When he went into the studio in Nashville in mid-January, he knew what song he wanted to record first for the gospel album—“This Train Is Bound for Glory,” a rousing song popularized in the 1930s by Sister Rosetta Tharpe, his longtime favorite. In fact, Cash would often describe her as his favorite singer—not favorite gospel singer, but favorite singer period. Her style was remarkably close to the flamboyance and spirit of rock.
To give a black gospel feel to the session, Cash brought in a mostly female vocal group, the Twenty-First-Century Singers, from Tennessee State University. Over the next couple of days he recorded two other tunes written by or associated with Tharpe. The edgy mix of sacred and sensual in Tharpe’s music made him think briefly about devoting half of the album to her songs, or maybe even to use the entire album to showcase black gospel music. In the end, though, he wanted to include too many of his own songs to make either approach viable.
He wished he could have devoted all his time to it, but there were always other commitments. After five nights on tour in Florida, on February 8, 1979, Cash returned to Jack Clement’s studio in Nashville to spend two days adding musical touches to the gospel tracks. Three days later, the musicians were again in Clement’s studio, only this time it was to work with Ahern on Silver. Switching back and forth between albums, the musicians sometimes found it hard to keep track of which album they were working on. At one point he had them recording for both the gospel album and the Ahern album on the same day.
While Cash was obsessed with the gospel tracks, the Ahern music could have suffered from a lack of energy, but the pills and Ahern’s strong will prevented it. The album’s songs were largely supplied by such Cash favorites as Billy Joe Shaver, Guy Clark, and Clement, and Ahern supplied him with some of the most dynamic musical foundations that Cash had enjoyed in years—musical backing that drew attention away from the damage the pills were doing to Cash’s voice. John even did one track with his old friend George Jones. The album sounded contemporary and sharp.
From the start, Ahern envisioned the centerpiece to be “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” a mystical Old West tale that had been a rumbling pop smash for both Vaughn Monroe and Peggy Lee in 1949. And Cash gave it his all.
After a few dates in the Midwest, he returned to Clement’s studio—this time for two quick days with Ahern, before sneaking in a day at the Columbia studio for the gospel album. This pace was enough to try anyone’s nerves, but Cash’s rapidly increasing drug use made it all the more stressful for Marshall and June.
Out of the blue, Cash informed Grant of new travel instructions: He wanted a suite with separate bedrooms for him and June. “I don’t know if he was nervous about us finding the drugs again or if he just needed more time by himself,” Grant said.
June tried to put a positive spin on it, explaining that she liked to watch TV at night, while John enjoyed reading or working on his songs. Privately, she felt deeply vulnerable and turned to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, for help in combating the constant anxiety. “Over the years, she and John had been treated at the clinic for various illnesses,” Grant said. “One of the doctors there who understood both of them pretty well told June, ‘Your biggest problem is being the wife of Johnny Cash. You’ll have to do something about that before we can do anything for you.’”
The line sounded eerily similar to what Vivian Cash’s doctor had warned a decade earlier.
Grant’s own unease was relieved when he learned that John wanted Marshall to sing with him on one of the songs for the gospel album, “I Was There When It Happened,” the song they had worked up for their Sun audition. It would be the first time Marshall’s voice was featured so prominently on one of their records. As he thought back on the gesture years later, he couldn’t decide whether John was thanking him for all the good times or if he was saying good-bye.
Everyone, especially Cash, got a brief reprieve from all the anxiety on a twelve-day European tour in March. The affection shown by the crowds helped reduce some of Cash’s stress. He was especially beloved in Ireland, where his song “Forty Shades of Green” had become something of a national anthem. There was so much respect for Cash in Northern Ireland that battling factions in the ongoing Catholic-Protestant conflict called a truce to allow his performance in a Belfast church to proceed. Leaders of the opposing factions even sat across the aisle from each other. Cash learned just how temporary the truce was the next afternoon when a currency exchange booth was blown up just hours after he passed by it.
