Johnny Cash: The Life (28 page)

Holiff had not slowed in his efforts to link Cash with the evolving folk movement. He got Cash a role in a low-budget MGM film,
Hootenanny Hoot,
which tried to capitalize on the folk boom the same way that films like
Rock Around the Clock
had used a parade of rock stars to lure teens into theaters in the late 1950s. Cash’s appearance to sing “Frankie’s Man Johnny” was the only interesting thing about the film, even though he looks miserably out of place amid the mostly pop-folk acts.

Johnny fared better in an appearance that fall on an episode of the
Hootenanny
series on ABC, singing “Busted” and “Five Feet High and Rising.” The show was taped at SMU in Dallas on September 30 and aired on October 5. But the performance failed to help Cash’s reputation among the folk purists, because Joan Baez and other important folk artists were refusing to go on the show after the
Hootenanny
producers rejected Pete Seeger over his “left-wing views.”

Ironically, the most effective thing Cash did to connect with the folk audience had nothing to do with Holiff’s strategy. On November 12 he went into the studio in Nashville to record a song that had clearly been influenced by his hours of listening to Dylan’s music. Not only did “Understand Your Man” carry much of the melodic feel of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” but also the lyrics reflected a similar mix of confrontation and wit. The theme, however, was all Cash’s. The number was a not so thinly veiled message to Vivian.

As soon as the Columbia brass in New York heard the record, they made plans to give it a heavy pop promotion push—and they congratulated themselves for keeping Cash in the Columbia family.

As Kathy Cash recalls, her mom was worried to death when her dad wasn’t at home and even more worried when he was. “He would do stupid, bizarre things, like get in the camper and disappear without saying he was leaving,” she says. “Or he’d scream or just say, ‘Don’t talk to me, I’m writing.’ When I’d hear them yelling, I’d go to my room and close the door. I had this little record player, so I’d put on a record, anything to drown it out. But it never worked. Then we’d all go to bed, and we’d get up the next day and he’d be gone.”

Over several months, Vivian had put together a list of people and places to call when looking for her husband. The trail often led to Curly Lewis, the contractor who had built their house, and Floyd Gressett, the minister who had walked up the driveway to welcome them when they first moved to Casitas Springs. She detested both men for not standing up to Cash when he was in a drugged or drunken state.

Cash continued to flee the confrontations by driving to remote desert areas either to go hunting or simply to lie on the ground at night and let the drugs go to work. Death Valley was a favorite destination because he was fascinated by the name of the place. On occasion, however, he brought Lewis along, and the contractor seemed to delight in Cash’s often foolish daredevil antics, such as the time John drove his camper into the Mojave Desert and came across the fenced-off Naval Air Weapons Station. The land seemed isolated enough that Cash ignored the “No Trespassing” sign and drove through a gate. The camper bounced along a rough dirt road for several miles before they reached a curious sight: a paved highway that was marred by occasional bomb craters and burned-out remains of military vehicles.

Soon they were approached by someone in a military vehicle, who explained they were lucky to still be alive because the area was littered with thousands of dud bombs and land mines.

After that, although Lewis continued to spend time with Cash, he let Cash go on the all-night explorations by himself. When Cash returned from the desert, he was usually too wasted to go home, so he’d spend a day or two at a ranch owned by Gressett.

While Vivian and the girls attended Catholic services, Cash had joined Gressett’s nondenominational congregation in the spring of 1963; it was the first time he had gone to church regularly since Dyess. The church’s adopted slogan was “No law but love; no creed but Christ.”

Cash felt comfortable with Gressett because he, like Ezra Carter, didn’t judge him. “Floyd Gressett was always kind to me, even when I was at my worst,” Cash wrote in his first autobiography. “But he was wise enough to know from having preached for 13 years in the prisons of California that a man taking drugs isn’t going to listen to you.”

One of the prisons that Gressett visited regularly was Folsom, and he told Cash the prisoners would love to see him if he ever had time. Singing “Folsom Prison Blues” at Folsom Prison obviously appealed to Cash, and he passed the idea along to Holiff, who eventually worked out a date with Gressett for November 11, 1966.

To make their silent pact work, Cash said, he pretended that the pastor didn’t know he was hooked on drugs, and Gressett had to act as if he didn’t know. “He came looking for me more than once and found me at the point of death from days without food,” Cash wrote. “He’d take me back to the ranch and give me food and a bed.”

