Johnny Cash: The Life

by Robert Hilburn

  Hopes were raised even higher when pop and rock reviewers, some of whom hadn’t paid attention to a Cash album in years, praised the collection. The biggest hurdle was country radio. Feedback was discouraging. Most DJs didn’t see “Johnny 99” or “Highway Patrolman” as country records.

  To play it safe, Columbia released Cash’s remake of an old George Jones hit, “I’m Ragged but I’m Right,” as the first single in September. It was a flop. Finally, the label decided to give “Johnny 99” a try, but it didn’t fare any better. As the country promotion department had predicted, country radio ignored it. The album never had a chance in the marketplace.

  In retrospect, all the parties may have been overly optimistic. You couldn’t have been any hotter than Springsteen in 1983. He was, in many ways, the rock ’n’ roll equivalent of Johnny Cash, not just a record maker but a heroic figure whose music and image reflected many of the traditional values of America. Even so, rock radio shied away from the downbeat Nebraska. Whereas Springsteen’s last three albums had sold a total of 14 million copies, Nebraska struggled to reach the 1 million mark.

  IV

  Cash had certainly been there, and for years longer than Springsteen. As 1983 progressed, those closest to him noticed that he was gradually falling deeper and deeper into depression. No one felt it more acutely than John Carter. Speaking of the period he says, “My parents were tender and wonderful people, but it got to a point when my dad was no longer there for me.”

  Cash’s son remembers coming home from school one day and finding his dad in “an almost trancelike state, as though he were asleep but somehow still functioning: Slurred, low speech; bloodshot eyes; a head that drooped.” Cash, his son said, had stashes of drugs everywhere, and he was becoming increasingly “volatile and unavailable.”

  Once again, the addiction reached a crisis point in Europe. Cash was in bad shape, and the shows in November reflected it. One morning John Carter woke up to find the hotel room he shared with his father littered with wine bottles his dad had taken from the minibar and consumed during the night.

  Near the end of the English dates, John and June were staying at a hotel in Nottingham that had lovely old wooden paneling. Cash was so wasted that he began hallucinating about a Murphy bed stored in one of the walls. Despite June’s assurances there was no bed in the wall, Cash started ripping at the paneling with his bare hands with such force that the wood began to splinter. One of the pieces got lodged in his right hand, causing it to bleed and become infected, swelling to almost twice its normal size. When reporters noticed it, Cash told them he had been bitten by a poisonous spider.

  Watching all this, June again decided she had had enough—both the drugs and the recurring periods of emotional distance between them. After the final show of the tour, she told John she was going to stay with Carlene and husband Nick Lowe in London. Wasted, Cash could barely understand what she was saying. On the way to the airport the next morning he kept asking, “Where’s June?”

  Back in Nashville, he checked in to the Baptist Hospital, where the doctors realized that the hand was the least of Cash’s problems. He had a bleeding ulcer and other ailments. Doctors ended up removing his spleen and several feet of intestine. Lou Robin was so concerned he phoned June in London and urged her to return. “John may be dying,” he said.

  To make matters worse, Cash was anything but a model patient. His daughter Kathy got a call from him early one evening, asking her to bring him a six-pack of beer and some pills. When she refused, he said angrily: “Did you say no to your dad?” Kathy explained, “Because you’re in the hospital, you’ve had surgery, you don’t need beer, and you don’t need pills. They’re giving you what you need.” He said, “Piss on you, then. I’ll call someone else.” And he hung up.

  That other call must have worked, because by the next day he’d accumulated a considerable amount of Percodan and amphetamines. He even managed to smuggle Valium into intensive care with him, stuffing it under the bandages that covered his stomach.

  When he started fading in and out of consciousness two days later, the hospital team feared for his life until Cash, in a moment of consciousness, directed nurses to the drugs under the bandages. Sure enough, half of the Valium had dissolved and found its way into Cash’s body through his wound. This was on top of the morphine the doctors had already given him.