“Ghost Riders in the Sky” became a solid hit on country radio, eventually going to number two on the charts. But once again it was a false alarm; the single didn’t trigger any rush to buy the Silver album. There may have been a moral tucked into the lyrics, but the record’s appeal lay in its production values. It didn’t speak to any of Cash’s emotional strong points. To the record buyers he was trying to reengage, the reaction to the record was likely “So what.”
II
Descending deeper into pills, June was on edge as the band headed to Cleveland in late July 1979 for a three-day engagement at the Front Row Theater. By then, June and John’s old friend Jan Howard had joined the tour as part of the Carter Family. June knew that John and Jan had a close relationship dating all the way back to the 1960s, probably (most thought) an affair at some point. There was enough talk about the two that some people thought that Jan was another of the women Cash might have proposed to instead of June. Like Billie Jean, Jan was pretty, outspoken, and fun to be around. Plus, she had gone through an enormous amount of pain; one of her sons, Jimmy, was killed in Vietnam, and a second, David, took his own life. It was easy for John to feel protective of her.
For her part, Jan acknowledged spending lots of time with John, but she denied a sexual relationship. “I loved him,” she says. “But I didn’t love him like that.” She tells how John would often call—frequently to ask her to go fishing—when he was trying to get away from being Johnny Cash. “He just needed to escape from everything around him for a while,” she adds.
The incident in Cleveland started out simply enough. Onstage during the final show of the engagement, Cash paused after a song, looked over at Jan, and said in a way that June—in her anxious state—took as highly suggestive, “That’s just about the prettiest dress I’ve ever seen, Jan.”
Alone in her adjoining hotel room that night, June couldn’t sleep; she couldn’t erase her suspicions about John and Jan from her mind. Around two a.m. she noticed that one of the lines on her phone was lit up. She didn’t want to pick up and risk having John hear the click, but she wanted to know who he was talking to at that hour. She went into the sitting room that connected their separate bedrooms.
Finally, she took a chance and ever so slowly picked up the phone. It was Jan, and June didn’t like what she was hearing. The term that later circulated through the Cash camp was “phone sex.”
June spent the rest of the night debating what to do. Should she be the good soldier again and proceed to Omaha, the next stop on the tour, or should she send a message to John by returning home to Hendersonville? Sometime after dawn, she walked across the sitting room and knocked on John’s door and, without asking for an explanation, gave him an ultimatum.
“If Jan goes to Omaha, then I go home, and that’s just all there is to it,” she told him. “I’ll take John Carter and go home, and it’s over.”
Cash called Marshall and told him that he had to see Jan. When Grant informed him that she was already on the way to the airport with the rest of the band, Cash insisted, “I’ve got to talk to her right away.”
Sensing the urgency, Grant drove to the airport, where he found Jan handing her ticket to the gate agent. He led her to a phone booth and put her on the line with Cash. As soon as she said hello, Grant wrote in his memoir, “there was a god-awful quietness, and the look on her face was just terrible.” He said Jan listened without saying a word for maybe five minutes, then dropped the phone and let out a bloodcurdling scream that co
uld be heard all over the airport.
With her demand met, June was at John’s side onstage that night, the start of a six-day run, as if nothing had happened, but there was more drama ahead.
Cash went to Lou Robin’s room and said he was going to fire Helen and Anita. He wasn’t even asking Robin to fire them; he was going to do it himself. But first he picked up a bottle of wine that happened to be in the room. He drank it in one furious gulp. Then he went across the hall and fired his sisters-in-law.
The Carters became hysterical, especially June, who was sprawled across Helen’s bed in a dead faint when Grant entered the room. He tried wiping her head with a cold washcloth, but it didn’t help. Helen wanted to call an ambulance, but Marshall worried that it might lead to bad publicity. Instead, he called John, who had apparently gone to his room after the firing. Seeing June lying there passed out, Cash yelled at her and slapped her on both cheeks, trying to revive her. When that didn’t wake her, Helen started screaming again, “She’s dying, she’s dying.” Cash told Helen that everything would be fine and left the room.
