Johnny Cash: The Life

by Robert Hilburn

  One important person missing from the sessions was Marty Stuart. He and Cindy had divorced in 1988, and Cash, to show support for his daughter, severed ties with Stuart for a while. Eventually, however, he would welcome him back into his life—just as he did other ex-sons-in-law, including Rodney Crowell and Nick Lowe.

  After the Highwaymen sessions, Cash was honored in Nashville by B’nai B’rith’s Anti-Defamation League for humanitarian service. Rosanne was one of the speakers. “You sparked something in me,” she told her father. “It was tolerance. And that’s what I loved about you.”

  Cash continued to ease into touring, heading to Europe for a three-week stretch that began April 26 in Cork, Ireland. The shows were a struggle because Cash had trouble breathing. He finally entered the American Hospital in Paris for treatment of what was announced publicly as a pulled leg ligament. Privately, doctors told Cash he had a potentially serious condition and strongly advised him to cancel the show that night.

  “They told them he was risking his life if he did the show before taking tests to find out the exact nature of the problem,” Lou Robin says. “But John insisted on doing the show anyway, and to show the doctors, he did a longer show than usual. After it was over, I drove him back to the hospital so they could take the tests.”

  Back home in the States with an apparently clean bill of health, Cash became only the second country artist honored by the Songwriters Guild of America. Among the speakers at the two-hour tribute on June 28 was Sam Phillips, who told the Nashville gathering, “I was wrong as much as I was right. But…I was right to keep listening to Johnny Cash.”

  Cash was grateful to be among such other Guild honorees over the years as Johnny Mercer and Sammy Cahn, and he charmed the crowd by telling about his feelings while riding to the tribute with June in her new Rolls-Royce. He told her, “You know, [it’s] great to get the roses while you’re still alive.”

  Accepting the honor, he said, “Of all the awards, this is the one. It’s for writing songs. I’ve found that songs are our children, an extension of ourselves….It’s what’s most important to me.”

  On top of that award, Cash was delighted to learn that a group of maverick U.S. and mostly British musicians—including Pete Shelley of the Buzzcocks, and Marc Almond of Soft Cell—had recorded a tribute album featuring some of his biggest hits, including “I Walk the Line” and “A Boy Named Sue.” The collection—whose title, ’Til Things Are Brighter, was taken from “Man in Black”—raised funds to fight AIDS. In Buck Hogarth’s liner notes, Cash was saluted for speaking out “for the little man.”

  His next Mercury album, Boom Chicka Boom, would be just another lost Johnny Cash album. It never made the charts.

  On the road meanwhile, Cash continued to face health issues. In late August he canceled three performances in Oregon and Washington because of bronchitis and a respiratory infection. Once again Cash found himself turning increasingly to pain pills. Rather than hide it, he shared the information with his doctors, who advised him to return to rehab.

  In September 1989, June flew to California to visit her daughter Rosie, who had checked in to the Betty Ford Center to deal with her own drug use. She arrived only to discover that Rosie had unexpectedly left. Apparently she had taken another patient’s credit card and bought a ticket home.

  June was planning to head back home herself, but in their meetings with her to discuss Rosie’s situation, the Ford staff recognized that June, too, had an addiction problem and needed counseling. They talked her into taking an outpatient course. “They made her think the program was to help her better understand Rosie’s addiction,” says Kti Jensen, a masseuse and nutritionist who was brought in to help treat June. “That was the only thing they could do. She was too deep in denial to admit she had a problem. Under the outpatient program, she didn’t even have to check in to Betty Ford. She stayed at a nearby hotel.” June and John liked Kti so much they hired her to work with them full-time.

  Finally deciding to follow his doctors’ advice about more rehab treatment, Cash entered the Cumberland Heights Alcohol and Drug Treatment Center in Nashville as soon as his tour ended in mid-November. Talking to reporters at the end of his Cumberland stay, he described the course as “an in-depth look at yourself.” He added, “You study the history of your chemical abuse and learn to look for the danger signs of a relapse.”

