Johnny Cash: The Life (41 page)

When Dylan showed up for the taping on May 1, he was as riddled with nerves as Cash. For all their acclaim and fame, these were both essentially shy, private men, another thing they had in common. If they were nervous about going onstage to sing to adoring audiences, imagine how much more anxious they were stepping in front of cold, indifferent TV cameras, knowing that millions of people would be watching them. Cash tried to make the experience as easy as possible for Dylan, inviting him and his wife, Sara, to stay at his house. Cash had frequently invited some of Nashville’s most promising songwriters to his house to spend the evening playing their new songs. He put together one such gathering in Dylan’s honor. In the end, Cash was grateful that Dylan had agreed to appear on the show, and Dylan couldn’t wait to get the whole thing over with.

Dylan had been to the downtown Ryman Auditorium before, but only as a fan, eager to check out the mother church of country music. The fact that Dylan had pretty much been out of the public eye since his 1966 motorcycle accident made him even more jittery about doing the show. And sure enough, his appearance was a magnet for some obsessive Dylan fans around the country, many of whom began lining up outside the Ryman hours before the taping. Backstage, Dylan kept his distance from other cast members and avoided the press. He was finally cornered by Red O’Donnell, a popular columnist for the
Nashville Banner,
but his answers were brief and unrevealing. Dylan seemed relieved when he could finally step onstage to perform two songs from
Nashville Skyline
before sitting down with Cash for a duet on “Girl from the North Country.” Even together they looked uncomfortable. To make everything worse, the stone wall set looked a bit ridiculous. But the original set—a barnyard—had been worse. Dylan was so offended that he told Cash he couldn’t sing in front of that, saying, “My fans would laugh me off the stage.” Cash, through Jacobson, got that idea scrapped.

The audience gave Dylan a standing ovation and yelled for more after his numbers, with chants of “Bobby, Bobby.” When Dylan didn’t return to the stage, Jacobson found him in a Ryman office, sitting by himself, still edgy. “I wanted him to see the reaction,” Jacobson says. “I told him, ‘Bobby, take my hand, we’re going back out.’ He told me, ‘No, we’re not!’ but I was finally able to convince him. I said, ‘Yes, we are. They came to see you. They’re standing for you. You owe it to them. They are your fans.’ When he stepped back onstage, his fans went nuts. He was so relieved.”

Aside from Dylan’s part in the show, Cash was most proud of the segment in which he turned songs into mini-travelogues à la the
Ride This Train
album. Though he included an occasional hit in the segment, he mostly leaned toward the Old West or folk material, such as “Dark as a Dungeon,” “The Legend of John Henry’s Hammer,” and “The Big Battle.” Even here, he had to fight Screen Gems to make his vision of the segment a reality.

“When I signed on for the show, there was a segment called ‘Cash Travels’ that was going to be John’s reflections on America using old stock footage,” Jacobson says. “But I felt John deserved more. I suggested it should be today’s look at yesterday and that we should shoot new footage. It was a whole different look. John loved the idea and wrote the ‘Ride This Train’ theme song in ten minutes.” Cash was grateful and felt even more positive about Jacobson’s role.

With the all-important Dylan show in the can, Cash headed to Detroit for a May 4 concert co-starring Hank Williams Jr., who had come a long way since his teenage days of merely singing his daddy’s songs each night. Hank Jr. wouldn’t hit his commercial stride until the 1980s, but he was already starting to forge his own identity as an independent hell-raiser. The combination of the Hank Williams legacy and Cash’s post-
Folsom
popularity resulted in the biggest box office single-day gross in country music up to that time: $93,000, more than half again the previous record of $59,000.

To promote the TV series, Cash did guest turns on the
Kraft Music Hall
and the
Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour.
Holiff also helped arrange for the documentary by Robert Elfstrom,
Johnny Cash: The Man, His World, His Music,
to make its debut on the public television outlet in New York City. Columbia did its part by releasing
Johnny Cash at San Quentin
to coincide with the June 7 series launch.