Eventually, June got up and was so hurt by John’s action that she decided to fly home that minute.
“I was in the lobby that night and there’s June with a suitcase, headed out the front door,” Robin says. “It was midnight and I asked where she was going and she said, ‘I’m leaving. John just fired my sisters…I’m going to the airport.’ But I told her there were no flights at this hour and I talked her into [staying at] at the hotel.”
Figuring she didn’t want to go back to John’s room, Robin called Goldie Adcock, the wardrobe lady, and asked her to let June stay with her.
When Marshall went to John’s suite the next morning, however, he was shocked to find them together again. “It was like the worst of the sixties again,” he said. “You never knew what to expect.”
Pushing June through the airport in a wheelchair later that day, Grant knew the crisis hadn’t passed. June looked defeated. “She had nothing,” he later said. “Her family had been fired from the show, she was a physical wreck, and now there was no way to reconcile the problems we had. It was a terrible situation.”
Meanwhile, Jan Howard was sufficiently shaken and depressed that she checked into a Nashville hospital for two weeks. “There were rumors everywhere about me and John, and no matter what I said, people believed them,” she says. “I even heard things like the reason I was in the hospital was that I was having an abortion.”
Johnny Western, who kept in touch with Cash, was approached after the Cleveland episode by someone who identified himself as a writer for the National Enquirer and offered him $2,500 to confirm that John and Jan were having “this big, torrid affair.” Concerned about a scandal, Western immediately phoned Lou Robin, who said he’d get the message to Cash.
“As it turned out, the article never ran, and I saw John shortly after that,” Western says. “He came over to me and said, ‘I want to thank you for calling Lou on that deal with Jan Howard, but, you know, you were getting screwed. The National Enquirer offered Reba five thousand.’ He had this kind of smile on his face. In his mind, it was over and done.”
When Western heard that June was still by John’s side when the tour resumed four weeks later in Dubuque, Iowa, he assumed the crisis was over. But June was apparently just biding her time.
There were practical career considerations holding John and June together. They both believed their relationship—the hard times and the good—was part of their appeal. Older fans, they thought, came out to concerts or tuned in to the TV specials not just to hear John’s music but to see them. There were lots of singing duos over the years who could lay claim to the title of King and Queen of Country Music—including some who had more hit singles, notably George Jones and Tammy Wynette, and Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn. But none was as warmly embraced as John and June. To millions, their personal redemption was living affirmation of Cash’s music and themes. It wasn’t just the music that was inspiring; the couple was inspiring together. June, fans believed, was one of John’s blessings, and John was repaying her with his love and devotion.
Beyond the risk of destroying all that, June believed that John still loved her. And there was John Carter. She was clinging to any reason she could find to stay married, but in the end she no longer had the strength. One week after the tour’s final show, on December 19 in Las Vegas, June flew to London—alone. A few days later, she asked an attorney to draw up divorce papers.
“She was really messed up,” says Carlene, who was married at the time to British rock musician Nick Lowe and in the early stages of her own recording career. “She had lost her self-esteem. She spent a few weeks with us, and we all tried to help her feel better about herself again. Kris [Kristofferson] came to see her, and he told her how beautiful she was and that she’d get past all this. I tried to be neutral. I didn’t encourage her to leave [Cash], but I also told her that if she wasn’t happy, she should do something [about it].
“I kept saying, ‘Mama, why are you so scared to leave him if you are so unhappy?’ and she said, ‘I’m afraid that I won’t have John Carter.’ I tried to tell her the court would never take her son away from her, but I finally began to realize that she was just flashing her wings a little bit, like, ‘I’m going to show him. I can live a life without him.’ She was trying to shock him.”
After three weeks, June moved to the upscale Dorchester Hotel, and Cash flew to London in hopes of wooing her back. “I could see he was devastated too, and he wanted her back, but it wasn’t going to be easy,” Carlene says. “It was really a tough time for both of them. The pills were the big problem. John wasn’t perfect. He would go off the handle and say things he didn’t mean to say, including some very hurtful things. But he wasn’t mean-spirited. He had a good heart. He couldn’t have done something as cruel as fire the Carter Family if he wasn’t on pills.”
