Johnny Cash: The Life (49 page)

John and June sped to the hospital, praying every mile of the frantic hour-and-a-half journey. It was, he said later, the most frightening ninety minutes of his life. June was near hysteria by the time they parked the car and joined John’s parents in the emergency room.

“Where’s my boy?” Cash shouted. “Which room is John Carter in?”

When he couldn’t seem to get an answer, he and June became even more desperate.

Finally, they learned that John Carter had just left in an ambulance for Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital, thirty minutes away in Nashville. Cash’s knees were trembling. He was too afraid even to ask about his son’s condition.

John’s and June’s worst fears were relieved when they got to Vanderbilt and heard John Carter’s cry. Not only was he alive, but also the injury wasn’t as severe as feared, just a mild concussion and slight skull fracture. He needed to be kept in intensive care a couple of days, just for a precaution, but they were assured that everything would be fine.

Cash used the next few days to think once more about his fast pace.

“I must slow down,” he wrote later. “I must keep priorities in order. I must weed out the commitments I make that are not a part of what I feel He really wants me to do.”

In relating the hospital experience years later, Cash valued one other moment. He learned that his daughters Rosanne and Kathy had spent the whole first night in the hospital waiting room. On the last night of John Carter’s hospital stay, Cash was thinking about all his children and wrote a song titled “My Children Walk in Truth.”

He wanted to record the song, and he might have done just that a decade earlier, but now he was second-guessing himself more and more. He wouldn’t record “My Children Walk in Truth” for nearly a decade. And for all his promises about a slower pace, Cash continued to push himself to the limit in every area of his life except recording.

It was only natural that as the oldest Cash daughter, Rosanne was the first to move to Hendersonville to live with her father. It was the week she graduated from high school in 1973, and she immediately went on the road with him. Watching her father onstage and learning to play the guitar, Rosanne quickly developed an interest in songwriting. When Cash was off the road, Rosanne reverted to being a teenager.

“We were still trying to get to know each other, and he kept encouraging me in different directions,” she says. “That was him in a nutshell. He was always so expansive. He would never tell you that you were wrong. He treated you with real respect and let you make up your mind. He’d never lecture you.”

Even when Rosanne and Rosie got into trouble after borrowing their dad’s vintage Chevy, he didn’t scold.

“We went someplace and got drunk with a bunch of people and somebody puked in the car,” Rosanne says. “We got home real late and we planned to get up early, like six a.m., and clean it before Dad got up and saw it. Of course we sleep until eight, and by the time we get outside, Dad has seen it and has had someone take the car somewhere to get it cleaned.

“We were supposed to go with him to Bon Aqua that day, and he has Rosie and me ride with him in his regular car, which was a Mercedes or something. No one says a word about what happened to the Chevy. Finally, Dad pulls up to an ice cream stand and buys us ice creams. He gives them to us, but still doesn’t say a word—all the way to the farm, which is more than an hour.

“Finally, we get to Bon Aqua and he sits down on the front step and pats on the step; he wants us to sit with him. After all this time, he says very calmly, ‘You have a choice. You can stay at home and do drugs or you can go on the road with me, see the world, and make a lot of money.’ I was so touched that I started crying. I was already on the road, but he was going to make us choose. That’s what he always tried to teach us: ‘Everyone has a choice in life. It’s up to you to make the right one.’”

Rosanne treasured those years with her father, but she finally decided she had to begin building her own identity. After three years she moved to London, where, thanks to her dad’s connections, she got an entry-level job at CBS Records. Within six months, she felt that she was just spinning her wheels, and she headed back to Nashville to attend Vanderbilt University and start working on her career as a songwriter. She was the only one of Vivian’s daughters to think seriously about the music business, though June’s daughter Carlene pursued a similar path.

