Johnny Cash: The Life

  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.”

  On Flanders Field in World War I

  She got a big hole from a Bertha Gun.

  She turned blood red in World War II,

  She hung limp, and low, by the time it was through.

  She was in Korea and Vietnam,

  She went where she was sent by her Uncle Sam.

  Native Americans, brown, yellow and white

  All shed red blood for the Stars and Stripes.

  In her own good land here she’s been abused,

  She’s been burned, dishonored, denied and refused.

  And the government for which she stands

  Has been scandalized throughout the land.

  And she’s getting threadbare, and wearing thin,

  But she’s in good shape, for the shape she’s in.

  ’Cause she’s been through the fire before,

  And I believe she can take a whole lot more.

  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.”

  The producer brought some excellent songs to the project, including “The Lady Came from Baltimore” and “Reason to Believe” by Tim Hardin, whose work Cash already knew because of “If I Were a Carpenter.” Klein also brought Randy Newman’s “My Old K
entucky Home (Turpentine and Dandelion Wine)” and the Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” For his part, Cash threw into the mix such songs as his own “Lonesome to the Bone” and David Allan Coe’s “Cocaine Carolina,” a rowdy hell-raiser that could have been an album highlight in the irreverent contexts of either of the prison albums.

  In interviews at the time Cash expressed optimism, singling out “The Lady Came from Baltimore” for special praise. That song was released as a single in December 1974, and Columbia’s promotion team pushed it hard. The label was encouraged when it made number fourteen on the country charts, the best showing of any Cash single in two years. But that initial airplay didn’t transfer into album sales. In fact, John R. Cash was the first top-level Cash album not to hit the country charts at all. The rejection may have been Nashville’s way of saying to New York–based executives: Leave us alone. The album garnered little pop airplay or sales.

  In the early weeks of 1975, Columbia and Cash both asked the same question: Now what?

  What the record company still didn’t understand was that Cash’s focus was no longer on music. He and June had signed up the year before for a correspondence course on the Bible. For three years, at home and on tour, they would work on lessons they received from the Christian International School of Theology. Cash threw himself into his Bible study the way he’d once committed himself to making albums. He even told a few people that he might give up his career and become a full-time minister, but he quickly abandoned the idea—fearing, he said, that he would simply be a “celebrity preacher” who would attract people who wanted their photo taken with him rather than his spiritual counsel. Marshall Grant for one never took the idea seriously: “I think it was just another part of John finding a place for himself after the music started slipping away.” Besides, June reminded him that he could reach far more people through his music than through any private ministry. But he didn’t lose his thirst for the scriptures, especially the story of Saint Paul, a man “I couldn’t get my mind off,” said Cash.

  As his record career continued to stumble, Cash’s goal was to be the father he hadn’t been in the 1960s.

  Cash’s struggle to regain the love and respect of his daughters was a lifelong one, as he documented in a series of letters to the girls, especially Rosanne. In May 1969, when he’d been feeling optimistic about the future, he wrote her: “Regardless of the mistakes your daddy has made in the past, the bad publicity I got, etc., please know that I’m above all that now. I really believe I’ve turned out to be a good man. I just wish I could spend more time with you girls. I miss you more than you know.”

  Fifteen years later he would still be trying to exorcise his guilt over abandoning his family: “I suppose I will always agonize over the fact that I split on you in 1967….Maybe it was a selfish quest, but it was a quest for self-survival.”

  Chapter 25

  Family Man and National Icon

  I

  IN THE TWENTY YEARS SINCE he had cut his first record at Sun, Cash’s résumé included some 1,800 concerts, nearly fifty albums, five movies, dozens of television shows, a divorce, and thousands of pills—and he was tired. After achieving superstardom and sobriety, Cash, at forty-three, looked forward in 1975 to the comforts of faith and family at least as much as new career horizons. Except for projects like The Gospel Road, he no longer approached every album with a sense of occasion.

  “John kept writing songs or looking for songs—and he had hundreds to choose from because every young writer in Nashville dreamed of having Johnny Cash record his song,” Marshall Grant recalled. “But everything was more casual.”

  When it was time to go into the studio, Cash would just bring in the last bunch of songs that had caught his ear. He didn’t sit down and plan them. There wasn’t a feeling of life and death about them anymore. He had other priorities.

  Years later Cash told me he was lulled by his success in the 1960s and early 1970s into taking his music for granted. He felt he could devote most of his attention to his family and spreading God’s word and still have plenty of time left over to make records. But suddenly, it seemed like everything dried up. By the time he realized what was happening, he didn’t know what to do about it. Besides, he enjoyed those new priorities.

