Rubin was a man of as few words as Cash, which meant there wasn’t a lot said that night. Robin remembers them sitting on a couch, just staring at each other for several minutes. June thought the idea of John working with a heavy-metal producer was absurd, but Cash sensed an independence in Rubin that he liked. Besides, there were no other options. He thought his record career was over. He agreed to get together with Rubin to see what they could come up with.
Thanks to Mercury’s lack of interest in Cash, who still owed the label one more album, Rubin was easily able to work out a deal. He paid Mercury a modest royalty on Cash’s future album sales and got the rights to sign Cash to his American Recordings label. “More than anything, I got the feeling that he was curious about why I would want to work with him,” Rubin says. “My first challenge was to rebuild his confidence.”
“I’d love to hear some of your favorite songs.”
Those were Rubin’s first words to Cash when they sat down in the producer’s spacious home high above the celebrated Sunset Strip in Los Angeles on May 17, 1993, to begin exploring the process of making an album together. It was just two weeks before Cash’s debut in Branson.
Normally, Rubin would spend lots of time talking to acts he was working with for the first time, trying to learn about them so he could better understand their music. With the reserved, soft-spoken Cash, Rubin realized he needed to reverse the process; he would learn about Cash the person through his music. Wanting to keep things informal, Rubin didn’t even turn on the recording equipment when he asked Cash to sing some of his favorite songs. Accompanying himself on acoustic guitar, Cash responded with all kinds of tunes—cowboy songs, train songs, gospel songs, heartbreak songs, funny songs.
On their second night together, Cash went into a number that caught Rubin’s attention. The producer didn’t know if it was a song or a poem; he just knew it was the kind of strong personal statement he associated with Cash’s best work in the 1950s and 1960s. He reached over and turned on the recording equipment and asked Cash to repeat the number. To Rubin’s mind, he wasn’t recording songs for a record, just assembling ideas. The song was “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie,” a popular nineteenth-century folk song that Cash learned as a boy in Dyess and included in the Ballads of the True West album. But it wasn’t the song that intrigued Rubin so much as the two-minute recitation that preceded it, a personal statement of faith.
“It got back to the sort of mystical root of who Johnny Cash is,” Rubin says. “It was something that sounded like it was coming from someplace deep inside of him. It was epic, and that’s what Johnny was to me—epic.”
The recitation, in fact, was a poem, “A Cowboy’s Prayer,” written in the 1920s by Charles Badger Clark, who was the first poet laureate of South Dakota. The words summarized Cash’s own feelings about finding his greatest connection with God outside church walls.
When he finished the number again, Cash paused, then started it a third time, perhaps feeling he could do a better version of it. Apparently satisfied, he went on to “Just the Other Side of Nowhere,” a song from one of the first demo tapes Kris Kristofferson had ever given him. Again, Rubin cheered him on.
Warmed by Rubin’s show of enthusiasm, Cash then did something that surprised even him. He started singing a song he had written four years earlier but refused to record because he was too protective of it; he didn’t want it wasted on a Mercury album that no one would hear. The song, “Drive On,” was an evocative look at buddies from Vietnam and the emotional scars of that war. Again Rubin was intrigued. Cash later explained that the song was “really a piece of history.” The lines, including the “drive on” exhortation, came right out of the mouths of troops, and he wanted the song to demonstrate their resilience and resolve. “It wasn’t pro-war or antiwar or anything else,” Cash said. “It’s just pro-people.” The song also echoed the “Sail on!” optimism of the Joaquin Miller poem he’d loved as a boy.
It was the next song Cash played that night, however, that proved to be the breakthrough in the pair’s relationship: “Delia’s Gone.”
Looking back at those early meetings, Cash often drew a parallel between Rubin’s patient manner and Sam Phillips’s similar approach in the studio. As he told music writer Sylvie Simmons, “Sam Phillips put me in front of that microphone at Sun Records in 1955 for the first time and said, ‘Let’s hear what you’ve got. Sing your heart out,’ and I’d sing one or two and he’d say, ‘Sing another one, let’s hear one more.’”
The even more remarkable parallel, Cash would come to understand, was between what Rubin did for him in those Sunset Strip get-togethers and what Phillips did with a fledgling Elvis Presley in 1954. When Elvis sat down with Phillips, he needed direction—he needed an outside listener to point out where his strengths lay. During Presley’s first recording session, Phillips gave it to him by declaring after the impromptu version of “That’s All Right,” “That’s it.”
Though Rubin had never heard it before, “Delia’s Gone” was the old folk-blues song that Cash had rewritten in the 1960s into his own statement about violence and remorse. By singling the song out, Rubin was saying, in essence, “That’s it.” It went:
Delia, oh, Delia Delia all my life
If I hadn’t have shot poor Delia
I’d have had her for my wife
Delia’s gone, one more round Delia’s gone.
I went up to Memphis
And I met Delia there
Found her in her parlor
And I tied her to her chair
Delia’s gone, one more round Delia’s gone.
She was low down and trifling
And she was cold and mean
Kind of evil make me want to
Grab my sub machine
Delia’s gone, one more round Delia’s gone.