Sometimes Gressett joined Cash at the ranch, which was in the Cuyuma Valley about ninety miles north of Ventura. At other times Cash was alone or with his nephew Damon Fielder, the son of his older sister Louise. Cash was only ten years older than Damon, and he enjoyed his nephew’s company. Like Cash himself, Damon was a man of few words, and he loved to go camping, hunting (usually just for jackrabbits), and fishing. He also treated Cash like an uncle, not a star.

“Gressett provided a place for us to hide for two or three days when J.R. didn’t want to be home,” says Fielder. “Over time, J.R. must have burned every piece of wood on that ranch, because there wasn’t any firewood. He’d rip the boards and doors off the barn and shed and put them in a fire because he couldn’t find any firewood.”

On some days, when he wasn’t in any condition to drive ninety miles, or was found by a neighbor simply wandering around in a daze, Cash ended up at Fielder’s apartment in Oak View.

“He’d be so spaced out that he wasn’t making any sense, so of course he didn’t want to go home,” Fielder says. “He was really changing physically during this period. It got to the point where he looked like a drug addict. We wore the same kind of clothes, so he gave me a lot of his clothes after he lost all that weight. He’d sometimes call me from the airport in Los Angeles and say, ‘I don’t have any clothes,’ so I’d go to my closet and get his clothes and take them to him.”

Fielder had known Vivian since Memphis, which caused him frequently to end up in the middle of their arguments.

“Vivian would call and say, ‘Are you with Johnny?’ and it would be hard because I didn’t want to be disloyal to J.R.,” he says. “But Vivian was like my second mother, the sweetest lady that ever was, and all of a sudden, she is the jilted wife who thought she had done everything right and wanted to stay in the marriage. So I’d tell her the truth: ‘I have talked to him and he asked me not to tell you where he is. He’ll be home soon; he’s just messed up.’”

Cash went home to Vivian for Christmas, but it was a painful time. After the strain of the holidays, he looked forward to being back on the road and seeing June. They opened a week’s engagement at the Mint Hotel in Las Vegas on January 2, 1964, and it didn’t take long for the friction over his behavior to resurface. In their time apart, June had hoped that Cash would act on their lengthy, sometimes nightly talks—“bouts,” some would say—regarding his drug use and the marriage. But she could tell that nothing had changed.

Back in California, things took another bad turn for Vivian when she heard her husband’s “Understand Your Man,” his open letter to her. Now she had two reasons to avoid the music stations.

Don Law was pleased to see that
Billboard
magazine in its January 25 issue praised the single of “Understand Your Man” and Cash’s version of Merle Travis’s “Dark as a Dungeon,” calling the release so appealing that the only problem DJs were going to have was “deciding which of these sides is to be played first.” As it turned out, they had no trouble determining which song to play: “Understand Your Man” spent six weeks at number one on the country charts, while “Dungeon” made it only to number forty-nine. “Understand Your Man” also went to number thirty-five on the pop charts.

Meanwhile, Holiff continued to push on the television front. Cash not only made repeat musical appearances on
Hootenanny
but also was penciled in as a key guest on several TV pilots aimed at the networks or syndication. In its January 18 issue,
Billboard
ran a roundup on the various efforts.
Star Route,
hosted by actor Rod Cameron, was a sort of country version of
This Is Your Life.
Another project, hosted by Houston DJ Bill Bailey, was designed to be a “pop country” variety show with a live audience. The third show was called
Shindig,
and it was also a variety show, featuring Cash and artists from across the pop, country, and rock spectrum. Only
Shindig
would prove noteworthy, but the show had been completely redesigned by the time it aired that fall. Instead of the original country format, it focused on rock ’n’ roll, highlighting such major emerging stars as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and James Brown, along with Cash and Sun alums Jerry Lee Lewis and Roy Orbison.

The relationship between Cash and Carter was not all romance and cheering crowds. What Cash would look back on as his first real showdown with June came in early March while they were in Toronto, where as usual they had adjoining rooms. He had been up for days and seemed drained, physically and emotionally. Suddenly June walked into his room and said flatly, “I’m going. I can’t handle this anymore. I’m going to tell Saul that I can’t work with you anymore. It’s over.”

Writing about the incident in his second autobiography, Cash said he didn’t know exactly what had prompted her outburst—though it’s easy to assume it was her exasperation with the drug and divorce issues.

Rather than apologize, he lashed out verbally and grabbed her so that she couldn’t leave the room. When June struggled, he slapped her with the back of his hand. Realizing what he had done, he let her go, and she went back to her room. While she was in the shower Cash went into her room, gathered up her suitcase and all her clothes, including her shoes, and took them back to his room and locked the door.
Now let’s see her go!

