Johnny Cash: The Life (47 page)

The strain became so intense after the filming that Cash, at June’s urging, confronted Holiff—not in person, as Cash hated face-to-face disagreements, but on the phone. In the conversation, taped by Holiff, Cash and his manager both sounded nervous; each was trying his best not to offend the other, but the edginess was apparent. After a discussion of their differing opinions of the prospects for
The Gospel Road,
they broached the subject of their own relationship.

“I’m one of the few people who [will] try to say to you exactly what they think without meaning to be harmful,” Holiff told him. “I’m not trying to break things down. I’m just trying maybe to temper things a little bit by saying not exactly what people think you want to hear. I find a lot of people tell you exactly what you want to hear.”

“I know that. I don’t need that either.”

“And that doesn’t help.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

The crisis was over for the moment, but the wound still wasn’t healed. Everyone in the Cash entourage knew it was only a matter of time before Holiff would be out. In retrospect, they thought it was remarkable that the Cash-Holiff relationship lasted as long as it did.

The final showdown between the Cashes and Holiff occurred in July 1973 in the idyllic setting of Lake Tahoe, the second major gambling and entertainment center of Nevada. Soon after Cash’s dramatic success at the Las Vegas Hilton, the Sahara Tahoe Corporation approached Cash’s agents and offered the same $100,000-a-week contract. After his usual morning jog, Holiff was invited to have breakfast with the Cashes at the house on the lake supplied to entertainers by the hotel.

There aren’t many more beautiful spots in the world, but the mood was anything but relaxed. As soon as Holiff sat down, June brought up the matter of the Billy Graham Crusades. Again Saul offered the defense of seeing no purpose in attending shows that he hadn’t set up. According to Holiff, June lashed back with the charge that he was only interested in money. This time there was no turning back.

When the meeting ended, the nearly thirteen-year relationship was ended too.

Lou Robin learned from Cash a few days later that Holiff was out. He wasn’t surprised. “John had been looking for the opportunity to get rid of Saul for a long time,” he says. “Saul had done a lot for John. He saved his rear many times when John was out of control. He got him some good record deals and found promoters who would do the shows despite John’s reputation for no-shows in the 1960s. But at some point he was just getting less and less interested. It got to where he was referring more and more to us, and John noticed that.”

After a show two weeks later at Pine Knob in Michigan, Robin and partner Allen Tinkley made a pitch to John and June to take over the management duties. “We were in the limo with John and June, and we resolved everything by the time we got to the Detroit airport forty-five minutes later,” Robin recalls. “It was easy because we had pretty much been acting as managers before that.”

The news didn’t become public until Holiff issued a press release on his Volatile Attractions, Ltd., stationery on October 27.

“After serving in the dual capacity of Johnny Cash’s manager and agent for nearly thirteen years, Saul Holiff has announced his resignation, effective December 9, 1973,” the statement began. “Holiff and Cash are parting on completely amicable terms after having shared, over the years, many ups and downs, and ultimately much good fortune together. Holiff’s reasons for the severance are based mainly on the fact that he has a very young family that, due to prolonged absences from home owing to business and travel obligations, he has seldom had the opportunity to see their formative years. He hopes to spend a great deal more time with his family, and to reduce his active role in show business to one of semi-retirement.”

The Canadian Jew and the fundamentalist Christian had struck many as an odd couple in Nashville, where signs of anti-Semitism were not uncommon. So there were inevitable whispers of anti-Semitism in some industry quarters when the relationship started to crumble. But those whispers diminished when Cash turned to Robin, also Jewish, to manage him.

On November 3,
Record World,
one of
Billboard’
s rival music trades, reported the resignation and announced that Robin and Tinkley would continue to represent Cash for concerts and other personal appearances, while Marty Klein, of the Agency for the Performing Arts, would represent Cash for TV and movies.

But the news getting back to Holiff was that people connected to Cash were scoffing at the resignation story. The truth, they said, was that Holiff was fired. Furious, Holiff wrote a letter to Cash’s sister Reba, who helped oversee the House of Cash operation. “I take umbrage at your spreading false information,” he insisted. “As I am sure you know, I resigned of my own volition which, of course, was verified by Johnny’s letter to me. It is unfair and unwarranted to give anyone an incorrect version.”

About the break, Robin declares, “Bottom line, I think they got to a point where they had just had enough of each other.”

In later years Cash was generous with his praise, frequently lauding Saul as the man who’d lifted his career aspirations. He and June would also invite him to Jamaica for a visit.

Cash’s recording career continued on a downward spin. While he toured Europe, Australia, and the States in the closing months of 1973 and into 1974, Columbia continued to release albums, desperately hoping something would catch on. Unfortunately, the label wasn’t given much to work with. As he often did when searching for a hit, Cash resorted to something that had worked for him before. In
Johnny Cash and His Woman,
he tried, among other things, to recapture the magic of “Jackson” by recording another Billy “Edd” Wheeler novelty titled “The Color of Love,” but the song had neither the same humor nor the same drive. Similarly, the couple unsuccessfully aimed for the spirit and tone of “If I Were a Carpenter” with another Wheeler duet, “The Pine Tree.”

After Butler resigned because he didn’t think he was being paid fairly for his production duties, Cash caught everyone by surprise by re-teaming with Don Law. Once again Law simply nodded approvingly at every step in the process—though he would have better served his longtime friend by pointing out the freakish arrangement on another novelty, Chris Gantry’s “Allegheny,” that featured June squawking like an injured hawk. Grant thought it was downright embarrassing.

