Johnny Cash: The Life

by Robert Hilburn

  Satisfied they had everything of value, the men locked Cash and the rest, including the boys, in the basement and fled. Cash and Reba’s husband broke down the door and phoned the police, who quickly captured one of the robbers. He was subsequently killed when he tried to escape. The others were caught a few weeks later during another robbery, and they too were killed while reportedly trying to escape from prison. Cash described the Jamaican police as “action-oriented.”

  Reba was so shaken by the experience that she vowed she would never return to Jamaica, but Cash told reporters that Cinnamon Hill was his home and he would always come back to it

  In his unrelenting empathy for the underdog, though, he felt guilty about the “desperate young men” who had threatened his family, possibly to feed their own. “I felt I knew those boys,” he wrote in his 1997 autobiography. “We had a kinship, they and I. I know how they thought, I knew how they needed. They were like me.”

  Despite Cash’s lack of chart success, in the late 1970s and beyond Lou Robin did such a shrewd job in maintaining a high profile for him on tour and on television that few outside Music Row noticed how little he mattered commercially in a country music recording world where such artists as Alabama, Kenny Rogers, Dolly Parton, and Willie Nelson were each topping the album charts for ten weeks or more at a stretch. The Adventures album never even charted. Still, Cash hosted Saturday Night Live in April, where he was a good sport about his image. In one skit, he fulfilled a death-row prisoner’s final request by singing “99,999 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” In a second, the Man in Black let two women test themselves for dandruff by shaking their hair over his black clothing. But, significantly, he didn’t perform any of his new songs. The show’s viewers were treated to “I Walk the Line,” “Folsom Prison Blues,” “Ring of Fire,” and “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down.”

  Around this time, William S. Paley, chief executive of CBS, the parent company of Columbia Records, was encouraging his top executives, including Rick Blackburn, to attend Harvard Business School workshops for at least one week a year. At one of the sessions, Blackburn became intrigued by the ways companies were using research to pretest consumer interest in their new products. Once back home, he contacted a Columbia University professor, Sidney Furst, who had a national reputation for such testing, notably with Pringles potato chips.

  It is a long way from potato chips to country albums, but Blackburn wanted to know which recording artists interested young country fans. He believed that the information could help him concentrate his energy and promotion money on those artists who stood a chance of picking up young fans. In Furst’s report, the artists preferred by these potential buyers were rated “new and contemporary”; the artists generating little or no interest were rated “old and traditional.”

  Cash had turned fifty. To young buyers, he was considered old and traditional—which meant he was essentially irrelevant to them. Many of his generation were equally dismissed, including George Jones and Loretta Lynn. By contrast, the study found high interest in artists the buyers considered young and contemporary—a group that included the not-so-young Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, because of their ties to the outlaw movement. Among others registering high with the panelists: Rosanne Cash.

  “I went over the findings very carefully with John,” said Blackburn, “because I wanted him to know what he was up against. I explained things like why other artists would be getting more promotion money. I said, ‘John, if I had my choice of having a hit with anybody on the label, it’d be you, but there is nothing I can do for you as long as the numbers are the way they are.’ The thing I remember is he was so gracious about it. He said he understood. He said he’d like to reach that younger audience, but he wasn’t going to change his music to do so. I knew that was going to make it hard for John ever to be a big seller again, but I respected his integrity as an artist.”

  Cash didn’t know how to proceed. He had Stuart telling him he had lost his edge, and he had Blackburn telling him record buyers didn’t care about him. With no plan, he turned once again to a personal passion—an acoustic gospel album produced by Stuart.

  Cash got the idea for the gospel album when he and Stuart visited Luther Perkins’s grave in Hendersonville on Luther’s birthday, January 8, 1982. Perkins was almost as much a hero to Stuart as Cash. “Bob Wootton did a great job, but Luther was an irreplaceable part of J.R.’s sound,” says Stuart, one of the few in the Cash entourage who usually referred to him as J.R. “The two were soul mates. J.R. gained something just knowing Luther was by his side in the studio. I’ve often wondered about how things might have turned out if Luther hadn’t died.”