Early reviews were encouraging, singling out Cash himself for special praise. “After 15 years in show business, Johnny Cash is finally being discovered by network television,” read the
Time
magazine review, which also praised the lack of showbiz clichés (“no Johnny Cash Dancers”) and spoke to Cash’s evolving image as a cultural icon, not just a country singer. “Cash and his songs are rooted in the basics of country life, the land, lost loves, wanderlust, the seasons, lonely trains hooting across the still prairie night, preachers, prison and Sweet Jesus and home sweet home.”

The
Toronto Star,
too, stressed Cash’s charm and authenticity: “Cash himself, with his lived-in face and take-it-or-leave-it manner, was an engagingly unpretentious host and a welcome relief from the endless ranks of Beautiful People who normally populate television….The wonder is not that Johnny Cash finally has made it to television, but that television took so long to find him.” A Nashville TV critic declared it flatly “the best country music show ever offered on network television.”

In the midst of all this, Cash couldn’t help but allude in a Nashville newspaper interview to the continuing head-butting backstage. The issue this time wasn’t guests but the show’s locale. Most of the key staff people had come out from Los Angeles, and they weren’t adjusting well to life in Nashville or the surprisingly primitive conditions in which they had to record the show. For all its history, the Ryman proved a torture chamber for the production heads and crew, from its lack of air conditioning to technical sound problems.

Cash drew a line in the sand in his interview. “I understand there’s a movement under way to talk me into movin’ the show back to California,” he said. “But I’m not gonna do it. It wouldn’t be the same show. That’s a whole different way of life out there. That’s not where I want to be. That’s not what I want to be.”

The only thing left was to wait for the ratings.

The first ones in, from the big cities, were dismal, but then viewership reports started coming in from rural areas, and they were sensational. Overall, the show was clearly a winner for ABC. Even a modest hit was cheered by the struggling network. The initial order of six shows was extended to fifteen. The guest list would continue to be uneven. There were some acts worthy of sharing the stage with Cash, including the country rock of Creedence Clearwater Revival and such country stars as Merle Haggard, Marty Robbins, Roger Miller, and Tom T. Hall. On the downside were artists with little or no relationship to Cash’s music or ambitions, including Lynn Kellogg, Ed Ames, and Dale Robertson. Somewhere in the middle were the Monkees, another Screen Gems property.

Drawing millions of viewers each week, the TV show made Cash a hot property, and Columbia felt good about the chances of “A Boy Named Sue.” It was a strange record, to be sure—edgy enough, with its references to all the “kicking and a’ gouging in the mud and the blood and the beer,” but also memorable enough with its humor and its feel-good lesson that it just might appeal to both the underground rock crowd who loved
Folsom
and to the mainstream television audience who enjoyed Cash the TV star.

And sure enough, the “Boy Named Sue” single, like the
Johnny Cash at San Quentin
album, was an immediate smash. The album would spend twenty weeks at number one on the country list and four weeks atop the pop list. “Sue” hit the singles charts three weeks later and went to number one in country and number two in pop. With his new Sun catalog, Singleton released old Cash material under various album themes, including
Get Rhythm, Story Songs of the Trains and Rivers,
and
The Singing Storyteller.
By the end of the year, Singleton had five of the Sun reissues on the pop and country charts. The man from Dyess was well on his way to being the biggest-selling record artist in America.

Cash continued to celebrate his success by reaching out to members of his family. Soon after the release of the
Folsom Prison
album he had purchased a house across the street from his in Hendersonville for his parents, and he would sit with his father whenever he was in town and watch the
CBS Evening News.
When he played the Hollywood Bowl in August 1969, he again tried to make peace with his nephew Damon Fielder. Again he sent a limousine driver to Oak View with a note: “I’ve told Mama Cash the truth about the Los Padres fire. Please come to my concert.”

