Johnny Cash: The Life

by Robert Hilburn

  June wasted no time. Early the following morning, she phoned Hamilton’s office at Vapor Records, an upstart label owned by Neil Young and Elliot Roberts. “When I got in, there was this note from June in my inbox,” Hamilton says. “It read, ‘Rick Rubin says you need to make my record. Call me back. June Carter.’” Hamilton still thought the idea was crazy, but she returned the call out of courtesy.

  “June was determined,” she says. “We got together at the Four Seasons, where she and John were staying, and she was so excited about making a record that I got swept up in it and I started thinking it might work. I’d help her find a label deal and a producer. I liked her right away and wanted to help her.”

  Meanwhile, Cash continued to struggle physically, causing June to worry most nights whether they’d make it through the show. His failing eyesight made it difficult for him even to make his way from the dressing room to the stage; the stage crew put fluorescent tape on the floor to help guide him. Lou Robin watched carefully for any sign he’d have to cancel the next group of dates. By now, John was openly talking about retirement, though the earliest target date anyone recalls him mentioning was sometime in 2000. Holland, his longtime drummer, figured the end was going to come much sooner, and he warned other members of the band and crew to think about lining up another job—just in case. “It wasn’t the kind of thing you’re never ready for,” Holland says. “But I wouldn’t have been surprised if John had to stop at any point.”

  That point finally arrived the night of October 25, 1997, at the Whiting Auditorium in Flint, Michigan—just about as routine a stop on the tour trail as you could imagine.

  III

  Cash had been playing Flint since the 1960s, but this was the first time he had played the two-thousand-seat home of the Flint Symphony Orchestra. It was the same week Cash’s second autobiography was published, and he and June were scheduled to fly to New York the following day to kick off a brief book promotion tour.

  Val Awad, the production manager for the Whiting, sensed something was wrong as soon as she saw Cash backstage. “It wasn’t drink, it wasn’t drugs, it was something else,” she said. “I thought maybe Alzheimer’s; I didn’t know.”

  As soon as Cash walked onstage, several members of the audience, too, felt the same concern.

  After a few numbers, Cash dropped his guitar pick and nearly tumbled onto the floor when he bent over to pick it up. “As Johnny began to stagger, we, as nurses, instinctively started to stand up to go to his aid as he looked like he could fall,” said Marie Macaulay, an RN who was sitting with some co-workers near the stage.

  Cash, however, was able to straighten up with the help of a bandmate. Embarrassed, he decided to share with the audience a secret he had been carrying for months. He told the crowd he had Parkinson’s disease, which ran in his family. He’d noticed he was having impaired balance, difficulty concentrating, and occasional slurred speech, classic symptoms.

  Mistaking the statement for a joke, several in the audience laughed.

  “It ain’t funny,” Cash replied sharply before he caught himself. “It’s all right,” he told the audience. “I refuse to give it some ground in my life.”

  Cash didn’t want to leave the stage, though band members were ready to help lead him to the dressing room. He ran through several more songs, including “Rusty Cage” and “Delia’s Gone,” as well as old favorites such as “Get Rhythm” and the ever-present “I Walk the Line.”

  His daughter Cindy watched it all from the edge of the stage, and she rushed to his side once he did finally head for the dressing room. “When he left the stage, he told me to please help him walk,” she says. “I didn’t think about this maybe being his last show; I just didn’t want him to fall. I could see that he was dizzy and he was starting to panic. It was heartbreaking.”

  Chapter 34

  A Hero Again

  I

  JOHNNY CASH PROCEEDED TO NEW YORK, as planned, for the TV show appearance but canceled the rest of the book tour and returned home to Hendersonville to meet with a team of doctors. Lou Robin issued a press release saying that Cash was indeed suffering from Parkinson’s disease and needed to cancel all public appearances indefinitely. “He’s faced a lot of challenges in his life,” Robin wrote. “He thrives on challenges. Johnny feels confident that once the disease is medically stabilized, he will soon resume his normal schedule.” A week later the diagnosis was changed to Shy-Drager syndrome, a harsher disease that also attacks the nervous system. He was told he had eighteen months to live.