First time I shot her
I shot her in the side
Hard to watch her suffer
But with the second shot she died
Delia’s gone, one more round Delia’s gone.
But jailer, oh, jailer
Jailer, I can’t sleep
’Cause all around my bedside
I hear the patter of Delia’s feet
Delia’s gone, one more round Delia’s gone.
So if your woman’s devilish
You can let her run
Or you can bring her down and do her
Like Delia got done
Delia’s gone, one more round Delia’s gone.
This was the tough, hard-edged side of Cash that Rubin wanted to hear, the side he felt had largely been missing from Cash’s recordings since he became a symbol of American goodness and family in the 1970s. What Cash had lost during that period was the confidence and inner drive to continue pushing musical and cultural boundaries. Rubin’s goal was to help Cash regain his confidence in ways that would brush away all those years of uneven, sometimes indifferent recordings—almost as if Cash had never lost track of the bold, maverick tradition of his best fifties and sixties recordings. Rubin didn’t want to take Cash back to the earlier decades, but he did want to see what kind of music Cash, at sixty-one, would make if he could recapture the spirit of the singer-songwriter who first electrified the pop world at Folsom Prison.
“I’m talking about the original Johnny Cash who loomed large and was surrounded by all this darkness, yet who still had vulnerability,” Rubin says. “I wanted, if you will, to take him back to the ‘I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die’ Man in Black, and ‘Delia’s Gone’ did it perfectly. He kills the girl, and then is remorseful. I loved how the brutal act was followed by this haunted life. I was trying to get him to go from all these years of thinking his best stuff was behind him and just phoning in records to thinking we could make his best albums ever. I don’t know if he really believed that, but he was willing to give it a try.”
Not only was Rubin surprised by how good a song “Drive On” was, but he was even more impressed by “Like a Soldier,” another song Ca
sh wrote during the Mercury period but kept to himself until he felt he was in good hands. In it, Cash used the image of a duty-bound military survivor to describe his own struggles and the prospects for a blessing of salvation. In some ways it was a sequel to Kristofferson’s song “The Pilgrim, Chapter 33,” with its Cash-inspired lines about “a walkin’ contradiction partly truth and partly fiction / Taking every wrong direction on his lonely way back home.” In “Like a Soldier,” Cash was back home and looking back over his journey.
The lyrics of the graceful song go in part:
Like a soldier getting over the war
Like a young man getting over his crazy days
Like a bandit getting over his lawless ways
Every day is better than before
I’m like a soldier getting over the war
There were nights I don’t remember
And there’s pain that I’ve forgotten
Other things I choose not to recall
There are faces that come to me
In my darkest secret memory
Faces that I wish would not come back at all
But in my dreams’ parade of lovers
From the other times and places
There’s not one that matters now, no matter who
I’m just thankful for the journey
And that I’ve survived the battles
And that my spoils of victory are you.
Rubin was amazed by what he was hearing. This was even more than he had imagined. Almost immediately, he began thinking about ways to enhance the impact of the songs by applying more musical shading, but he wasn’t ready to bring musicians in yet. He wanted more of the pure Cash. Things were going so well that Rubin began suggesting a few songs for Cash, notably “Thirteen,” a tale of bad luck and hard times written for Cash by heavy-metal rocker Glenn Danzig, and “Down There by the Train,” a story of sin and salvation by Tom Waits.
“I wasn’t trying to look for songs that would ‘connect’ Johnny to a younger audience,” Rubin says. “I was just trying to find songs that really made sense for his voice. By that I don’t mean baritone. I mean resonate with his character so he could sing the words and have them feel like he wrote them.”
After three days they had nearly three dozen songs on tape. Rubin was ecstatic. And as he left for Branson, Cash was cautiously optimistic.
II
Going from Rubin’s living room to the Wayne Newton Theatre in Branson was a case of culture shock in the extreme. Cash wasn’t even able to enjoy the luster of playing in his own theater, as he had earlier envisioned. All the attention in the venue was focused on Newton. When the theater opened in early May, the newspaper account told it all: “If anyone still doubted that Branson had hit the big time, they needed only to be on hand last weekend when a glowing spaceship arrived amid blasts of smoke and streams of laser lights. In a stage show the likes of which this southwest Missouri town has never seen, the King of Las Vegas took his place on his own Ozarks throne.”
A concluding paragraph underscored Cash’s secondary role: “When [Newton’s] away from Branson for short stints back in Las Vegas this summer, Johnny Cash will fill in.”
Things were worse than Cash imagined when he opened his first two-week engagement on May 31. The atmosphere was touristy, leading him to wonder if the audience even cared about the music. Most of the crowd were bus tour groups who were simply attending shows that the tour organizers had lined up for them. They expected to be led backstage after the show for autographs, pictures, and chit-chat, things that Cash might have enjoyed at one time in his career but not now that his health was such an issue.
Kathy Cash operated a souvenir shop in Branson at the time. “Dad hated the whole retirement aura of Branson,” she recalls. “One day he said, ‘Do you know the difference between Jurassic Park and Branson? Blue hair.’”