  The trip to Luther’s grave at Hendersonville Memorial Gardens had become an annual ritual for Cash and Stuart. They called it “Luther Day,” and they’d spend hours figuring out what pill Luther might have wanted that year. They’d end the visit by placing a cigarette and one of those very pills on Luther’s headstone. “I treasured those visits because it offered a great look into the wonderfully sick and twisted humor that was the hallmark of the old band,” Stuart says. “J.R. would even begin the visits by jumping all over Luther for resting while the rest of us were out there busting our tails to make a living.”

  During that 1982 graveyard visit, Cash said he’d like to do the gospel record with Stuart. After they spoke about the idea for a few minutes, Cash turned toward Luther’s grave and said, “If L.M. don’t speak up and disagree, we’ll call it a done deal.”

  Not unexpectedly, Columbia had no interest in another Cash gospel album until a gospel music executive named Ken Harding agreed to establish a subsidiary label for Columbia specializing in gospel music. He’d call it Priority Records, and Cash’s album would be its first release. With that set, Cash and Stuart began work on the album in May. The project was such a labor of love for Cash that he seemed to prolong it purposefully. Then again, the slow pace (the album wasn’t finished until December) may have been due to Cash’s heavy drug use.

  The first session offered a window into Cash’s erratic studio behavior at the time. He showed up wearing brown knee-high boots, only to look down and declare there was no way that he—the Man in Black—should be recording in brown boots. While the musicians watched, he sat on the studio floor and carefully painted the boots black. Then he learned that Julie Andrews was recording in the studio down the hall, and he went in and asked her if she’d like to do a duet. She agreed, and they recorded a song (“Love Me Tender,” as Stuart recalls). After all this delay, Cash started recording the gospel album. With just two songs done, he announced he was going out to get some milk and cheese. He promised to be right back.

  The next Stuart saw of Cash was on the TV news later that night.

  Cash bought the milk and cheese, then he apparently headed home. On the way, his car got stranded in a ditch in a field. He spun his wheels until the grass caught fire and burned up the car, the silver Mercedes that June had given him the night of his Country Music Hall of Fame induction. After watching all this unfold on television, Stuart phoned Cash to see if he was okay. Cash assured him that he was fine: “The car was a total loss, but the milk and the cheese were delicious!”

  Once again, Cash took a break from music that summer to star in a TV movie. Murder in Coweta County, co-starring Andy Griffith, was a drama based on a struggle for justice in rural Georgia in the late 1940s. Cash’s acting was self-conscious, as usual, but the film—in which Cash played a county sheriff who brings a wealthy landowner to justice after he kills a farm worker—again spoke to Cash’s belief in good triumphing over evil.

  Ever since Cash initiated the policy of separate bedrooms on tour, John Carter slept in his own bed in his father’s room when he joined his parents on the road. This gave him a frightening front-row look at his father on pills. On several occasions, John Carter was alarmed when Cash’s labored breathing would suddenly stop for long periods of time. The boy wanted to run to his mother’s room for help, but he was worried th
at it could lead to more arguments. So he lay awake in his bed praying that his father would be all right.

  Cash was in such bad shape one night during the filming of Coweta County that John Carter, who was now twelve, couldn’t hold himself back. He rushed to his mother for help.

  “Dad’s not breathing!”

  June went to John’s room and shook him, but there was no response.

  “We have to get him into the tub,” she said. Together, she and John Carter pulled him from the bed and dragged him into the bathroom, where they dumped him in the tub and turned on the shower so the cold water would startle him awake. It worked.

  Looking into his father’s drained face, John Carter screamed, “I can’t take it anymore! You have to stop the pills, Dad! You have to stop!”

  Recounting the scene in Anchored in Love, his 2007 book about his mother, John Carter wrote, “My father never hit me, but I had never talked to him this way either. This was the one time he came close to lashing out at me. His dark, flat eyes flashed, and he clinched his huge fist.”