  Within days, Cash was back in Baptist Hospital with double pneumonia and other ailments. The treatment included the use of a ventilator to clear Cash’s lungs, and ultimately an induced coma. Rumors circulated through the Nashville music industry that he was dying. His family and friends gathered around him. Cash remembered regaining consciousness well enough on occasion to hear the dire talk around him, though he still couldn’t communicate. On one occasion he awoke to find his old friend Merle Haggard cradling him in his arms. On another he heard his doctor speaking to God. “She told God that she and medicine had done all they could, it was in His hands now.” She spent the whole night praying.

  Watching all this for more than a week, June sent word out on the Internet that fans should pray for John. He was now, she too felt, totally in God’s hands. The following morning, Cash not only had come out of the coma but was sitting up in bed drinking coffee. He and June maintained that his recovery was due to divine intervention.

  The experience had a profound impact on Cash’s children. Hours before he awakened, Rosanne poured her heart out to him in a four-page letter: “In these 10 days, I have learned more than I thought possible about love and the resources of the human spirit and the fragility of us all. Dad, you were so sweet laying in your bed. It was an opportunity to be close to you in a way I’ve never known before. All pretense, any issues, defenses, resentments, fear, expectations, everything just fell away like cardboard and there you were, your pure essence, and there I was in awe and appreciation….All else was burned away in these 10 days. It was an honor to be able to just give love to you—to wipe your forehead, stretch your hands and feet, hold your hand and pray for you.”

  Rosanne closed the lengthy letter with these words: “I love you so much, dad—nothing else is real. Please forgive me for the way I’ve hurt you, separated myself from you and withdrawn. I am so deeply grateful and proud that you are my father.”

  The letter meant the world to Cash, who just months earlier had pleaded—once again—in a note to Rosanne for her and his other daughters for them to stop blaming him for the early years of neglect. In the letter, written at the Cinnamon Hill house on Christmas Eve 1996, he wrote: “I believe I’m still being paid back—out of a lot of resentment for leaving you girls 29 years ago. I believe I have never been forgiven for the neglect, emotional abuse and abandonment. I believe I’m somehow expected to ‘make up’ for it, which is impossible. For me, it was a matter of survival. When God gave me a son, I vowed not to make the same mistake again and I didn’t.”

  Then to correct the impression he’d given that he loved his son more than his daughters, Cash added: “When the lady at the…Kennedy Center asked for a list of people I wanted invited, your name was first on the list, followed by your sisters and John Carter, 5th [the order of his children’s birth]. My brothers and sisters and co-workers came last.”

  Over the next few months, Cash put on a brave front. He told friends and loved ones that he simply refused to accept the Shy-Drager diagnosis and that he looked forward to getting back into the studio. But he was still in constant pain and kept worrying how, without any tour income, he was going to be able to go on supporting all those people who depended on him. He also wanted to simplify his life.

  He had put the House of Cash building, which included his museum, up for sale in 1989 for $795,000, but no buyer emerged. In explaining Cash’s decision at the time to try to sell, his brother Tommy, who had become a
real-estate agent and was handling the property, said, “I’m not going to get into why he has decided to cut down generally all the unnecessary expense in his life and his career, but he is in the process of doing that. He is putting out many, many, many dollars for things that could be cut back on, and this is just one thing they’re considering doing.”

  He was now thinking about a new sales push. In putting the property back on the market, Cash was selling not only the museum building (now for $1.2 million), but also an old railroad depot which John and June had moved from Madison to their property to display June’s antiques ($75,000), the lot on which the museum and depot both sat ($250,000), and two seven-acre-plus lots adjoining the property ($1.8 million).