Damon, who hadn’t seen his uncle in four years, accepted the apology. He got into the limousine and headed to Los Angeles. “The show was great and he was great when we got together after the show; the best thing was he wasn’t on the drugs any longer. He was J.R. again.”

In the midst of all this, Johnston kept reminding Cash about the danger of taking this success for granted; he needed to come up with strong new material to meet the high expectations. With his energy drained by the TV show, however, Cash found it difficult to do that. Fortunately there was a new crop of young songwriters in Nashville—and he finally realized that the best of them was virtually at his doorstep.

KRIS KRISTOFFERSON WAS ABOUT
to accept a teaching position at West Point when the former Rhodes scholar took a two-week side trip to Nashville in the mid-1960s to see if anyone was interested in the songs he was writing. Through a friend, he had already received encouragement from Marijohn Wilkin, who co-wrote “Long Black Veil,” one of the songs Cash sang at Folsom. She introduced Kris to publishers and took him to the Grand Ole Opry on a night when Cash was performing.

“To me, John was the most real thing that came out of that great bunch of people at Sun Records,” Kristofferson says. “There was something awesome about him from the beginning, but especially in those days when he was so skinny and he walked around the stage like a wild animal. He was so wound up that he looked like he was going to explode any minute.

“But he also had something to say. It was Woody Guthrie, talking about humanity, human rights. He was someone who felt he could actually make the world better through his music, and I admired that. I told Marijohn that I had to meet him, and she brought him over and he shook my hand. It was electric. It transformed me. Immediately, I knew where I wanted to be. As soon as I got my discharge [from the Army], I headed to Nashville.”

It was quite a sacrifice for Kristofferson. He was under a lot of pressure to take the West Point assignment. Here was the quintessential All-American boy. Besides the Rhodes scholarship, he was a Golden Gloves boxer, the son of an Air Force major general, the winner of a prestigious fiction-writing contest. When he took a job as a studio assistant at Columbia—“janitor,” he called it—just so he could be in a position to pitch songs to recording artists, his family pretty much disowned him, and his wife eventually filed for divorce. But Kristofferson didn’t back down.

With his striking good looks and passion for music, he soon fell in with a group of Nashville songwriters and record producers. He’d sing his songs at the drop of the hat, hoping to find singers to record them. One source of frustration at Columbia was that he was warned his first day that he would be fired if he tried to lobby the artists; they were in the studio to work, not to be hassled. Kristofferson respected the rule. He was there in 1966 while Dylan recorded
Blonde on Blonde,
but never worked up the courage to say even one word to another of his heroes. It took an assist from mutual friend Jack Clement for Kristofferson to talk to Cash.

Soon after moving to Nashville, Kristofferson, who opposed the Vietnam War, wrote a song expressing a soldier’s feelings about the war in the style of Dylan’s talking blues numbers. He sang the song, “Talkin’ Vietnam Blues,” one night in a club that catered to music industry people. Clement liked it, and they became close. When Clement noticed a glum Kristofferson reading a letter a few days later, he asked if it was bad news. Indeed it was—one of an apparent series of letters from his mother, who was still trying to get Kristofferson to come to his senses and go back to West Point. He passed it along to Clement, who especially noticed the line that scolded him for idolizing someone who most people thought was just a drug addict.

Kristofferson forgot about the conversation until a few days later when he was working a Cash recording session. Cash walked up to him and said, “Always nice to get letters from home, isn’t it, Kris?”

Even though that broke the ice, Kristofferson still didn’t take advantage by slipping Cash tapes of his songs. In fact, he shooed away two other songwriters who snuck into the studio and tried to corner Cash. When a studio secretary heard of the incident, she thought that Kristofferson had been the one trying to pitch the songs and she barred him from working in the studio. He had to spend his entire shift in the basement erasing and filing old tapes.

“Somebody must have told John about it because he came down to the basement a few nights later to ask why I wasn’t in the studio with him,” Kris says. “I explained what happened and he said, ‘Well, I’m not going to start the session until you come up.’ So my boss brought a chair into the studio for me and I sat and listened to the session. The secretary gave me the nastiest look.