  Inadvertently, he mentioned in the interview that June had been at Betty Ford—the first public hint that Mrs. Johnny Cash might have a drug problem too. In the interview, Cash stressed that she was there only for a six-week codependency course, not for an addiction problem. He explained that she had a painful herniated disc that required medication, but he said he never saw her take drugs unless she was in intense pain. Yet he left the door slightly open with his added remarks: “Her use has certainly never caused a problem in our relationship….If she does have a problem, it will be for her to say.”

  After the Cumberland stay, John and June spent the holidays in Jamaica, where, as usual, the drug use waned after rehab visits. John pondered his next move. Without Asher and Popovich, he felt like an orphan at his label. He would re-team with Jack Clement to make a fourth album, but he had few hopes for it. For all practical purposes, Cash believed his recording career was over. Except on oldies stations, he was no longer a singer on the radio.

  There was one bright spot. Lou Robin met with the representatives of Nelson, Jennings, and Kristofferson to finalize a Highwaymen tour. The goal was to promote the upcoming album, but Robin and the others also wanted to give the musicians the chance to feel a certain thrill once again: walking onstage to the wild cheers of ten to twenty thousand fans in arenas across the country.

  IV

  Seeing The Highwaymen onstage at the Rosemont Horizon Arena outside Chicago on May 6, 1990, made the audience feel as if they were looking at a living Mount Rushmore of country music. Among them, these familiar faces and voices had made it through a collective twelve marriages, 115-plus years on the road, and untold bottles of whiskey and pills as they spread their tales of restless ideals and troubled times.

  The show itself was put together expertly. Rather than focus on tunes from the two Highwaymen albums, the quartet gave the audience a survey of their signature solo songs. Wisely, they all spent the entire two hours onstage, playing one another’s tunes. It was a marvelous piece of country music history.

  Despite the ticket sales, rave reviews, and adoring fans, the country music establishment was skeptical. Record company executives, radio program directors, and journalists around the country didn’t see the shows as a commercial rebirth as much as a last hurrah. They were quick to note that the individual Highwaymen could once headline arenas by themselves, but now they had to join together to do so.

  Despite the warmth of the audiences, The Highwaymen themselves guarded against reading too much into the shows. Even Nelson by now was finding it hard to come up with Top 10 country hits. Was their era of country music over?

  In his hotel room two days later in Minneapolis, Cash was still thinking about his place in the new world of country music. He had spent the morning with a word processor rather than a guitar, and was about 120 pages into an early draft of his second autobiography. “I love that thing,” he told me. “I wrote my other two books by hand and it was like carving in stone.”

  On the state of country music, he was less upbeat. “I wonder what would happen if I were starting out today in the music business,” he said, a protein drink by his side. “I think the only job I’d be able to get would be singing in a coffeehouse somewhere because that’s where I could sing songs that mattered to me. I sure couldn’t get into singing most of the things you hear on the radio.”

  Cash was too proud a man to spend much time complaining about a swollen left jaw that was causing him such pain that he had to hold an icepack to it as he spoke during the interview. He just said it was the result of some dental work he’d had done before the start of the tour; it’d be better
soon. But in fact, the jaw pain would haunt Cash for the rest of his life.

  What had happened was that within days after a routine visit to the dentist in New York in January 1990 to have an abscessed tooth removed, Cash developed a cyst between the gum and his jaw, requiring surgery to cut into his mouth and scrape the cyst from the jawbone. The operation apparently weakened the jaw and caused even more agony. He was in such pain during a TV taping at the Grand Ole Opry on February 7 that he’d needed to use an icepack in between taping segments. After three hours he couldn’t take it anymore, and he had to bow out of the show. June stepped in for him as co-host with Barbara Mandrell.

