Johnny Cash: The Life (27 page)

George Jones, who had quite a reputation himself for erratic behavior on the road, said that Cash far surpassed him in terms of trashing hotel rooms. In fact, he wrote in his 1996 autobiography, he learned during a stop at a Midwest Holiday Inn in the early 1960s that Cash had broken so many pieces of furniture in the chain’s motels that he knew exactly what each item cost.

Jones got into an argument with Cash at the motel and accidentally broke a lamp. Cash noted matter-of-factly, “One broken lamp. That’ll be forty-five dollars.”

Jones then pulled down some drapes. Cash said, “That’ll be three hundred dollars.”

The singer then ran into the bathroom, took the porcelain top off the toilet tank, and smashed it in the bathtub: “One commode top, a hundred seventy-five dollars,” John said.

When Saul Holiff confronted Jones with a bill for the room damages, Jones was amazed that all of Cash’s predicted costs were accurate right down to the penny.

“Ring of Fire” could be heard on jukeboxes, on the radio, and on home record players almost everywhere in America—except one hillside home in Casitas Springs. Vivian had once stood by the radio for hours hoping to hear one of John’s records, but she now avoided music stations. The pain of this single was even greater than usual. During one of his rare visits home, Vivian maintained, John told her that he had written a song while drunk and on pills, called “Ring of Fire,” which was about “a certain female body part.” What really riled Vivian, according to her account, was that he said he wrote it while fishing with Merle Kilgore on Lake Casitas but gave his songwriting credit to June Carter because “she needs the money and I feel sorry for her.” The authorship of the song, however, was resolved when Kilgore later confirmed that he and Carter wrote it.

There was one place where Vivian couldn’t avoid the song: Cash’s return date at the Hollywood Bowl on June 22, 1963. Once again, Holiff teamed with radio station KFOX to send out a star-packed lineup in support of Cash. While the fans at the Bowl cheered “Ring of Fire,” Vivian wished she could be anywhere else, but it was one of her rare chances to see her husband. “If she had not been such a devoted mother and had gone on the road with him, then the marriage would not have failed,” her sister Sylvia says. “But she wasn’t going to have somebody else raise her children back at home. Besides, she kept holding to the dream that Johnny would eventually realize what he was giving up and come back to his family.”

At the end of the night, Vivian’s actions were more telling than words. She didn’t even go backstage. She didn’t want to risk another humiliation. To make matters worse, Cash was in horrible shape that night, his voice little more than a rasp. She headed back to Casitas Springs with the children.

Cash’s drug addiction was becoming dangerous enough that Marshall Grant felt especially anxious. It was tough enough trying to cover for Cash when he failed to show up for a concert, but it was even more draining to see the destruction Cash was causing in his personal life, and he felt horrible when Vivian would call him on the road, begging him to do anything he could to make sure Johnny came home during tour breaks.

“I asked him countless times at the end of a tour, ‘John, why don’t you go home and see the kids and spend some time with Vivian?’ Most times,” Marshall remembered, “he wouldn’t go home, but even when he did, he seldom stayed long. He might stay overnight for a day or two, but then he’d jump into whatever vehicle was available and head into the desert, sometimes for three or four days at a stretch.”

Rosanne Cash shared Marshall’s despair. “When I was six years old [in Encino], it was like my daddy had always come home,” she says. “But when I was eight [in Casitas Springs], somebody else came home. He was distracted and depressed and antsy. He had this little office in the house. He’d go in there, close the door, and put on records all the time. He’d stay up all night.”

Because of the suffering of Cash’s family, Grant found himself resenting June Carter, especially after she began demanding that Cash get a divorce. But he knew Vivian was wrong when she claimed that June encouraged Johnny’s drug-taking so that he wouldn’t feel guilty about leaving his family.

In fact, Grant’s view of June had changed dramatically by the time they played the Hollywood Bowl in 1963. She had come to him weeks earlier to ask how they could work together in fighting the pills. Grant had already been telling hotel desk clerks to forward to him packages addressed to Cash so he could intercept pill shipments. He and June eventually became allies in that effort, and Grant admired her for it because he knew how angry Cash could get when anyone came between him and his drugs.