  The year-end balance sheet from one of the years after Flint showed his net income at well under $100,000. Even at the end of his life, Cash’s assets—aside from property and future royalties—were accounted in the low seven figures, far less than is generally assumed for a star of his stature.

  Unchained won a Grammy for best country album in February 1998—over bigger sellers by artists such as Alan Jackson, Patty Loveless, George Strait, and Dwight Yoakam. This was even sweeter than the contemporary folk Grammy. The album had been up against the best that Nashville could produce, and Cash had won. Rubin was especially delighted. He took Nashville’s indifference to the albums personally. After that Grammy, he bought a full-page ad in the March 14 issue of Billboard magazine literally giving the finger to those professionals who had turned their backs on Cash and continued to ignore him.

  The $20,000 ad was dominated by a striking photo that Jim Marshall, a noted rock photographer who had also been at Folsom, had taken of a snarling Cash flashing his middle finger at the camera the day of the 1969 concert at San Quentin. Lou Robin says Cash was “fed up” with the TV crew following him everywhere he went and he decided to send them a message. In the ad, which Rubin showed Cash before submitting it to the trade publication, the text read, “American Recordings and Johnny Cash would like to acknowledge the Nashville music establishment and country radio for your support.”

  Cash was uneasy about the ad. Before agreeing to it, he phoned Billy Graham. “He didn’t tell me what to do or not to do, just that he wouldn’t judge me either way,” Cash said. “After my talk with him, I prayed about it and called Rick back. I gave him the go-ahead.”

  The ad was cheered and jeered in Nashville—tacked up on scores of record company bulletin boards by young Turks who also resented the conservative ways of most of the city’s record labels, but criticized, too, as a crude West Coast record industry gimmick. Asked about the ad, Rubin told USA Today, “We hope it will open the eyes of the country community and hopefully they’ll say, ‘The guy did win…and he’s making records considered the best in country and maybe we should readdress the situation.’”

  Willie Nelson, who cut out the ad and hung it on the wall of his tour bus, told the same paper, “John speaks for all of us.”

  No longer having to spend weeks on the road, Cash spent most of the summer and fall of 1998 putting together songs for the new album and visiting his doctors. He and June also worried about the failing health of others around them. Both of June’s sisters were seriously ill. Helen had been hospitalized for months with various stomach problems. She passed away on June 2.

  All this brought John and June closer together. As their world shrank, their love deepened. They were enjoying the kind of relationship he had dreamed about in the Air Force and his fans had imagined they were living all along. To Cash, their love was another sign of redemption. He was also thrilled that June was getting the chance to make an album again.

  “The love affair between them was never stronger than those last years,” says Kelly Hancock, Cash’s niece. “June told me one day that nobody truly knew the depth of her love for John, and I must agree.”

  II

  Vicky Hamilton, who at forty-one was experienced at pitching new bands to record labels, didn’t think she’d have any trouble finding a label that wanted to work with someone as celebrated as June Carter, but she was turned down by everyone she contacted in Los Angeles and in Nashville. Nobody wanted to sign a nearly seventy-year-old woman. After several months, Hamilton realized there was only one person in the record business who wanted to be involved with a June Carter Cash album—Hamilton herself. “I was astonished and pissed,” she says. “I never had the idea of starting my own record label, but I did it out of anger that the industry would not support someone as iconic as June Carter Cash.”

  Even then, Hamilton couldn’t find a deal. Thinking it’d be easy to get a major label at least to go into a joint venture on an album, Hamilton formed her own label, Small Hairy Dog, and returned to established labels, but she was again rebuffed. Finally, in the summer of 1998, she worked out a deal with tiny Risk Records, an indie label in Los Angeles, which put up $35,000.

  Much like Rubin with Cash, Hamilton prepared for the album by asking June to send her tapes of songs she’d like to record. The song Hamilton focused on was “Far Side Banks of Jordan.” Hamilton had heard the Cashes sing it at the House of Blues, where there wasn’t a dry eye in the place, she says, including hers.