  Despite more visits to the dentist, Cash found no escape from the suffering, and he had to cancel some concert dates in late February. But he was determined to keep his commitments to The Highwaymen—even after the pain intensified during a steak dinner a week before the opening date. Though he wouldn’t know it for several weeks, the jaw was broken. The left side of his face was so swollen during the tour that a camera crew, which was shooting documentary footage, was instructed to shoot Cash only from the right side. He made it through the dates, but even his gritty resolve wasn’t up to pressing on. He was unable to continue on the two-week European leg of the tour, causing the dates to be postponed.

  Cash kept on thinking for years that he was just one doctor’s visit or operation away from an end to his pain, but Lou Robin saw the operations fail time and again over the next few years—he estimated sixteen operations in all. “The pain was monstrous and it didn’t let up,” Mark Stielper says. “Such unending agony totally consumes one’s life. It overwhelms everything else. But he couldn’t do like the rest of us and go to bed. His was a public life. He wasn’t a complainer, didn’t make a point of airing all his ills in the marketplace. It would gall me when people would write that ‘Johnny Cash looks like he’s on drugs again’ or complain because there wasn’t a new record out or such. He was desperately trying to simply function day to day, to stay alive.”

  David Ferguson, who was Jack Clement’s engineer, remembers meeting Cash when he stopped by Clement’s studio one day. A Nashville native with an easygoing demeanor, Ferguson had been a Cash fan since childhood.

  “I had heard Jack might be working on an album with John, but I was still surprised when he walked in unannounced one day,” says Ferguson, who would be at the singer’s side in the studio for most of the rest of Cash’s life. “He was looking for Jack, but Jack was out somewhere, and John just made himself at home. I was so nervous meeting my hero, but he was as nice as he could be…no airs about him, plus he was so funny.

  “At one point, he looks over and sees this expensive exercise bike that some salesman had talked Jack into buying even though everyone knew Jack was too lazy ever to get on it.…John finally turns to me and says, ‘Well, who is Jack going to pay to ride that thing for him?’”

  Ferguson also recalls darker times with Cash. He had visited Cash in Baptist Hospital after the heart surgery and pneumonia at the end of 1989. “I walked in and he was in there all alone, sitting in a wheelchair and looking so bad that I started crying. I had to leave the room. I felt so sorry for him. He was so sick.”

  A year later, after a European tour in December 1990, Cash stopped by Clement’s office and Ferguson could tell he was hurting. He told Clement and Ferguson about how hard he had fought to get off the pills and then this jaw thing happened and now he couldn’t help himself; he was back on the pain pills.

  Ferguson wasn’t prepared for what happened next. This time his hero was the one who cried.

  Chapter 31

  Branson, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and U2

  I

  CASH WAS HONORED BY THE record industry again with a Living Legend Award—for ongoing contributions and influence in the recording field—during the Grammy ceremony in Los Angeles on February 21, 1991, but the affair left him melancholy. What “ongoing contributions”? If he was a legend, why was his career in such bad shape? The evening’s other recipients—Aretha Franklin, Billy Joel, and Quincy Jones—were still going strong. The only future he saw for himself was more of the aches and pains that were coming at a distressing pace. Instead of the kick he used to get from the road, he longed more and more for the quiet comforts of home—reading his books, tending to his garden, and spending quality time with his family. In other words, retirement.

  Retirement was a foreign concept to country singers; most of them kept performing the old hits as long as they could walk—or even be wheeled—onstage. Roy Acuff, the Grand Ole Opry patriarch, set the standard. When the singer’s wife, Mildred, died in the 1980s, the Opry was all he had left; he moved into a house on the Opry grounds and kept taking his turn at the microphone, singing “Great Speckled Bird” or “Wabash Cannonball” whenever his health permitted. Acuff was eighty-seven the night Cash got the Grammy award.

  Before his mounting health problems, Cash had assumed that he too would always keep performing, but no longer. Still, he couldn’t figure out a way to retire; he had too many financial obligations. When Mark Stielper asked Cash about it, he said, “They won’t let me retire.” “They” were all those in the family, household, and band who depended on him for their income, a number that at any given time in the 1980s and 1990s ranged from thirty to forty. “Financially, he couldn’t [retire],” Stielper says. “He needed advance money from the next tour to pay the bills from the last one.”