Marshall began to realize the depth of June’s growing devotion when he saw that she was willing to risk her place in John’s life by forcing him to confront his addiction. He would later say, “June is the hero in any story you want to write about Johnny Cash.”

The turning point in June’s relationship with Marshall had been the previous December in Albuquerque, when no one could get John to leave his hotel room to head to El Paso for the next show. As everyone else stood around, June stormed into Cash’s room and shouted, “Lay there, star!”

“He came out of that bed madder than I’d ever seen anyone,” she said later. “I was embarrassed, scared, and expecting to be fired, but we were on our way to the airport.”

Thinking her days with the Cash troupe were over, Carter sat at the airport wondering what to do next in terms of her career. Just then, Cash walked up to her and handed her an Indian peace pipe he had bought for her in the souvenir shop.

Grant was impressed again when June took the lead in searching Cash’s room for drugs. One reason Cash and Carter had separate rooms on the road was for the sake of appearances, but another was that Cash didn’t want anyone going through his hiding places, which ranged from his guitar case to old socks to the insides of toilet tanks. If June found any pills, she’d flush them down the toilet, and then had the nerve to tell Cash what she had done. According to Marshall, on occasion June would even encourage Johnny to go home between tours to see his children. She thought it would help lighten his sometimes dark moods.

Despite Vivian’s suspicions, Cash was not always in June’s arms between tours. Often he would just go off on his own, trying to escape. There were also times when the tension between John and June got so intense that they needed to take a break from each other, and John would sometimes turn to other women for comfort. There was constant uncertainty.

“It was tough not knowing where he was, what he was doing, whether he was hurt, or if he’d hooked up with some of the undesirable people he sometimes ran with and was lying dead in the gutter somewhere,” said Grant. “We couldn’t help him if we couldn’t find him.”

Don and Harold Reid, who would later tour with Cash as members of the Statler Brothers vocal quartet, recall that Cash felt so much torment about his family and June that he once went to the airport ticket counter at the end of a tour and asked for a ticket on the next flight. When asked where he wanted to go, he said, “Wherever the next plane will take me.” Harold Reid felt sorry for him. “You could see his head and his heart were fighting inside.”

At the center of all this turmoil, Cash continued to find a refuge in his music; it was the one part of his life he felt he could control. On the endless nights between tours when he would often drive out in the desert or simply crash in a town where he knew no one could track him down, he’d think about his music, searching for themes that fit his interests and beliefs. Even though it was “Ring of Fire” that had saved his Columbia contract, he returned again and again to the music that most pleased him—especially
Ride This Train
and the gospel collections.

In his moments of isolation, he continued to draw comfort and strength from the underdogs of the past, the characters in movies and books about the Old West, both the heroes and the outlaws. Like them, he felt happiest when there were no boundaries to fence him in. As his addiction deepened, he went back to piecing together the concept album celebrating the Old West.

Even when he was touring, Cash often tried to lose himself in his records. By now he had moved on from
Folk Songs of the Hills
and
Blues in the Mississippi Night
to other folk and blues collections. He carried a portable record player with him so he could listen to music backstage or at the hotel. Among the albums that he played repeatedly was the seven-volume Southern Heritage series which was released by Atlantic Records in 1960. It was further, invaluable documentation of the diverse music of the rural South— recordings put together by Alan Lomax, who had also been responsible for
Blues in the Mississippi Night.
Each volume was devoted to another genre of Southern folk music, from Blue Ridge Mountain music and white spirituals to folk songs for children and black gospel. Cash played the set so often that he could recite the titles of all the songs on each album—in order. He was especially pleased to see a Carter Family song, “Lonesome Valley,” in the collection.

Another album that captured Cash’s imagination during this period was the second Bob Dylan LP. Cash had been playing
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan
ever since producer John Hammond sent him a copy in the spring, and Cash marveled at the brilliance of Dylan’s writing. He had liked Dylan’s eponymous first album, but it was mainly the honesty and conviction of Dylan’s approach to folk standards that appealed to him; Dylan had written only two of its thirteen songs.