Soon, June, covering herself with a towel, knocked on the door and demanded her clothes, but Cash refused until she promised not to leave. After tempers cooled, she gave in. The relationship was salvaged—for the moment. But the stress between them would resurface throughout the tour.

Johnny Western was driving John and June to the airport in Detroit a few weeks after the Toronto incident when they got into a screaming match in the backseat of the rental car. “They were going on and on about why his divorce was not happening,” he says. “And Johnny challenged her about her marriage. They called each other liars and just about every other name you could think of. But by the time we got to the airport, they had kissed and made up. It was surreal. It was not a fun time for anyone.”

In the first week in March, Cash went into the studio in Nashville to record songs for an album Columbia planned to rush out in order to capitalize on the success of the “Understand Your Man” single. The emphasis of the album, titled
I Walk the Line,
would be on six Cash favorites from his Sun days. To round out the collection, Cash threw in a song that Maybelle and Dixie Dean had written, “Troublesome Waters.” When he had all the material he needed for the album, he decided finally to record that Peter LaFarge song he had been thinking about for so long, the forceful commentary of “The Ballad of Ira Hayes.” He wanted it to be his next single—and it would be one of his finest moments on record.

Around the same time, Holiff came up with a booking coup—a showcase appearance at the prestigious Newport Folk Festival, where Cash would be introduced by Pete Seeger, no less, and share the bill with Dylan. This was, Holiff hoped, Cash’s chance to make up for the Carnegie Hall fiasco.

Once again, those around Cash were hoping that a corner had been turned. Less than six weeks later, however, he was in California during a tour break when he apparently fell asleep at the wheel of his camper, flipping the vehicle over on a highway near his house. He was cited for not having his driver’s license with him. Newport wasn’t until July 24, four months away, which left Holiff and Grant and the others with plenty of time to worry: Which Cash would show up?

UNLIKE CARNEGIE HALL
and the Hollywood Bowl, where all you had to do was rent the facility for the night, musicians had to be invited to play Newport. George Wein, a jazz pianist turned concert promoter, had operated the popular Newport Jazz Festival for years before starting the folk spinoff in 1959. In both ventures he was widely admired for choosing performers for their artistic credentials, not simply their record sales. Pete Seeger was a member of the original board of directors of the festival, which quickly became a crown jewel of the folk circuit.

While Holiff looked at Newport as part of his commercial strategy, Cash saw it as another chance to define his musical identity, and he spent days drafting set lists, searching for the right combination of songs. Considering all the time he spent with June, it’s understandable that he opted for a Carter Family song. When it came to his own recordings, the last thing he wanted was a greatest hits package; there’d be no “Teenage Queen” on a bill with Dylan. In the end, he didn’t even include “Ring of Fire.” The titles that were penciled in and erased from his worksheet leaned toward songs he felt strongly about, such as “I Still Miss Someone,” “Busted,” and “I Walk the Line.” He wouldn’t finalize the exact list until the day of the show. For the most part, the more than 225 musicians appearing at Newport, many of them amateur or semiprofessional, had grown up in the Southern folk culture. In putting together his set, he wanted to demonstrate his musical kinship with them.

In his overview of the 1964 festival,
New York Times
critic Robert Shelton stressed the populist spirit of the affair: “Prison-born work songs or blues were not merely interpreted this weekend, but were also brought here by singers who had been in the jails of Louisiana and Texas. Many of the performers had waged their personal war on poverty long before it became national policy. An effort was made throughout the festival to show the meaning of folk music in the lives and milieus of the people to whom it was not just a diverting intellectual game, but a vital form of cultural expression as well.”

For all the daring of
Ride This Train
and
Blood, Sweat and Tears,
Cash’s best work on the Columbia label had gone largely unnoticed by the cultural elite, as represented by such tastemakers as the
New York Times
and
Time
magazine, and aside from Shelton, there had been little media interest in the Carnegie Hall show.

But Newport was different. In the media’s eyes, there was a seriousness and historical measurement at work that deserved attention. Even if key publications chose not to send their own critics or correspondents to the festival, editors and critics would all read Shelton’s review of it and often base their future coverage of the artists on his recommendations. Thanks largely to Dylan’s appearance, there was so much interest in the bill that Newport smashed its 1958 attendance record of 57,000 fans when over 70,000 paid to see one or more of the weekend shows.

With all that at stake, Cash’s nerves started getting the best of him, which meant taking pills. He was scheduled to perform the night of Friday, July 24, on a bill with Joan Baez, the Chad Mitchell Trio, and Phil Ochs, but he was in such wobbly shape, he missed his flight from the West Coast. Holiff must have thought,
Here we go again!
Fortunately, Holiff was able to talk Wein into moving Cash’s spot to Saturday night, when he’d share the stage with Peter, Paul and Mary, who had replaced the Kingston Trio as the most successful folk group in the country.