  Cash’s hallucinations caused him to be so unruly during the hospital stay that the only visitor allowed was June, except for one time when Carrie demanded to see her son. Cash remembered awaking at one point to feel his mother’s hand on his forehead and to hear her plead for his life: “Lord, you took one of my boys and if you’re going to take this one, he’s yours to take, but I ask you, let him live and teach him to serve you better. Surely, you have work for him to do.”

  As he slowly began to recover, the family was told that he needed psychological help to survive. Through the hospital, the family contacted the Betty Ford Center, a heralded new alcohol and drug addiction treatment facility in the celebrity-rich Palm Springs area a couple of hours east of Los Angeles. Co-founded just a year earlier by the former first lady, who suffered from alcohol addiction, the clinic housed around a hundred inpatients at a time. To convince Cash to check into Betty Ford, the family staged an intervention.

  Among those confronting Cash in a hospital meeting room were June, John Carter, other family members, and friends. The session was led by a specialist from the hospital. As Cash looked on, the guests sat around him in a circle.

  “Every one of them had written out something they wanted me to know about my behavior toward them,” Cash recalled, complaints ranging from lying and neglect to scores of broken promises about curbing his drug use. Of them all, he said, John Carter’s note hit hardest. The teenager reminded him of the horrible embarrassment he felt whenever his father, under the influence, stumbled around the farmhouse at Bon Aqua in front of the boy’s school friends. As John Carter started reading the note, John reached out and hugged him tightly.

  Cash was in no mood to resist. He looked at everyone around him and said softly, “I want to go. I want some help.”

  Part

  Five

  Chapter 29

  At Betty Ford and Dropped by Columbia Records

  I

  FOUR DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS 1983, John and Michelle Rollins, neighbors in Jamaica, flew John in their private jet to Palm Springs, where he was taken to the Betty Ford Center’s drug rehabilitation clinic. In Nashville, Reba announced his treatment, explaining he wanted to guard against any recurrence of his drug problems. While continuing to be treated for his stomach condition, Cash met with his counselor and attended group lectures on addiction; one of the talks, most days, was given by Betty Ford herself. He was one of several celebrities at the center at that time, the most prominent being Elizabeth Taylor. During their frequent talks, Cash and Taylor discovered they were born only one day apart in 1932 (she liked to point out she was twenty-four hours younger). They exchanged birthday cards for years.

  Bill Miller visited him at Betty Ford and found him surprisingly upbeat. “I think he was relieved in a way,” Miller says. “He had chosen to go in and say, ‘I realize I have a problem and I am committing myself to this program,’ which made the fans able to think, ‘That’s cool,’ rather than see him stumbling onstage or crashing a car or some other ugly stuff.” Cash was also visited by Gene Autry, Kristofferson, and Lou Robin, among others.

  During many restful hours, Cash resumed work on his novel about Saint Paul and wrote letters of apology to his children and others. Kathy Cash recalls the tenderness of his words. “I was so mad about what he had done to me on the phone that I didn’t even go to Betty Ford, which made me feel bad because I got this letter saying he was sorry and that he loved me,” she says. “I cried when I read it.”

  In a January 17 letter to Rosanne, Cash said he was looking forward to having June visit him, but he knew she was going to be wary. Kristofferson says June told him
that she was thinking of leaving. “I said, ‘June, that’s like telling me there’s no Santa Claus.’”

  When June finally came with John Carter, Cash ran to his son and gave him a hug that lifted the boy off the ground. “The light was back in his eyes,” John Carter remembered. “He seemed brand-new.”

  June held back for a few seconds before finally reaching out to hold John’s face in both hands as she told him she loved him. In her journal that week she wrote, “I can love John for the man he is inside. I can accept him whether he is stoned or not. What matters is that I keep my heart close to God. Jesus will keep me safe.”

  Kristofferson said he got a telegram from June telling him not to worry: There still is a Santa Claus.