The record charts told Cash what Law wouldn’t.
Johnny Cash and His Woman
gave Cash his poorest showing yet on the country charts. Released in December 1973, it stalled at number thirty-two. It was followed a few weeks later by a greatest hits package built around “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,” and it did even worse, making it only to number thirty-five. Things didn’t get any better in 1974 with a low-key collection of children’s songs. Produced by Cash and former recording engineer Charlie Bragg,
The Johnny Cash Children’s Album
was a pleasant enough piece of work, but it wasn’t what Cash needed—an album strikingly original and purposeful enough for Cash to reclaim his position of leadership in country music.

The one bright spot during this time was a song Cash wrote in the “message” tradition of “What Is Truth” and “Man in Black.” Like many Americans, Cash was troubled by much of what was happening politically in the country, including the Watergate scandal which forced Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974. Despite his public support of Nixon’s policies, Cash quietly questioned the wisdom of the war. He wanted to reaffirm his faith in the country and the goodness of the American people. After weeks of reflection, he wrote “Ragged Old Flag.”

Apart from his gospel songs, this was the first deeply felt spark from Cash in years, and the song quickly became a crowd favorite on tour. While considered too sentimental and jingoistic by many of the young rock fans who had turned away from him after the Nixon White House appearance, the recording was far less of a strident “love it or leave it” statement than his friend Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” and “Fightin’ Side of Me.”

If it had been released during the height of the TV show, “Ragged Old Flag” would most certainly have been a Top 5 country single. But times had changed, and it climbed only to number thirty-one. The accompanying album stopped at number sixteen.

The tunes on the
Ragged Old Flag
LP ranged from mediocre to good, but again there was nothing in them or in the arrangements to convince anyone that Johnny Cash had recaptured the magic—especially at a time when the Dripping Springs “outlaws” Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings were finally being hailed as the new stars around Nashville. All Cash would have had to do was listen to Nelson’s ambitious concept album
Phases and Stages
to see how far his own artistic standards had slipped.

Released by Atlantic Records two months before
Ragged Old Flag,
Nelson’s album was a beautifully crafted account of the breakup of a marriage, with the man’s story told on one side of the album and the woman’s on the other. Like Cash’s early concept albums,
Phases and Stages
was ahead of its time. It didn’t do any better on the country charts than
Ragged Old Flag.
But Cash’s own label, Columbia, saw the potential in what Nelson was doing. Within twelve months, Nelson, now signed by Columbia, returned with another concept album,
Red Headed
Stranger,
that was so sparse and unorthodox in its storytelling that the label bosses wondered if they hadn’t made a mistake. But the timing was perfect.

Not only had Nelson made a great album, but he had become a media favorite thanks to the outlaw movement, and the album was quickly embraced by DJs and the press alike.
Stranger
stayed on the country charts for two years, including five weeks at number one. At the same time, Cash’s old roommate Waylon Jennings was regularly hitting number one on the country charts too. In fact, lots of names from Cash’s past had number-one singles in 1974. In addition to Jennings, the list included his old Sun roster mate Charlie Rich, plus Hank Snow, Merle Haggard, Sonny James, and George Jones.

In the old days, one would like to think, Cash would have been motivated enough by all that competition to apply himself for months, if necessary, to reclaim his position as country music’s greatest figure.

Instead, he continued to operate as if nothing were wrong. Without anyone to challenge him, he relied almost exclusively on his instincts and his cronies.

Just as he had gotten the idea for the children’s album while fishing with his son, he decided that he wanted to make what was, in essence, a family album. In a series of sessions from January to mid-June 1974, Cash brought June, Rosanne, Carlene, and Rosie into the studio to join him on a wide range of tunes, including the Carter Family favorite “Keep on the Sunny Side,” Cat Stevens’s “Father and Son,” and his own “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town.” Though the religious component in Cash’s albums had been decreasing as he tried to put out more commercially palatable records, he saluted Christian evangelists in “Billy and Rex and Oral and Bob.” Once again he co-produced most of the sessions with Charlie Bragg.

For the title tune of the album, he turned once again to Kris Kristofferson for “The Junkie and the Juicehead, Minus Me.” He may have been slow to recognize Kristofferson’s talent, but Cash by now had complete faith in it. He went around telling everyone how much he liked this new song, even though it was one of Kristofferson’s weakest. The album dropped off the country charts after just four weeks. It was another embarrassment for Cash.

Columbia Records’ patience finally ran out.

Charles Koppelman, national director of artists and repertoire for Columbia, called Cash to New York and gently told him that he was too great an artist to see his albums disappear from the charts as quickly as
Junkie
and
Ragged Old Flag.
Then Koppelman said he had an idea: Why not go into the studio with Gary Klein, a New York producer who had just made a smash hit called “Stop and Smell the Roses” with Mac Davis? Gary could work with Cash on picking songs and find the best studio musicians in the country to play on the tracks. All John would have to do was concentrate on his singing.

Rather than take Koppelman’s suggestion as an attack on his artistic freedom, Cash was flattered by his interest. He returned to Nashville with high hopes. Others in Nashville, though, could see what was really happening. New York was taking over, and Music Row insiders didn’t like it. If Klein could make Cash a hit all over again, other labels would also turn to their pop departments to help generate more sales from Nashville. All over town, country producers worried that their days were numbered.

Klein, however, was excited to be working with Cash. “Everybody knew a Johnny Cash record when they heard it,” he says. “I felt honored to be working with him. But it was a very difficult project for me. His sound, style, and persona were so well established that it was intimidating. As it turned out, he made it easy. He was a pleasure to work with. He was always prepared and on time, always a gentleman.”