“But that’s the kind of thing John would do all the time. I knew he had come down to the basement just to see me because there was no other reason for him to be there—and you’ve got to remember he was bouncing off the walls at the time. He was so pilled up. But even in that condition, he could reach out to people.”

Cash became fond enough of Kristofferson to invite him to the house to sit in on the songwriter sessions he’d have in his living room, but he still didn’t pick up on Kris’s songs. “I just don’t know what took me so long to really listen to what he was writing,” Cash said later. “I can’t imagine how many times he gave me a cassette of something he had just written, but I just hurled it into the lake with all the other tapes people had given me.”

Even as other country singers began recording Kristofferson’s songs, Cash still passed. This led the frustrated young songwriter to risk arrest by landing a helicopter on Cash’s property one afternoon. It’s such a great story that it has been repeated frequently, though usually enhanced to include the colorful image of Kris stepping from the helicopter with a beer in one hand and a cassette of “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” in the other—as a startled Cash looks on.

“I had to fly four hours a month as part of my National Guard service, and I thought it would be a good way to get John’s attention,” Kristofferson recalls. “But I didn’t have a beer in one hand and a tape in the other. In fact, the song wasn’t ‘Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down.’ And either John wasn’t there or he was hiding in the house, because someone else came out of the house. I don’t know if John ever even heard the tape. It was one of many.”

The song that did catch Cash’s attention, months after the helicopter incident, was “To Beat the Devil,” a cautionary tale Kristofferson had written back in 1967 after passing Cash in the hall and seeing how messed up he was. “I thought he was his own worst enemy,” he recalls. “Here was this man who worked so hard to get a message out to people, but I thought he was going to die in the process.”

Cash didn’t know “Devil” was about him, but he certainly identified with lines in the song contrasting the singer’s idealism with his personal struggles:

It’s odd that Cash returned to the song in 1969 at the height of his success, when it was clear his message was getting through to millions; it may just have reminded him of his earlier times. He recorded it on July 24, when he was in an especially good mood. He had performed at the Newport Folk Festival a few days earlier, where he was the prime attraction for the closing night’s crowd of 7,500. Cash also had brought Kristofferson onstage in Newport to sing “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” and “Me and Bobby McGee.”

The biggest news of the weekend, however, came from June.

Two months earlier, John had insisted after a romantic vacation in the Virgin Islands that he was sure June was pregnant—and that it was going to be a boy. June scoffed, because they had been trying for some time to have a baby, worried whether they could even conceive because of his extensive drug use and June’s age. She was forty.

But a few weeks later she learned that his prediction was right. They even came up with a name: John Carter Cash. John was so certain it was going to be a boy, they didn’t even think of a girl’s name.

As soon as taping for the first season of shows ended, Cash turned his attention to recordings. It had been nearly a year since he had recorded a new album. “I felt there were a lot of people who only knew me from the prison album and the TV show,” he said, “and I wanted to give them some music that meant a lot to me personally—a very personal album that kind of reflected my journey. I told Bob Johnston I wanted to introduce myself to these new fans and he said, ‘That’s great John, You should call it
Hello, I’m Johnny Cash,
and that’s what we did. I was real proud of that record.” The album’s centerpiece was “To Beat the Devil.”

The album, recorded mostly over four days in late August and early September, was one of Cash’s most endearing works.
Hello, I’m Johnny Cash
was not as overtly ambitious as
Ride This Train
or as dynamic as
Folsom Prison,
but it came straight from the heart.

“Southwind,” the opening tune, recaptured the joyful exclamation of the old
boom-chicka-boom
sound so well that it could have been recorded the same day as “Big River.” Another song, “See Ruby Fall,” was co-written with Roy Orbison after the two friends saw the words “See Ruby Falls” on a billboard promoting a tourist attraction in Tennessee and pictured a woman named Ruby falling off a barstool. It evolved into a song that, despite its novelty edge, captured perfectly the sentimental mood of honky-tonk heartache tunes. The record, too, was brightened by a vigorous piano arrangement reminiscent of “Home of the Blues” at Sun.