  Cash didn’t go further than that, but his son would always look back on the night as a turning point in their relationship.

  There would still be good times when Cash would set aside drugs and actually be a dad. In late August 1983, for instance, Cash took John Carter and June on a five-day fishing and rafting trip through remote stretches of Alaska, and it was such a wonderful memory that John Carter devoted seven pages to it in his book. June took ten pages to describe the week in her own 1987 memoir, From the Heart.

  Summarizing the experience, John Carter wrote, “When we left the wilderness, Dad was clear eyed and strong, and Mom was the same joyful and supportive mother I had known all my life….There was still hope for the future of our family. And for a short period, I was as happy as I had ever been.”

  But those memories were the exception in what was an especially turbulent year. His recollections of the Alaska trip are surrounded by accounts of heartbreak. The juxtaposition of the good times and bad indicate how fragile and unpredictable life could be around Cash. An event early in the year seemed to set the tone—an accident that Cash often cited as a turning point in his fight against drugs, and a renewed dependency that led to thoughts of suicide.

  Cash loved animals and was so fascinated by the forms and characteristics of different species that he gradually built an informal animal compound on a large piece of vacant land across the street from his house in Hendersonville; its occupants ranged from zebra and wild boar to ostriches and scores of birds. The property also included a petting zoo of sorts for John Carter.

  Cash was hospitalized early in 1983 for pneumonia, and when he got home, he decided to visit the animals, even though the temperature was freezing. As he was walking through the woods, an ostrich jumped onto the trail in front of him and hissed menacingly. Cash waited until the ostrich left the trail, and then he continued his walk. When he returned minutes later, the ostrich again blocked his path, but Cash, who had picked up a formidable six-foot branch on his walk, wanted to show the creature who was boss.

  When the ostrich made a move toward him, Cash, possibly feeling the effects of medication, swung the stick, but he missed. The ostrich leaped into the air and landed on Cash’s chest. The blow broke two of Cash’s ribs, and the bird’s claw ripped him open down to his belt. Cash staggered backward and broke three more ribs falling on a rock. As the ostrich stood poised for another attack, Cash swung the piece of wood again, causing the animal to flee. Cash went back to the hospital, where he was stitched up, but the ribs still hurt. For relief, he upped his intake of pills, pretty much giving up any attempt to combat the recurring addiction.

  “Justification ceased to be relevant after that,” Cash wrote in his second autobiography. “Once the pain subsided completely, I knew I was taking [the pills] because I liked the way they made me feel. And while that troubled my conscience, it didn’t trouble it enough to keep me from going down that old addictive road again.”

  Cash found himself making the rounds of various doctors once more, gathering enough pills to support his habit. When his excessive consumption upset his digestive system, he began drinking wine to calm his stomach. Soon, he was again going through periods when he was out of control.

  “I was up and running, strung out, slowed down, sped up, turned around, hung on the hook, having a ball, living in hell,” he wrote. “Before long I began to get the impression that I was in trouble—I had bleeding ulcers, for one thing—but I kept going anyway. The idea of taking things to their logical conclusion, just drugging and drinking until I slipped all the way out of this world, began to dance quietly around the back of my mind.”

  He described that frightening feeling as “weirdly comforting.”

  III

  Back on tour, Lou Robin was surprised a few weeks after the ostrich attack to see Cash one afternoon in the lobby of the hotel where they were staying in Augsburg, West Germany. Cash invariably took long afternoon naps, and when Robin questioned him, Cash simply said he couldn’t sleep—and Robin could tell from Cash’s nervous, jittery state that he was high. Cash had been on pills pretty heavily much of the year, causing Robin to cancel one show in Beckley, West Virginia, and leading an exhausted Cash to check in to the Nashville hospital again with pneumonia.