As the word got out that Cash wasn’t going to be available for all the gladhanding, attendance at his shows slowly decreased. Paid attendance the second week, for instance, ranged from 907 to 2,084. His guarantee was down $10,000 from the 1991 pact and the number of days was cut to forty.
Two weeks after the Branson engagement, Cash was back in Rubin’s living room offering new versions of songs from the May sessions as well as recording additional ones. Rubin continued to tape his vocals to help him decide which songs might work best together on an album.
Part of Rubin’s genius was that he didn’t simply portray Cash as a rebel. He wanted to break through the public image of Cash as a superhero by capturing his human side—the struggle and the pain and the grit. Says Rubin, “When I asked artists what they admired about him, that’s what they often mentioned—that vulnerable, hurt aspect, the man who wouldn’t give up.”
Rubin especially liked Cash’s rendition of Danzig’s “Thirteen,” and he asked Cash to open the new session by redoing the song, this time accompanied on guitar by Danzig himself. Pleased with the result, Rubin began thinking the tune could sound great on the album alongside “Delia’s Gone.”
Cash’s hopes for the coming album continued to rise, while many of those around him tried to caution him against putting too much faith in this “bearded hippie.” They didn’t want to see Cash set himself up for another painful fall.
Tom Petty, whose new album, Wildflowers, was being produced by Rubin concurrently, was confident that Cash was in good hands. A fan ever since buying the Folsom Prison album as a teenager and seeing Cash weekly on the ABC show, Petty admired him for his socially conscious music and for bringing so many cool guests on the show. “He wrote about real things and America in a way that didn’t feel phony to me,” says Petty.
Like so many, Petty lost track of Cash for years—remembering only one album from the 1970s and 1980s: the dreadful Look at Them Beans. After playing it, he asked himself, “‘God, what’s happened to him?’ It was obvious he was kinda lost,” recalls Petty, “but I still admired him for what he had done earlier.”
When Rubin mentioned to Petty early in 1993 that he was thinking about working with Cash, Petty urged him on. “Rick was just over the moon about working with Johnny. I don’t know if any record meant more to him than Johnny’s.”
Two days after returning to Branson on July 6, there was another death in Cash’s circle—his older brother Roy, who had been second only to his mother in encouraging him to become a singer. John and June attended the funeral in Memphis. He at first declined when his nephew Roy Jr. asked him to deliver the eulogy. “Oh, Roy, I don’t know if I can do that,” Cash objected. “I may come apart.” But he eventually relented, and he expressed his love for his brother. He was most moved that day when Roy Jr.’s daughter Kellye, Miss America 1987, sang the closing hymn, “I Bowed on My Knees and Cried Holy.” A few days later, Cash called her to say he’d had no “real peace in Roy’s passing and the funeral until I heard you sing that piece of music, and I now know that Roy is in heaven.”
There was still more reason for Cash to despair. He wasn’t the only one relying on pills to keep him going. Both June and John Carter were struggling against growing addiction problems.
John Carter, in his early twenties, had checked in to rehab units in 1991 and 1992, but he was showing signs of deepening depression. His world turned infinitely darker in 1993 when he found his mother passed out on the floor in Branson. He rushed to her side, flashing on all the times when he had feared for his father’s life in similar situations. “Mom!” he shouted, “Wake up! Please, Mom.”
If what happened next hadn’t been so tragic, he wrote later, it would have been almost comical. “She rolled over, her long hair splayed over her face, opened her eyes, and focused on me deliberately. ‘I am awake,’ she answered calmly. ‘I was in meditation.’”
It was John Carter’s introduction to his mother’s addiction, and it terrified him. Just as drugs stole his father from him in the 1980s, he feared addiction might now take his mother away.
In Anchored in Love he wrote: “For so long
Mom had obsessed over the addictions of her husband, her daughters and her son. Next she moved into denial. Then came the time, I believe, when she had simply had enough, when the struggle with the addicts in her life overcame her strength and resolve. With no better way of describing it, I think the cumulative mental, physical and emotional pain combined in such a way that the drug use eventually seemed OK to her.
“She would never have acknowledged that she too was an addict. I believe she always had the illusion of control, as though the drugs were her friends, her helpers. I think she thought of herself as the master, not the slave, of the pills she took. After all, she never got angry, fell down or picked a fight with her loved ones when she was under the influence of narcotics. She simply stopped speaking in full sentences and went off into her own world. Her mind was not the same.”
With all this heartache around Cash, music once again became his chief escape and hope, a way to rally against the tensions and pressures—physical, emotional, and financial—in his life. Though he still drew upon his faith, he was finally back to a place where he was looking to music for self-affirmation. Through every concert and every bus ride and every sleepless night, he longed for the day when he would go back to Rubin’s living room and sing his heart out.
III
When recording resumed July 21, Cash was unusually productive. Over three days he sang more than two dozen songs, including two more that had been suggested by Rubin: Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold” and Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on The Wire.” He also played a new one of his own, “Redemption,” a solemn tale of the liberating power of the blood of Jesus.
Johnny Cash: The Life Page 59