By then, Kathy had also moved to Hendersonville and begun working with a cadre of her relatives in the museum souvenir shop housed in the House of Cash complex. Cindy was the third daughter to head south, but it took a while. She was married right after high school and had a baby, but the marriage lasted less than two years. Cash offered to take care of all her bills if she wanted to go to college, which she did. After about a year, Cash called her and said, “I think it’s my turn.” When asked what he meant, he replied, “I think it’s my turn to have you live near me.”

Cash sent plane tickets for Cindy and the baby, and had a moving van transport her belongings to Hendersonville, where he had already rented an apartment for them near his house. Cindy got a barber’s license and started cutting hair in a shop on Music Row. When her dad began spreading the word about her, even onstage, fans would show up to take her photo at the shop. It made her feel uncomfortable, and she quit. Cash then hired her to do hair and makeup on the tour.

After studying acting in Los Angeles, Cash’s youngest daughter, Tara, moved to Nashville in her early twenties with an eye on modeling and acting. Cash got her some bit parts, but she eventually went to work in the production office and found she enjoyed being behind the camera more than in front of it.

Cash’s generosity wasn’t limited to his children. “From the time I was a child,” says his niece Kelly Hancock, “I remember the love that radiated from John. He was always doing for others, usually without any fanfare or recognition, for he preferred it that way.”

The temporary takeover of Cash’s career by Columbia with the Klein album served as a wake-up call. Within weeks of its release, he told Grant, “I don’t even consider that ‘my’ album.” Redirecting his attention to music, Cash scheduled more formal recording sessions in 1975—thirty-six in all—than he had done the two previous years combined (thirty-one).

During this period, he fulfilled a long-standing pledge to produce an album for June. They went into the studio on January 31 to begin work on the collection, which consisted chiefly of songs June had written with John or various other family members, including Maybelle, Helen, Carlene, and Rosie. While on breaks from the road, they went back into the studio twice in February and once in March to finish the project, which Columbia agreed to release.

The label was hoping that the album,
Appalachian Pride,
would benefit from the Cash connection, but the execs were kidding themselves; Cash’s fan base wasn’t even buying
his
albums at this point.
Billboard
didn’t bother reviewing June’s album, and few were surprised when it tanked.

In returning to the studio the first week in May to work on his own music, Cash quickly realized that his skills were rusty and his confidence was low. Unable to write anything substantial himself, he continued to turn to others. He wanted to find the kind of song that would define him, something with character and a point of view. He found it in a song by Guy Clark, one of the many young folk- and country-flavored writers with a strong literary bent coming out of Texas. The song, “Texas 1947,” touched on many of the familiar themes in Cash’s music, including railroads, small towns, big dreams, and final chances.

Two weeks after finishing another engagement at the Las Vegas Hilton, he and the Tennessee Three devoted an entire session on May 6 to the song. He wasn’t fully pleased, and after a Billy Graham Crusade appearance on May 12 in Jackson, Mississippi, he went back into the studio with a couple of other musicians to redo his vocal. He had to record it a third time before he was satisfied.

By now Cash was thinking about an album, but not one of his formal concept works. He was too concerned with trying to regain his confidence to attempt something so grand. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to come up with more songs of “Texas 1947” quality. The most telling moment on the album would be Cash’s own “Down at Dripping Springs,” in which he acknowledged the rising Willie and Waylon outlaw movement that he had helped inspire but of which he was not even remotely a part. Despite the box office disaster of the inaugural Dripping Springs festival in 1972, Nelson put on a one-day festival at the same spot in 1973 and, thanks to word-of-mouth about the first festival, and better promotion, drew forty thousand fans. The news spread through Nashville that something was happening with this outlaw movement. Waylon was red-hot on the charts, and Willie was heating up.

It would have been ideal for Cash to step in and take his rightful place at the forefront of this exciting movement. And he might have pulled it off if he had been able to write a compelling song—something even half as striking as “Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love),” the anthem that Bobby Emmons and Chips Moman would write in 1977 for Jennings. But Cash wasn’t able to deliver one. From the lyrics of “Down at Dripping Springs,” it wasn’t even clear if he was truly saluting the outlaw movement in the song or subtly trying to remind country fans that he was the godfather of the whole thing. Even Larry Gatlin, who was mentioned in the song, couldn’t figure out what Cash was trying to say.