  Through it all, Robin had noticed that Cash was savvy enough to keep out of the public’s sight on days when he reached for the pills too often. That’s what troubled Robin this day. If Cash was this badly strung out in the afternoon, what would he be like that evening when he performed live on Wetten, dass, a hugely popular German TV show?

  When Robin mentioned the show, Cash replied, “I’m thinking about ending my song tonight by bending down and thanking the audience—the way Elvis used to do. What do you think?”

  Robin thought it was a horrible idea, but he was even more concerned about the risk of a meltdown in front of the show’s 30 million viewers. Robin offered to cancel, but Cash wanted to go ahead.

  “The strange thing is John loved going to Europe because he thought he would be free to take all the drugs he wanted without his family and the Music Row crowd watching his every move,” Robin says. “What he didn’t understand was that he was under more scrutiny in Europe, not less, because he was still such a big star. The press was everywhere.”

  Watching him onstage that night, Robin worried about the impact the performance would have on ticket sales for the upcoming two-week tour. Cash was sweating profusely and stumbling his way through a song.

  The worst moment came at the end, when Cash was kneeling before the crowd. As he stood up, he lost his balance and had to grab the microphone stand to steady himself.

  Newspaper headlines the next day pulled no punches. Declared one front-page report, “Johnny Cash Sick or Drunk on TV Guest Appearance.”

  The impact was immediate.

  “We went on to do the dates, but business fell way off,” Robin says. “We may have even had to cancel a few shows. It was the nightmare of all nightmares.”

  Wanting a strong hand in the studio, Cash teamed up with Brian Ahern again in April 1983. As he had promised himself after their first album together, Ahern took a stronger stand, recording in Los Angeles with his own handpicked band, which included the increasingly omnipresent Stuart, who that year became the latest in Cash’s growing list of musician sons-in-law when he married Cindy. They would be together five years. Out of respect, Ahern listened to a half dozen of Cash’s latest songs, but nothing came close to catching his ear; the songs seemed bland, in some cases only half-finished. Some of those songs would actually turn up on subsequent Cash albums, but Ahern didn’t want any part of them.

  For years Cash’s chief problem as a writer was his failure to move forward. He had plenty of raw material available if he’d just look at the complexity of his life and the world around him, but he continued to focus on the ideas and imagery that had worked for him before.

  Instead of telling C
ash he didn’t like the songs, Ahern turned to material from a writer who was all about moving forward: Bruce Springsteen.

  It takes courage and immense creative drive to search constantly for revealing new songs and themes. Springsteen proved a master at always demanding more of himself. Even before his breakthrough hit “Born to Run” in 1975, Springsteen had already realized this important rule.

  “The writing is more difficult now,” Bruce said in 1974. “I got a lot of things out in that first album. In the new songs, I started slowly to find out who I am and where I want to be. It was like coming out of the shadow of various influences and trying to be me. You have to let out more of yourself all the time. You strip off the first layer, then the second, then the third. It gets harder because it’s more personal.”

  The songs Ahern played for Cash were “Johnny 99” and “Highway Patrolman” from Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska, where he chronicled with gripping starkness the way hardships, economic and social, can drive people to desperate means.

  “Cash was familiar with Springsteen, and he seemed vaguely familiar with ‘Johnny 99,’ but he certainly hadn’t thought about recording it,” Ahern says. “When the songs finished, all I said was that we had made some inroads on the last album and that we needed to keep cracking the whip. I think it was clear to him that I was saying his songs weren’t good enough, and there was this long pause. I was thinking he might fire me, but I was willing to take that chance. I’d rather be fired than put out a bad record.”

  Finally Cash signaled his approval, and he didn’t mention his own songs again. They decided to call the album Johnny 99. Cash loved the Springsteen songs for much the same reason he so admired Dylan’s songs: their daring, compassion, and commentary. He also enjoyed being back in the creative center of pop and rock, the music of young America. Rick Blackburn hoped Johnny 99 would appeal to those coveted young record buyers, thus putting Cash into the “new and contemporary” mainstream.