When he saw Dylan’s credit as the writer of the new album’s opening song, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Cash’s first thought was that Dylan had simply arranged some folk classic; the song was so good, Cash figured it had been handed down through the ages. Seeing Dylan identified as writer on song after song, however, he realized that this promising folksinger had blossomed into a profoundly gifted songwriter. Cash loved how Dylan would move from the romantic complexity of “Girl from the North Country” to the wry putdown of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” and then segue to the urgent political commentary of “Masters of War.”

Cash felt an immediate kinship with Dylan and was pleased to see
Freewheelin’
attract enough of an audience to reach number twenty-two on the pop charts. Its success—along with the Top 10 popularity of Peter, Paul and Mary’s cover version of “Blowin’ in the Wind”—gave Cash hope that his serious music, too, could eventually reach that same audience.

Eager to express his admiration, Cash wrote Dylan a letter soon after hearing
Freewheelin’,
and Dylan wrote back, saying he had been a fan since “I Walk the Line.” Cash invited Dylan to visit him the next time he was in California. Dylan later told him he’d tried but couldn’t find the house in Casitas Springs. When Dylan then wrote Cash from Carmel, Cash thought about taking the five-hour drive north, but Dylan had already left for New York. It was the start of a lifelong friendship, built mostly on respect rather than time spent together, because both men were essentially loners. They looked to each other not for companionship but for inspiration.

When asked in the early 1970s if he shared the widespread view that Dylan tended to be aloof and withdrawn, Cash told me, “We never did really talk that much. There was a mutual understanding between us. I never did try to dig into his personal life and he didn’t try to dig into mine. If he’s aloof and hard to get to, I can understand why. So many people have taken advantage of him, tried to do him in when they did get to him that I wouldn’t blame him for being aloof and hard to get to. Everybody tells him what he should write, how to think, what to sing. That’s really his business.”

While the lucrative new record deal gave Cash the confidence to pursue his own instincts even more boldly, it also reminded him of the need to sell records.

As soon as it was apparent that “Ring of Fire” was going to be his biggest seller yet, he returned to the Columbia recording studio in Nashville in a shameless attempt to duplicate the single’s success, all the way down to another mariachi horn intro. He even brought his good luck charm, Jack Clement, back from Beaumont to stand by his side. But nothing could make “The Matador” sparkle. The song was a slight, melodramatic tale of a once great but aging matador facing the bull for the last time, while his lost love watches with her new flame from the stands.

To judge from the
Billboard
charts alone, “The Matador” was a big success. After all, it went to number one on the country charts and number forty-four on the pop charts. But as had been the case with his early hits, there was such demand for a new Cash single after “Ring of Fire” that virtually anything would have done well—at least initially. But though “Ring of Fire” had stayed on the country charts for twenty-six weeks, “The Matador” dropped off after thirteen. In the end, Cash was embarrassed by the calculation involved. He rarely performed the song live and never bothered to include it on any of his “greatest hits” albums.

Columbia Records, however, was delighted, and Don Law felt vindicated in his decision to let Cash set his own agenda in the studio. To honor Sara and Maybelle Carter, Cash talked Law into doing a Carter Family “reunion” album with them in July.

John and June had become so comfortable together that they began to flaunt their relationship. Whereas even weeks earlier they’d tried to avoid any publicity away from the stage, they were now willing to pose for a photo when a newspaper reporter spotted them in a restaurant on July 24 in Kingston, Tennessee, just across the state line from Maces Springs.

The reporter didn’t know, or at least chose not to mention, that they were married to other people; they came across in the story as a couple, taking a break from the concert trail while June showed John around her old teenage stomping grounds. The article noted that the two famous singers had “enjoyed relaxation in the traditional East Tennessee manner by spending a quiet day fishing on Holston River,” and that the mood was so relaxed at breakfast the next morning that John asked June to throw him a bite of her ham.