but the biggest deal you’ve got is your family and home. You’d better hang with God if you want the other deals to work out….Your friend, Cash.”

  The “carnal” reference was surprisingly revealing. Despite the image that John and June painted in public, he was acknowledging the rockiness of their courtship and the fact that he had sometimes turned to other women. Some of those relationships had been serious enough, according to one Cash confidant, that four women were shocked when he asked June to marry him. They each thought he was going to ask them. One of the women was reportedly Anita.

  Even if the 1968 letter lingered mainly over his career accomplishments, he was starting to realize that it wasn’t enough simply to express his faith in his music and his frequent good deeds. He wanted to live up to his spiritual obligations. For years, his gospel recordings and even his spiritual statements were made in part out of a sense of duty; he was doing it for his mother and his brother Jack. But Ezra Carter did much to kindle his true spirituality through the hours and hours he spent reading the Bible with Cash and trying to explain how to reconcile the conflicts Cash felt between his personal ambition and his Christian humility.

  That process intensified near the end of another tour of Far East military bases with the USO. Cash was greatly troubled by the Vietnam War. His natural instinct was to support his country at all costs, but his visits to hospitals and talks with soldiers hit him hard, and he admitted his doubts to his brother Tommy. “Maybe,” he said, “they may be dying for a cause that isn’t just.”

  The soul-searching made him further question his own behavior. He was in bad shape physically by the end of the Asian tour. June told reporters he was ill; others feared he had relapsed. Just then, he bumped into an old friend, the Reverend Jimmie Snow, the son of Hank Snow and a onetime country singer himself.

  “We were in Vietnam and we got together and reminisced for a while,” Snow says. “It was pretty casual, but I could see something was troubling him. When he turned to go, he stopped and looked at me and asked if I’d call him when we got back home. He said, ‘I need to talk to you.’”

  Two weeks later, Snow went to see Cash at his house.

  “We talked about God for probably four or five hours,” Snow recalls. “He said he had slipped away from his faith over the years and he wanted to get back in touch with it, but didn’t know how. I took his hand and I said, ‘Let’s pray.’”

  Chapter 20

  The Johnny Cash Show and Superstardom

  I

  FOR THE FIRST TIME in a decade, Cash was waking up most mornings without feeling the need to reach for pills. The Far East trip reminded him how vulnerable he was and how much was at stake if he had another relapse. With the validation of the Folsom success and his relationship with June finally stabilizing, Cash wanted to embrace the moment, not escape from it. He felt reborn creatively in February 1969. During those four weeks he went into the recording studio with Dylan, recorded a second prison concert, and signed to host a weekly TV show. The last two projects had been in the works for months.

  Cash had no interest in returning to Folsom for a sequel even though there were several high-profile examples of successful live album sequels, including Belafonte Returns to Carnegie Hall in 1960 and Johnny Rivers’s Meanwhile Back at the Whisky à Go Go in 1965. Bob Johnston didn’t push the idea. He wanted Cash to feel free to explore his own creative instincts.

  The trail to San Quentin began in an office at Granada Television, an independent TV network in England. Geoffrey Cannon, who was also rock critic for the Guardian newspaper, was part of an ambitious “think tank” charged with coming up with “far out” programming ideas. The group, including Jonathan Cott, who was also serving as Rolling Stone’s first European editor, had a special affinity for documentaries
that placed music in a provocative cultural context. They had already contributed to The Doors Are Open, an acclaimed 1968 TV documentary that interspersed footage of a Doors concert in London with scenes from Vietnam and rioting in the United States to underscore the music’s reflection of the decade’s social upheaval.

  After hearing the Folsom album, Cannon thought of exploring the sociological ties between country music and prison life, but hopes to get Cash to return to Folsom for another concert were sidetracked when Holiff told the production team in late December 1968 that Cash had no interest in the idea. Even so, Cannon remained intrigued. “Nothing like a concert where a jailbird 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,” he says.