Some of the festival veterans—aware of Cash’s history of missing shows—were miffed at Cash’s lack of professionalism, and Pete Seeger reflected this in his sarcastic introduction.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the next performer was supposed to be on the program last night, but he couldn’t get here,” Seeger told the audience. “He was way out on the West Coast and he found that, somehow, you can’t get from Nevada to Newport, Rhode Island, in one day. But he did get here tonight.” Cash wasn’t apologetic for his no-show on Friday. Without a word to the audience, he opened with two songs from his Sun Records roots—“Big River” and “Folsom Prison Blues”—before turning to “I Still Miss Someone.”

He didn’t look good. With his drawn face and his unfocused manner, he resembled a man on a wanted poster, and his tenacious gum chewing suggested a casualness that struck some as downright rude. As much as he wanted the folk audience endorsement, he was so doped up that he came across as distant, almost condescending, as he looked out at a sea of mostly college kids no older than twenty-two.

However prickly his manner, Cash’s voice was in good shape, rugged and authoritative.

According to observers, the crowd was caught up from the beginning. These college students had been listening to Cash’s songs for years—especially the Sun ones—and they welcomed a bit of rock ’n’ roll flash and aggression into the show. When he asked for a glass of water after his customized version of the folk standard “Rock Island Line,” someone in the audience asked if he didn’t want something stronger. “No,” he replied. “I don’t drink anymore.” Pausing, he added, “I don’t drink any
less,
but I don’t drink any
more.
”

Then he got serious.

“Got a special request from a friend of ours to do a song tonight and I’m very honored,” he said. “I ain’t never been so honored in my life. I’m so honored I can’t [inaudible]. Hey, Bob. My good friend, Bob Dylan. I’d like to do one of his songs….We’ve been doing it on our shows all over the country…and trying to tell the folks about Bob. We think he’s the best songwriter of the age since Pete Seeger.”

He then launched into “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” changing Dylan’s “babe” to “gal” and adding his own tagline to the song: “I said just forget it from now on, Sugar, it’s okay.” After reaching back for “I Walk the Line,” Cash got to the centerpiece of his set: “The Ballad of Ira Hayes.”

“Ira Hayes was a great hero,” he told the audience. “The song was written by Peter LaFarge. It’s my latest recording on Columbia. We don’t try to be overly commercial with our records, but if you like it, it’s Columbia CL 1283.”

The order number was just made up, but Cash sang the song with a commitment and purpose that transformed his set. It was the moment he had been waiting for. This was his message for Newport. This was who he was and what he believed in. Cash closed with the Carter Family’s “Keep on the Sunny Side,” toning down the sing-along feel of the tune to emphasize its original spiritual foundation. Then he was gone—just twenty minutes, but charismatic and inspiring.

“Ira Hayes” was a revelation for an audience that knew Cash chiefly for his hits, as good as “I Walk the Line” and others were. Again, his early days at Sun helped him here. He was to this young audience a link to rock’s magical beginnings—the larger-than-life figure who once stood with Elvis and Jerry Lee. It was thrilling to discover him still relevant and dynamic.

Some of the old-line folkies were skeptical when Wein added this country star to the Newport bill, but the musicians embraced him warmly. Performers came from all over the festival grounds to watch his set. Afterward, they rushed up to congratulate him backstage. “No matter where you were or what you were doing, every musician that was there came to watch Johnny perform,” folksinger Tom Paxton said. “Just a magnificent performance,” George Wein declared.

For Grant, the concert was another example of Cash’s ability to reach out and connect with audiences, however diverse. Whether he was singing to soldiers in Korea or convicts in California, blue-collar workers in the Midwest or now college-age folk fans, Cash was welcomed as a comrade. “People believed in Johnny Cash,” Grant said. “They didn’t just like his music. They believed in him.”

Cash’s chief memory of the post-show activities was a gathering in a hotel room with Dylan and Joan Baez, who were so happy they “were jumping on the bed like little kids.” They traded songs for hours. At one point, Baez turned on a tape recorder and Dylan played two songs for Cash, “It Ain’t Me, Babe” and “Mama, You’ve Been on My Mind.” In return, Cash gave Dylan a guitar.

In his
Times
review of the Newport festival, Robert Shelton singled Cash out: “The Nashville star closed the gap between commercial country and folk music with a masterly set of story-telling songs.”

The cultural elite had spoken: Johnny Cash was a major artist. He was on his way to becoming the most important figure in country music since Hank Williams.