  After forty-three days, Johnny Cash was home. And in his regained clarity, Cash saw the trouble some of his children were going through, including Cindy, who was battling her own drug problem. “He came to my house one day and had tears in his eyes,” Cindy says. “It was the first time I ever saw my dad cry. He goes, ‘I came over here, Cindy, because I cannot watch you die.’ I asked him what he was talking about, and those tears just started coming down his face. He told me, ‘You need help. Your plane leaves at three o’clock this afternoon for Loma Linda Hospital in California.’ And I was on the plane. I was there for three months.”

  After more rest, Cash headed to Des Moines on March 27 for the first stop of an eight-city tour. Fifteen days later he went back into the studio for his first significant session in twelve months.

  Hopeful for a breakthrough, Blackburn again paired him with producer Billy Sherrill, even though their first teaming hadn’t clicked. Sherrill had another song that Columbia execs, in their desperation, thought might finally turn things around for Cash—a goofy novelty titled “The Chicken in Black” that featured Cash as the main character. Written by Nashville songwriter Gary Gentry, “Chicken” told the story of Johnny Cash needing a brain transplant because his old brain just wore out.

  In the song, Cash heads to New York City, where a transplant specialist tells him he’s in luck—a bank robber has just been killed and his brain is available. Cash is soon back in Nashville, and everything is just fine until he steps onstage at the Grand Ole Opry. Halfway through “I Walk the Line,” he suddenly stops singing and demands that everyone in the audience stick up their hands and give him their money and their valuables.

  Panicked, Cash calls the specialist to ask for his old brain, but he learns it has been put into a chicken that is already causing a sensation by singing Cash’s songs in auditoriums and at fairs all around the country. The Chicken in Black, as the bird is billed, has even signed a ten-year recording contract. Meanwhile, Cash is reduced to walking the streets of Nashville, telling people to stick their hands up. The record ends with Cash repeating the signature humming phrase from “I Walk the Line.”

  Given his past success with novelties, Cash may have figured he had another hit. He also may have imagined that the self-mocking might combat charges among some country music observers after Man in Black and the Billy Graham Crusades that Cash had become pious and self-important. The record would show everybody that he could laugh at himself.

  Talking to the media just before “The Chicken in Black”—or “Brain Transfusion,” as it was originally called—was released in July, Cash, as usual, was upbeat. “I did a session last week that I feel really good about,” he told me. “I recorded a thing that everybody thinks could be a good record, a thing called ‘Brain Transfusion,’ and I’m probably going to be doing it on the road.”

  Because Sherrill was involved and because they hoped there might be a groundswell of support for Cash among country fans after his Betty Ford Clinic stay, Columbia ordered a video to accompany the record’s release. In the video Cash assumed the role of a chicken, dressed in a bright yellow and blue outfit in the style of a comic book superhero.

  Rosanne was heartbroken. She called it the “nadir” of his 1980s decline. “There was an undercurrent of desperation in it. It was painful,” she says. Waylon told Cash he looked like a buffoon in the chicken costume. Hearing this reaction, Cash suddenly turned against the project. He later said that “The Chicken in Black” was the only thing he ever recorded that he flat-out hated. About the video he added, “It was godawful.”

  Even though the record was moving up the lower rungs of the country chart in the summer of 1984, Cash demanded that Columbia reclaim not only the video from TV stations but also unsold copies of the single from stores. Needless to say, he stopped performing the song live, which set up a perfect gag for the tour crew.

  “John liked to know from time to time what the audience wanted to hear, so we would hand out cards at some shows asking fans to write down any requests,” Lou Robin says. “One night we took the cards and wrote ‘Chicken in Black’ on every one of them and gave them to John. He looked so puzzled that we finally had to let him in on the joke.”

  Columbia executives didn’t find anything funny in Cash’s reversal. If he hadn’t made such a fuss over it, the song might have become a hit, they told themselves. As it was, it stayed on the country charts eleven weeks. Amid bad feelings, the Cash-Sherrill album was shelved. The incident further fueled Cash’s disillusionment; he blamed the record label for getting him into what he called the whole “fiasco.”