  Meanwhile, Holiff, always eager for more television exposure, began thinking about how the Granada project could build fans for Cash in England and, presumably, throughout Europe. When Cannon contacted Holiff a second time later that month, Holiff repeated that Cash had no interest in going back to Folsom. Just as Cannon was about to hang up, Holiff added, “But Johnny is going to San Quentin. He’d be happy to make a film with you there.”

  As Holiff worked hard to convince Columbia execs in New York that they should record the show for another album, the Granada team rushed to prepare for the February 24 performance. Things were moving so fast that Granada reps didn’t actually meet with Cash until two days before San Quentin.

  From his earliest days with Cash, Holiff felt that television was the key to gaining a wider audience, believing that seeing Cash was more compelling than just listening to him. In July 1965 Holiff pitched a TV series to CBS, hinting that Cash might be playing the lead in a new Edward Padula production on Broadway. (There were talks with Padula, who had produced Bye Bye Birdie, but nothing materialized.) Holiff had concentrated on CBS because it was the dominant U.S. network.

  ABC, however, was a distant third in the ratings and was looking for a way up. The network saw Cash as a way to piggyback on the success of CBS’s brightest new star, Glen Campbell, who hosted a weekly county music–leaning variety show. Not only were both male country singers with pop potential, but also they were both from Arkansas and about the same age. Even more important in ABC’s eyes, Cash, thanks to Folsom, was starting to create the same buzz in pop circles that Campbell had months earlier thanks to such crossover hits as “Gentle on My Mind” and “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.”

  Having no relationship with Holiff, Bill Carruthers, a director and producer who got his start in television directing the zany Soupy Sales show, approached Cash directly soon after Folsom hit the charts about doing a weekly variety show for ABC. Cash was torn. All the way back to American Bandstand and “Ballad of a Teenage Queen,” he knew how uncomfortable he could be if he wasn’t presented in the right setting and surrounded by compatible acts. But Holiff had done a good job convincing him of the importance of television to his career, so Cash decided to give it a try—if Screen Gems, the production company that would develop the show for ABC, agreed to some terms. Cash told Holiff he wanted to choose his own musical guests, and he didn’t want to move back to Los Angeles, where the Campbell show was taped. He insisted on the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville.

  Screen Gems was fine with the Ryman and assured Cash that his input on guests would be welcome, which, in the adrenaline rush of putting a show together, must have sounded like more of a commitment to Cash than it proved to be. The contracts were drawn up and the series was announced the first week in February. Cash would be the summer replacement for the Saturday night variety show Hollywood Palace.

  Two weeks later, Cash met with Carruthers to go over preliminary plans. When Cash then spoke to the press, his remarks seemed directed as much to Screen Gems as to his fans; in fact, his remarks sometimes conflicted with ABC’s own description of the show. According to a network press release, the show would draw guests from all fields, even rock, which was referred to as “Now Generation” music. In Los Angeles, Carruthers suggested that the show would be “85 percent music and some comedy too.”

  In Nashville, Cash told local reporters, “We will have three or four guests on each weekly show and although many will come from the popular field, the show will not be a major departure from the country music that we came from. If there is a theme to the show, it is to illustrate the contemporary nature of modern country music. So the integral part of each week’s show will be country music.” He made no mention of comedians, even though they were a component of most variety shows at the time.

  Though Cash’s success with Folsom swept away most of the strained feelings along Music Row left over from the 1964 “Ira Hayes” Billboard ad flap, there were still pockets of resentment among Nashville’s elite, and there was considerable grumbling about all this talk of non-country artists being featured, including Bob Dylan.