  It was a slow transition in his life that began the day John Carter was born in 1970. The child instantly became the center of his and June’s world. “He was like their dream come true,” Carlene says. “Everything revolved around him. Rosie and I used to laugh about it, but we also kind of doted on him. It was fun having a little brother.”

  The couple put John Carter’s crib in their bedroom and took him on the road with them, including a trip to Australia when he turned one year old. Besides bringing John Carter’s nanny along on tour, Cash arranged for a bodyguard to stand outside the boy’s hotel room door when John and June were doing their shows. It wasn’t long, though, before they started taking him to the venues. When John Carter was barely old enough to walk, Cash would bring him onstage, eventually teaching him enough words to “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” for him to join the rest of the cast in singing it.

  At the same time, Cash tried to rebuild a relationship with his daughters. In fact John’s daughters, in various combinations, had been going on the road with him since the summer of 1968—when the demand for Cash’s concerts was so great there was no way he could take six weeks off in the summer to be with them as he had in 1967. It was an eye-opening introduction to his professional world for the Cash daughters.

  “He was a different person on the road,” Kathy says. “He had his mind on his work. It was intimidating because he was the boss of all these people. You could tell he was glad we were there, but it was often, like, ‘Be quiet.’ He’d take a nap every day before the show. It was like we were on the bus and then in the hotels and backstage waiting for him; it was just go, go, go. Then suddenly we’d be home, and it was fun again.”

  Rosanne remembers that period at the house vividly.

  “We were all just so happy,” she says. “He had gained weight and he looked so good and he seemed so happy. Sure, there were still problems of adjustment, but my main memory is joy. I had my dad back.”

  With his career going nonstop, Cash felt an increasing need to get away from the demands on him. He and June had been spending time at Eck and Maybelle’s modest house in Port Richey, Florida, for years.

  True to his enterprising nature, Eck Carter didn’t just stumble upon the sleepy village north of Tampa. When he wanted a retirement home in the 1960s, he researched possible locations and found a magazine article that named Port Richey the ideal spot for value and lifestyle. Eck bought a bungalow on a river that fed into the Gulf of Mexico. John loved the fishing and the quiet,

  At Port Richey, John and June became intrigued by an even more exotic vacation spot just a short flight away: the Caribbean.

  “We went to the Virgin Islands,” Carlene says. “It was our first time out of the country. We had incredible times. John would spend all day in his swim shorts, and we’d go fishing and snorkeling. We’d be there for a week one time, then ten days, then two weeks—and we went to different islands. St. John, then St. Thomas. They just loved the area, and they were always looking for new places, trying to get more seclusion, which is how they eventually got to Jamaica.”

  John and June made their first trip to Montego Bay in the early 1970s, and Jamaica became their new vacation spot of choice. The moment Cash spotted Cinnamon Hill, an eighteenth-century plantation house nestled 280 feet above the sea, he felt much the same attraction that he had for the Hendersonville house. When he and June learned it had been built by the great-grandfather of one of their favorite poets, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, they felt even more attached to the grounds. There was something about the bright evening sky, he said, that reminded him of the stars at night in Dyess on his walks to town when he was a boy.

  John W. Rollins, a wealthy American businessman, had bought the old pla
ce and was planning to renovate it. But Cash’s charm worked again, and Rollins, a onetime lieutenant governor of Delaware, soon sold him the house.. The Cashes would try to spend at least part of the year—often the Christmas holidays—at Cinnamon Hill for the rest of their lives. The Rollins family would remain good friends.

  Wanting a place closer to home, Cash also bought a one-hundred-acre farm named Bon Aqua about an hour from Hendersonville. He frequently went there by himself for a day or two to unwind after a tour. Because John and June were together almost constantly on the road, they welcomed occasional breaks from each other during their time off. While John went to Bon Aqua, where he loved to trim his grapevines or just walk the grounds, June enjoyed going to New York for a weekend of often lavish shopping. (A favorite joke among the Cash inner circle was that “she had a black belt in shopping.”)

  II

  As his fame continued to grow, Cash found there were more demands on his time than just touring and recording, many of them attached to his new role as a national icon. Cash felt it was his responsibility to use his money and fame to help others, however costly or time-consuming. His support for causes close to his heart sometimes led him into strange alliances. Besides sharing the stage with segregationist Lester Maddox for prison reform in 1970, he joined Texas billionaire and future third-party presidential candidate H. Ross Perot at a press conference the same year to build a grass-roots movement to help free American prisoners of war in North Vietnam.