  And then there was more bad news from Mercury. Cash’s fourth album for the label, The Mystery of Life, was another commercial failure. Once again, Cash blamed the label for a lack of interest in him. He insisted for years that the label had pressed only five hundred copies of the album. It was another of his exaggerations, but the underlying point was accurate. He wouldn’t make another album for Mercury, which suited the label just fine.

  Cash suffered the hardest blow on May 11 when his mother died of cancer at the age of eighty-one. In contrast to the ambiguity he felt after his father’s death, Cash had always looked upon his mother as an unending source of inspiration and love. He had been pleased in the late 1980s when she suggested he open a museum and souvenir shop near the house, and he watched proudly as she greeted fans. Even after her death, Cash felt her presence. Whenever he was honored or otherwise felt blessed, he imagined her sharing the moment with him. At the same time, her death left him feeling increasing vulnerable. “Closing my mother’s coffin was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do,” Cash told Ralph Emery, the Nashville TV version of Larry King.

  Three days after the funeral at the First Baptist Church in Hendersonville, Cash felt the shadow of death again: eight members of Reba McEntire’s band were killed when their chartered plane crashed into the side of a mountain near San Diego. The tragedy reminded him of all the other country entertainers who had been killed in plane crashes—including Patsy Cline—as well as the close calls he had had in the air. Cash was forced to think about his own mortality even more when, at McEntire’s request, he delivered the eulogy at the funeral for the band members.

  One positive thing about this season of darkness—which had begun with his heart surgery in 1988—was a deepening of his need and love for his wife. The illnesses and pills had pretty much erased his lingering sexual urges, leaving the infidelities a thing of the past. He was grateful to June for the way she had stayed by his side through all the tough times, and he felt increasingly responsible for her as she underwent trials of her own. June sensed this change in him, and she too felt closer and more devoted.

  Until country music set up shop along the Highway 76 strip in the small town of Branson in the Missouri Ozarks, the community’s only claim to pop culture fame was that it was part of the character Jed Clampett’s old stomping grounds in the TV series Beverly Hillbillies. The show’s creator, Paul Henning, spent time in Branson as a boy, and the town was mentioned—along with several other Ozark towns—in the show’s early episodes outlining Clampett’s past.

  Bran
son’s identity became tied to country music through a series of events in the 1980s. Developers saw country music as a way to lure tourists. First, the Roy Clark Celebrity Theatre opened early in the decade and served as a showcase for name entertainers. By the start of the 1990s, other country stars, including Mel Tillis, Ray Stevens, and Mickey Gilley, opened theaters, and millions of tourists a year were streaming into the entertainment center. To performers, Branson offered a place to perform without having to travel hundreds of miles between shows.

  Cash was intrigued when a Southern California investor, David Green, approached him with a plan not only to build a 2,500-seat theater for him but also to construct a $35 million entertainment complex called Cash Country. Best of all, Cash didn’t have to put any of his own money into the eighty-acre project, which would include an amusement park, go-car track, and souvenir shop. He’d get a royalty for the use of his name. Branson also promised an easier lifestyle. “The idea was to cut down on the road,” Lou Robin says.

  Not everybody thought it was a good move. Most contemporary country best-sellers looked at the city the way rock artists in the seventies and eighties looked at Las Vegas showrooms: it was decidedly unhip. “It was impulse,” Rosanne says of the project. “Like ‘Strawberry Cake’ and ‘The Baron,’ like ‘Chicken in Black.’ All impulse….He was floundering a bit; there was something desperate about it and confused. He was trying to find his center. I think he realized that. I have a letter from him where he asks me to come and play at his theater in Branson, and I remember when I got it, I just kind of groaned, ‘How long is this going to last?’”

  Despite Cash’s reservations, the appeal was too strong; he was in. With his star aboard, Green held a press conference in Branson on April 30 to announce the project, and construction began six months later.