  II

  Dylan began recording his albums in Nashville with the Blonde on Blonde sessions in February 1966 at Bob Johnston’s suggestion, but his love of country music dated back to his childhood in Hibbing, Minnesota. He would listen to many of the same recording stars that Cash enjoyed in Dyess and in the Air Force, especially Jimmie Rodgers. During his teens, he was also spellbound by the music of Cash and other Sun artists. “Of course, I knew of him before he ever heard of me,” Dylan wrote years later about Cash. “In ’55 or ’56, ‘I Walk the Line’ played all summer on the radio, and it was different from anything else you had ever heard. It was profound, and so was the tone of it, every line: deep and rich, awesome and mysterious all at once.”

  Given their restless curiosity as artists, Cash and Dylan might have made shifts into folk and country, respectively, in the 1960s quite independent of each other. Just as Cash’s admiration for Dylan added enthusiasm to his embrace of folk music in the early 1960s, however, Dylan’s respect for Cash made Dylan’s transition from rock to country easier.

  Dylan’s move began in the fall of 1968, when he recorded the John Wesley Harding album not with the rock ’n’ roll crew who had joined him on Highway 61 Revisited but with two of the Nashville musicians Johnston had recruited for the Blonde on Blonde sessions, drummer Kenneth Buttrey and bassist Charlie McCoy. Except for “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight,” the album wasn’t full-blown country, but it was a softer and more rural sound than Dylan fans had come to expect. Dylan was ready to move even deeper into country when he returned to Nashville in February 1969 to record Nashville Skyline.

  While Dylan was in town, Johnston set up a separate session at the Columbia Studios for Cash, mainly, a conspiracy theorist might suggest, so that he could lure Cash and Dylan into a studio to cut some tracks together—and that’s what happened. After recording two songs on February 17, Cash was back in the studio the next evening when Dylan stopped by to say hello. Cash was delighted to see him, and they went to dinner. When they returned, they found that Johnston had rearranged the microphones and brought in some chairs and a table to give the room the informal feel of a music club. As Johnston remembers it, “When they came back and saw the little café setup, I knew they were going to sing together. They looked at each other and went out and got their guitars and started singing. People started yelling out song titles…‘How about this one or that one?’ I even yelled out songs too, and they came up with some. They were laughing and having fun.”

  It wasn’t a repeat of the “Million Dollar Quartet” sessions at Sun, where the artists just sang bits and pieces of old favorites, but it was close. Backed by Cash’s musicians, they opened with Dylan’s 1964 composition “One Too Many Mornings” and later traded verses on the even earlier “Girl from the North Country.” They followed with numbers identified with Cash, including “Big River,” “I Still Miss Someone,” and perhaps a bit playfully “Understand Your Man,” the song Cash wrote after stealing a Dylan melody.

  Then they turned to two Sun favorites, Elvis’s “That’s All Right” and Carl Perkins’s “
Matchbox,” before reaching into their country memory bank for two Jimmie Rodgers tunes as well as the country standards “You Are My Sunshine” and “Careless Love,” plus the gospel favorite “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.”

  When they finished, Johnston knew that the music was ragged; Dylan and Cash had messed up lyrics in places and lost track of the melody in others. But he felt that what he had was a wonderful piece of history. Here were two great figures in music having fun in an unguarded moment. It was magical, and Johnston was proud of being the catalyst that made it happen. To his immense disappointment, the only track to emerge officially from the session would be “Girl from the North County,” which Dylan used on Nashville Skyline.

  “Columbia didn’t want to put the sessions out,” Johnston says. “They cringed. The only thing they could hear was [that Cash and Dylan] were laughing in the middle of some songs or didn’t come out exactly together at the end of others. Maybe Columbia was just trying to protect their stars; they didn’t want to let people hear them like this—which was typical of how stupid record companies are. This was history!”

  It’s also possible that Columbia execs, without Johnston’s knowledge, had learned that even Cash and Dylan were uncertain about the album. Years later Cash referred to it as “musically inferior,” adding, “It’s not up to par for either one of us. I think [Bob] was embarrassed over that and I don’t blame him.” As with the “Million Dollar Quartet” sessions, however, tapes of the Dylan-Cash recordings eventually found their way onto bootlegs and became prized underground possessions for decades.