Cash was contrite enough during the London meeting that June relented; neither was willing to test life without the other. John and June were holding hands and singing “Jackson” again when their tour kicked off February 1 in St. Petersburg, Florida.
To Grant, it still felt like walking through a minefield. Beyond the fragile relationship between John and June, and Cash’s reliance on his pills, Cash was rarely speaking to him anymore. As the tour moved through Fort Myers, Jacksonville, and Fort Lauderdale, Grant wondered who would last longer in Cash’s circle, June or him.
Through all the domestic turmoil, Cash looked forward to the release of the gospel album, now a two-record set titled A Believer Sings the Truth. His writing continued to be uneven; the imagery of Jesus as “The Greatest Cowboy of Them All” was especially strained. But the passion of the Sister Rosetta Tharpe numbers and the immediacy and verve of other tracks were reminiscent of Cash’s Sun days.
The wild card was Cachet Records. The label started off aggressively, taking out a full-page ad in the trades which quoted Cash as saying, “This is the album I’ve wanted to do all my professional life.” What Cash soon learned was that Cachet wasn’t able to follow through financially. The album sold around thirty thousand copies and then hit a wall, Robin believes, because of lack of distribution. In lieu of back royalties, the label gave Cash the remaining twenty thousand copies from its warehouse. Cash tried to distribute the album himself, but there wasn’t much market for it, so boxes full of the LP sat in a back room at the House of Cash for years. To help Cash recover some of his production costs, Robin eventually talked Columbia into releasing a single-album version of A Believer, but sales were again minimal.
III
Cash and Grant were still barely speaking in the early months of 1980. The end came suddenly in a pair of incidents, both of which might simply have been dismissed in calmer times as a case of frayed road nerves. But pills and the strife with June had left Cash feeling edgy and defensive.
The first involved Cash’s desire to perform the Rodney Crowell song “Bull Rider” from the Silver al
bum. Cash was scheduled to play a rodeo, and he thought the song would be a natural. But when Cash asked Marshall to get the guys together so they could rehearse it, Grant brushed him off.
“I kept asking him to rehearse the song and he’d just say he didn’t have time,” Cash recalled later. “I would probably have looked past it if he just refused once, but I kept after him and he just wouldn’t listen to me. I was going through a lot at the time, and this was one of many things that made me think that Marshall didn’t care about me any longer. I didn’t think I could work with him anymore.”
The second incident occurred on Cash’s bus during a California tour in February. Cash was as bad at reading maps as at driving a car, but he was looking over a map this day, trying to help the bus driver find an unfamiliar city. Grant, who knew virtually every back road in America because of his years on the road, saw John fumbling with the map and he said something to the effect of “Give me that. You don’t know how to read a map!” Cash felt humiliated.
When the tour ended, he decided to fire Marshall.
From his apartment in New York, he phoned his secretary, Irene Gibbs, and dictated a letter to Marshall. He told her to sign it and send it.
As soon as he saw the registered letter, which arrived during the first week in March, Grant knew his twenty-five years with Cash had come to an end. He wasn’t surprised, knowing how irrational Cash had become again. He wasn’t even surprised that Cash didn’t tell him the news in person, because he knew how John hated personal confrontation. That didn’t ease the hurt.
In his 2006 memoir, Grant said he thought about including a copy of the letter in the book but decided against it. “Let’s just say that I know it was the drugs talking, and John said things in that letter that he later regretted.”
Two days after the letter arrived, Carl Perkins stopped by Grant’s house to offer support and to pass on some troubling news. Earlier in the day Perkins had also dropped by to see W. S. Holland, who told him he heard Marshall had been fired because he’d been caught stealing a million dollars through kickbacks and other schemes while handling travel arrangements and band purchases.
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