For all his hopes that this would be the album to bring him back, Cash had trouble deciding on a title for it. He thought about
Texas 1947,
but he wanted to do something to involve John Carter in it the way he had Rosanne, Carlene, and Rosie in the
Juicehead
album. An idea came to him one day when he was walking through his vegetable garden with his son. He’d call the album
Look at Them Beans
—after a Joe Tex novelty number he had recorded—and use a photo of him and John Carter frolicking in the field. To make it more of a family affair, June wrote the liner notes.

Cash wanted to release “Texas 1947” as the first single, but he went along when Columbia execs advised him that “Look at Them Beans” had more potential. When that single stalled at number seventeen that summer, the label followed with the Guy Clark song, but there was no momentum. Retailers and DJs had already given up on the album.

By contrast, the outlaws were picking up even more speed. At the same week in November that “Texas 1947” entered the country charts at number ninety, Jennings’s “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way” was number one. Nelson’s “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” was in its fourth month on the charts.

In his uncertainty, Cash told himself it was time to try another live album—after all, he had done well with them before. Rather than a prison album this time, he wanted to record one of his shows in Europe, where audiences continued to be amazingly responsive, buying nearly a third of all Cash albums sold. Columbia liked the idea.

For the new album, Cash chose London Palladium, one of England’s most celebrated venues. Besides the Tennessee Three, he was joined onstage at various points by June, the Carter Family, and Rosanne, plus Jerry Hensley on guitar and Larry McCoy on piano for two shows on September 21, 1975.

The idea was to cover the various high points in Cash’s career, and the set list rambled all over the place, from Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” to Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee” all the way back to “Hey, Porter.” But the song that held Cash’s attention that day was one he had written three months earlier in New York City. It was a flimsy novelty about a bum who sees a strawberry cake at a fancy banquet in a hotel. Feeling he deserves a piece of that cake after all his earlier years of hard work, the bum grabs a slice and races away, enjoying every bite.

As he often had in the past, Cash relied on his instincts. He felt that the song spoke to the resilience of the workingman and to the principle of fairness. Maybe so, but the song had no charm or punch.

He decided to make it the title track and put two photos of himself on the back of the album eating strawberry cake.

Released in early 1976, the album made the charts only briefly. With no game plan, Cash went into the studio with producers Charlie Bragg and Don Davis to work on the next album. In Grant’s words, “We were just plodding along,” until Davis gave Cash a tape of a quirky novelty song about an auto factory worker who falls in love with the fancy cars he’s making and, knowing he could never afford to buy one, starts stealing one piece of the car at a time from the factory until he has enough parts at home to build one of the cars for himself.

It seemed like just the kind of poor-man-wins-out tale that Cash would have liked, but he put down the guitar after running through it once and told everybody he was going to go pick up John Carter at school. Grant stopped Cash and told him he thought the song sounded like a hit; he at least ought to give it a try. Cash countered by saying that Marshall liked the song only because he used to be a car mechanic himself. Still, he did record a quick version of “One Piece at a Time” that afternoon.

Someone on the Columbia promotion staff heard the recording and played it for some DJs, then went back to Cash with good news. Everyone was flipping over the record. Cash agreed to release it as a single, but he didn’t have much faith in it. In his liner notes for the
One Piece at a Time
album, he seemed to be saying he was just spinning his wheels, wondering if anyone cared about his music anymore. As the single started climbing the chart in the spring, Cash crisscrossed the country on tour. He returned to Nashville just in time to learn that the record was number one on the country charts. It was his biggest hit since “What Is Truth.”

As much as he rejected chart success as a measure of his work, Cash couldn’t help but be excited when “One Piece at a Time” hit the public nerve that he’d been hoping to strike with “Strawberry Cake.” “He was ecstatic, like a kid,” Rosanne recalls. “He felt so invigorated.”