Cash wasn’t testing “Ira Hayes” at Newport. He had such faith in the song and its message that he had already finished a concept album about the treatment of Native Americans. Folk music had already adopted the civil rights movement as a cause: Dylan and Baez sang at the historic March on Washington in the summer of 1963, during which the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. gave his landmark “I Have a Dream” speech.

There was, however, little outcry about Indian rights. Cash had already written one sympathetic song about Native Americans, and he found in “Ira Hayes” a song that didn’t merely touch on the Indians’ plight but exposed it in modern times. Bigotry wasn’t just an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century problem, he felt; it was a twentieth-century disgrace. The more he thought about the song, the more he saw it as the foundation of an entire album.

Eager for additional inspiration, he visited Ira Hayes’s mother on the Pima reservation in Arizona. The woman was so touched that she gave Cash a small black stone that became translucent when put under a light. Known as an “Apache tear,” the stone held deep symbolism in the Pima culture, and Cash had it mounted in a gold chain and hung it around his neck. He wore it on the day he recorded “Ira Hayes” in the first week in March.

Cash invited Peter LaFarge to attend the session. Like Dylan, the songwriter had been a fan of Cash’s since the Sun days, and he was flattered that Cash was recording the song. While LaFarge was in Nashville, Cash spent hours with him, going over other songs with even more tenacity than he had shown during the
Ride This Train
period.

It was easy to see why Cash and LaFarge would connect. They were about the same age (LaFarge was a year older), shared an empathy with Native Americans, and they viewed music as their life’s mission, a validation. They also shared a restless, illicit-substance-fueled wild streak that made observers fear they could both self-destruct.

Yet there were differences. Compared to Cash, LaFarge was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. His father, Oliver LaFarge, was an anthropologist who was educated at Harvard and whose roots in America went back to the
Mayflower.
He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1930 for a novel,
Laughing Boy,
a trailblazing love story that treated Native Americans with dignity rather than depicting them as villainous or backward. He eventually served as head of the Association on American Indian Affairs.

After his parents divorced in 1935, Peter’s mother, who was independently wealthy, moved with him and his sister to Colorado, where she bought a four-thousand-acre ranch and remarried. Restless and independent as a teenager, Peter joined the rodeo circuit and then went into the Navy. Returning to civilian life, he tried to build a career as an actor and playwright in New York City. He was in his late thirties when he finally got turned on to the burgeoning folk scene, finding in the music of Cisco Houston and Woody Guthrie a focus on history and social purpose that enabled him to put into song his feelings about life in the West and about Native Americans.

Not fully understanding LaFarge’s history, Cash saw him as an authentic voice of the Indian people, someone who had experienced much of the discrimination he wrote about. “Peter was very proud of his heritage and he was adamant about the wrongs that his people had suffered over the years,” Cash mistakenly said of him. In return, LaFarge would salute Cash in an essay for the May 1965 issue of the folk magazine
Sing Out!
He declared that Cash had the “heart of a folksinger in the purest sense.”

In putting together the album he titled
Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian,
Cash turned to four other LaFarge compositions: “As Long As the Grass Shall Grow,” which criticizes American presidents through history for breaking treaties time and again; “Drums,” a proud salute to American Indian culture over the years; “White Girl,” a look at the prejudice that thwarts a relationship between an American Indian and an Anglo; and “Custer,” a savage portrait of the general who was treated in school textbooks as a hero for his slaughter of Native Americans.

To that foundation Cash added two of his own songs, “The Talking Leaves,” another look at government betrayal, and “Apache Tears,” a tale of suffering which likely was inspired by the stone he received from Ira Hayes’s mother. The final song, “The Vanishing Race,” was credited on the album to Johnny Horton.

When it came time to go into the studio, Grant and the others were on edge. They knew how much this album meant to Cash, but they had seen him blow off so many sessions that they wondered if he could pull himself together this time. Grant feared the worst when Cash entered the studio on June 29. He still looked gaunt and pale, his eyes sunken. “You can see it all in that cover,” the bass player said, referring to the photo on the
Bitter Tears
jacket. “Look at it closely. Look at his face, skin, bones, his elbow; that’s what we’re dealing with.”

Despite his appearance, Cash was ready for the test. He had arranged his schedule so that he would have three days free before the session—just to rest. It worked. Grant would later marvel at how focused his friend was. “Sometimes when we went into the studio, he was still searching for what he wanted to do,” Grant said. “He’d try one thing, then just the opposite. He’d come up with a song, and then go on to another. But this time, he knew what he wanted. It was John at his best.”