  Of the forty or so songs Carter sent Hamilton, there were old songs—“Ring of Fire” and “Will the Circle Be Unbroken”—as well as new compositions, notably “I Used to Be Somebody.” This last, with references to palling around with James Dean during her acting days and hanging out with Elvis Presley on the concert trail, came across to some listeners as a somewhat bittersweet reflection on what might have been if she hadn’t given up acting and other solo career dreams for Cash.

  But Hamilton says she perceived no sense of regret or thwarted ambition when she spoke to June about the song. “Oddly enough, I never got the feeling the album was so much about her,” she adds. “We had a lot of fun making it, but I got the feeling she did it because that’s what he [John] really wanted. He was so supportive, so proud of her. To my mind, they were truly soul mates. They had a closeness that I’ve only seen a couple of times in my life. It was a great love story.”

  John Carter said that his mother was the “director, the bandleader, the vocalist, and the cheerleader” during the recording sessions in the fall of 1998. “Spontaneity was the order of the day,” he recalled. “You never knew exactly what was going to happen or how the sound would actually come together.”

  Early in the process, June named the album Press On, a statement of resolve from “Diamonds in the Rough,” a Carter Family song. Over the weeks of recording, June was joined by Cash, Marty Stuart, Norman Blake, and champion fiddler Laura Weber (who would become John Carter’s second wife). It was a warm family affair.

  The sessions were understandably emotional for John Carter. Years later he would speak in detail about watching his parents seated so close together their heads nearly touched as they put their hearts into the lyrics on “Far Side Banks of Jordan.” The scene was dear to him for another reason. It was the last time, he says, he saw them both strong together. For the rest of their lives, one or the other would be ravaged by illness.

  Like everyone else around the couple, John Carter imagined that his father would pass first. Yet years later, listening again and again to that day’s recording, he points to a “sadness and conviction” in his mother’s voice that made him wonder whether she didn’t believe that she might be the first to go. The album would be released the following April.

  That April was also noteworthy when Cash was saluted in a TV special taped in New York City for the cable channel TNT’s Master Series. In the days leading up to the show at the Hammerstein Ballroom, the question was whether Cash, who had just celebrated his sixty-seventh birthday, would be well enough to attend. It had been nearly two years since the final concert in Flint, and he had spent two weeks in serious condition in Baptist Hospital the past October with pneumonia.

  Lots of his friends were represented in the telecast. Dylan, U2, and Springsteen check
ed in with videotaped performances: U2 with a reggae-flavored version of “Don’t Take Your Love to Town,” Dylan with “Train of Love,” and Springsteen with “Give My Love to Rose.” Among those on hand in person, Kristofferson sang “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” Lyle Lovett delivered “Tennessee Flat-Top Box,” and rapper Wyclef Jean performed “Delia’s Gone.”

  Finally, Cash appeared onstage to a grand ovation. Marshall Grant, setting aside the bitterness of the lawsuit, stood by his side as Cash sang “Folsom Prison Blues” and “I Walk the Line.” During the final number, June and the rest of the old cast joined him. The show was widely reviewed, providing additional steam to Cash’s revived career.

  Because Cash wasn’t strong enough to travel to Los Angeles regularly for recording sessions for the third album, Rubin arranged for engineer David Ferguson to set up some recording equipment in a cabin on Cash’s Hendersonville property. In the liner notes for what would become American III: Solitary Man, Cash described the relaxed atmosphere that surrounded the sessions, which started just weeks after the TNT special.

  “I began the album…in the cabin, in the middle of a 50-acre compound surrounded by cedar trees, deer, goats and peacocks,” Cash wrote. “The window unit air conditioner doesn’t work anymore. We had buffalo, and every time it came on, they rammed it with their horns. Sometimes we have to stop tape for a thunderstorm. We play back the songs and the mockingbirds sing along with it.”