  “There were times when I didn’t care,” he later said of this period. “It was, like, complete apathy from the record company, and I guess I got that way too.” But it was not the end of the line for Cash and Blackburn. They still clung to the hope that something could turn their luck around.

  “Chicken in Black” aside, Cash appeared to be in reasonably good spirits as he remained on tour pretty much through the summer and fall of 1984, including a successful trip to Europe in early November. He had already begun work on a new album with Chips Moman, one of the record business’s hippest producers and songwriters. He’d overseen Elvis Presley’s landmark 1968 recording sessions in Memphis, which had resulted in Elvis’s strongest singles in years, including “Suspicious Minds.”

  At the end of the European concert dates, Cash headed to Montreux, Switzerland, to tape his annual TV Christmas special. He was looking forward to the week because his guests were going to be Jennings, Kristofferson, and Nelson, a sort of summit meeting between Cash and the outlaw movement he’d helped inspire. After tapings each evening, the foursome would gather in a suite at the hotel and take turns singing songs. In contrast to his close relationship with Jennings and Kristofferson, Cash barely knew Nelson, but they took advantage of the gatherings to correct that.

  Moman, who had also produced Nelson’s last two albums, flew in to see how his new musical buddies were getting along, and he enjoyed the vibe in the songfests. Late one evening the four started joking around about making a record together, and Moman took it from there.

  Within days, John, Willie, Waylon, and Kris were in a Nashville studio with Moman, trying out some material. During the session, Marty Stuart, who played guitar and mandolin on the date, remembered a mystical Jimmy Webb song called “Highwayman” that had four distinct verses, which, divided up, would be perfect for the quartet’s voices and personas.

  From the first playback there was magic in their collective voices. With Moman’s encouragement, the group, which they called The Highwaymen, assembled some other songs that spoke to the nostalgic appeal of these four veteran talents coming together. After hearing a couple of others, including “The Last Cowboy Song,” written by Ed Bruce and Ron Petersen, and Guy Clark’s “Desperadoes Waiting for a Train,” Blackburn felt he had the makings of a classic.

  Released in late May 1985, just days after Cash went back to Baptist Hospital to have doctors remove some adhesions and scar tissue that had formed after his stomach operation, the album was an immediate winner.

  Blackburn hoped that Cash’s contributions to the collection would finally connect him with the contemporary country audience. Of the four Highwaymen, Nelson was by far the
hottest record seller at the time; Jennings was second. Blackburn looked forward to testing Cash’s next solo album.

  Meanwhile, Cash returned to acting. He signed to play the role of John Brown in the TV miniseries North and South. Filming was scheduled for late June, just before The Highwaymen made their first public appearance, in the rain, at Nelson’s annual July 4 picnic at Southpark Meadows near Austin.

  The album had gone to number one on the country charts by the time The Highwaymen were onstage again two months later before eighty thousand people at the first annual Farm Aid benefit concert at the University of Illinois. The benefit was designed to raise funds for and public recognition of family farmers who were struggling to pay their mortgages. Because Kristofferson wasn’t able to be there, Glen Campbell, who had recorded the original version of “Highwayman” years before, took his place. The album would stay on the country charts for sixty-six weeks, more than Cash’s previous sixteen albums combined.

  With interest stirred, The Highwaymen signed to star in a made-for-TV version of John Ford’s Stagecoach, the classic 1939 western that made John Wayne a star. In the film, Kristofferson would play Wayne’s part as the Ringo Kid, Nelson took the role of celebrated gambler-gunfighter Doc Holliday, Cash was cast as the marshal, and Jennings portrayed another gambler. Others in the cast included June Carter and Jennings’s wife, Jessi Colter. Cash and Kristofferson also starred in another made-for-TV film, The Last Days of Frank and Jesse James. Both were embarrassing to everyone, it seems, except the principals. They approached the whole thing as a lark.