Cash celebrated his marriage with two songs, “’Cause I Love You,” a pledge of faithfulness that recalled “I Walk the Line” and was written in the Dylanesque style of “Understand Your Man,” and the Tim Hardin ballad “If I Were a Carpenter,” a Top 10 hit for Bobby Darin in 1966. John and June sang it as a duet, apparently prompted by hearing Ramblin’ Jack Elliott sing it on the TV show.

“Route No. 1, Box 144” was another Cash song with an especially strong autobiographical strain. Cash had been thinking about the song ever since visiting the military hospitals in Asia. He ended up with this tale of an “average good boy” who “grew up on a little farm just a couple of miles out of town.” The only thing missing is the name Dyess. The young man marries his high school sweetheart and buys a farm of his own at Route No. 1, Box 144. With a baby on the way, the young farmer joins the Army. He’s killed in battle and the body is returned home. The song ends with the town turning out to welcome him—another Cash commentary about how every life can matter.

Cash then headed back on the road, where he found the crowds larger and more enthusiastic than ever. Instead of 3,000 to 5,000 fans, he was now pulling in 15,000 for two shows in San Antonio, breaking records at the New Mexico State Fair by drawing 48,000 fans over four days, and in Los Angeles he could have sold out two shows at the 18,000-seat Hollywood Bowl instead of the single scheduled date.

Things were going so well that Lou Robin and Allen Tinkley came up with a bold idea that gave even the normally ambitious Holiff pause: How about playing New York’s 20,000-capacity Madison Square Garden? The 2,800-seat Carnegie Hall was one thing, but playing Madison Square Garden in a city that hadn’t shown enough interest in country music even to have a country radio station would be something else entirely.

“Everyone said we were insane to put a country show in Madison Square Garden, but we knew he had gone beyond country music,” Robin says. “Allen and I had done lots of shows in New York, including the Garden, and we knew the market. John was on every station by then, plus we put him in the round so we could advertise that every seat was a good seat. We finally talked Saul into it. He just said, ‘Don’t guess wrong!’ So we booked the show for December fifth, and it sold out almost immediately.”

The Johnny Cash Show
had created such a buzz that ABC renewed it for 1970. Cash vowed to feature more country artists in the show when he spoke in October at a country music industry gathering in Nashville.

“There were some mistakes in my show this summer, partly my fault, partly ABC’s, partly Screen Gems’,” he said. “I was, as they say, not an established television star then. So the people in charge felt they should put guests from various fields of entertainment on every week. But the mail we received asked for more of my own people.”

As the audience cheered, Cash pledged that during the new season “we’re going to put more of the realism, truth, and down-to-earth feeling that is in country music into our show. We’ve already started lining up such guests as Merle Haggard, Charley Pride, as well as top new talent. We hope to present, with dignity, people like Roy Acuff, Ernest Tubb, Hank Snow. We feel country music has really come into its own, that it’s the biggest thing in the world, and we’re going to do our best for it.”

The resentment over the non-country guests must not have been too great in Nashville, because that same week the Country Music Association awarded Cash five of the ten honors handed out at the group’s annual ceremony. They were for entertainer of the year, best male vocalist, best album
(San Quentin),
best single (“A Boy Named Sue”), and best group or duo (John and June).

Cash made more news when it was announced that he would play a Cherokee chief in a film,
The Trail of Tears,
for National Educational Television. Despite the disaster of
Five Minutes to Live,
Cash still thought he had potential as an actor. The film’s director, Lane Slate, certainly built high expectations for him, making what is believed to be the first public reference to Cash as the heir to another cultural icon’s role as a strong, silent American hero.

“He’s got the same sort of power about him that John Wayne has,” Slate said. “I don’t know whether he’ll ever be able to play anything but those strong parts, but Wayne has certainly been successful at it.”