Cash: The Autobiography (7 page)

 Unit One hums through the night, leaning gently into the curves of the hill road from Santa Cruz back to San Francisco. Yes, I'm thinking, I've got a great little crew on this bus. There are just two of them, Bob and Vicki Wootton, and they take very good care of June and me. They know what they're doing, and we know they know. Bob's been my guitar player since 1968, when he showed up at a date in Oklahoma and began filling the hole Luther Perkins left among us that year. Vicki, his wife, is newer to our little gang, but she drives as well as Bob does, and better sometimes—which he knows and doesn't mind too much. She's coolheaded, very smooth. You need two drivers if you're serious about travel by private bus. There are all kinds of regulations about how far and how long one person can drive, not to men- tion the paperwork, and it's really not safe to drive with one hand and fill out forms in triplicate with the other. Back in the old days, of course, we didn't worry about that kind of thing; we just swallowed as many pills as it took to get where we were going. I myself don't drive, not a bus anyway. I tried one time, but Fluke absolutely would not allow it. He was so insistent that I believe he might have let it come to blows. He said I wasn't in a fit state to drive anything, let alone a vehicle that could flatten a Buick. He was right. Fluke is W. S. Holland, my drummer since 1959, and he doesn't travel on Unit One. He and the other members of the band and crew—Earl Poole Ball on keyboards, Dave Rorick on bass, Larry Johnson and Kent Elliot on sound, Brian Farmer, my guitar tech, Jay Dauro, our pro- gram coordinator and stage manager, and, usually, my manager, Lou Robin—have their own transport and

move independently as needs be. Altogether our show gets on the road in two all-black buses and one all-black tractor-trailer. Pitiful by some standards, magnificent by others; okay by me. Tonight I had to get the musicians all together in Unit One for a while, because we really messed up “Rusty Cage.” Fluke and I started into it on entirely dif- ferent wavelengths—it felt as if we were trying to fax each other the rhythm—and Bob was caught in the mid- dle, trying to figure out who to follow, so we didn't rock; we lurched. It was embarrassing. It was time for a band meeting. Hopefully we've got it straight now. The audience was about the way I expected it to be, openly enthusiastic with a hint of wildness around the edges. Now and again as I sang I'd look out and see a sudden flurry, like the flash of a fish in moving water. After the show I was told there'd been a couple of “inci- dents.” There was one as we pulled out of the parking lot. I'd just settled in at my table when I felt us come to an abrupt halt—not Vicki's usual style; something was up. And then there were voices raised, the front door opened, someone outside was yelling, and Bob and Vicki responded, calmly at first but then with urgency building quickly into anger. I stayed put behind the curtains. I learned long ago that if you're the one the people came to see, “the principal” as they put it in the security trade, the most foolish thing you can do in a potentially violent sit- uation is involve yourself or evert show yourself—so I had no idea what was happening. I was relieved when the door thudded shut and Vicki began easing us forward again. It felt like we'd been stopped a long time. Once we were rolling, Bob explained. A kid had jumped out in front of the bus, shouting my name over and over and refusing to move no matter what. He (she? Bob couldn't tell) was right up against the windshield,

not carried away in delirium, as benevolently overexcited fans can be, but demented in a slow, spaced-out kind of way (Bob could tell he or she was stoned). With no cops in sight and a crowd beginning to gather, Bob figured he had to do something decisive, quickly. He was threaten- ing force and meaning it, showing the heavy-duty flash- light Vicki pressed into his hand, when the kid backed off and drifted away, shouting obscenities. “How old was this kid?” I asked. “Hard to say,” said Bob. “Some sort of teenager. Late teens, probably. Could have been older, or younger.” And he thought it was a girl. She rattled him; he'd been wor- ried. Vicki chimed in that she still thought it could have been a boy. “Nope,” Bob said. “That was a female. Whatever it was, though, it sure got my heart beating.” Then he looked at me and grinned. “Must have been just like old times for you, huh?” “Yup,” I said, even though in some ways it was and in some ways it wasn't. Picture this. This is why it was so great in my early days, why it was such fun at Sun. It's late summer 195 5. I've just had my first hit, “Cry, Cry, Cry,” and I'm in Shreveport at the Louisiana Hayride, a Saturday night radio show much like the Grand Ole Opry but not as prestigious or powerful. The Hayride's man in charge, Horace Logan, complains sometimes, grousing that he's just a talent scout for his opposite numbers in Nashville, and there's truth to what he says. Some of us who are spending this year's Saturday nights in Shreveport will sooner or later move on to the

Opry and its bigger radio audience, just as others have done in the past: Webb Pierce, Faron Young, Hank Williams. The Hayride is its own world, though, and Horace Logan runs a great show. He looks good tonight. He's in full cowboy costume, complete with the fancy gunbelt and twin nickel-plated Peacemakers Webb Pierce gave him. He sparkles. There's high energy here. Most of us who play the Hayride love it. I look forward to the crowd, a mixture of local regulars and people drawn in from all over the show's broadcast area, and I look forward to the per- formers presented for their entertainment. Any Saturday night I might run into Claude King, Rusty and Doug Kershaw, Wanda Jackson, Jimmy C. Newman, Charlene Arthur, or Johnny Horton. Carl Perkins might have come down from Memphis with me. Elvis might be on the show. It doesn't really matter. I know it'll be fun, and I know I'll feel good. Here, you see, I'm accepted as an equal, as one of them, and that's really something. This business I'm in is different. It's special. The people around me feel like brothers and sisters. We hardly know each other, but we're that close; somehow there's been an immediate bonding between total strangers. We share each other's triumphs, and when one of us gets hurt, we all bleed—it's corny, I know, but it's true. I've never experienced anything like this before. It's great. It turns up the heat in life. So do the audiences. My record gets played a lot in Shreveport—it's the first place outside Memphis I ever heard myself on the radio, on Tommy Sands's show on KCIJ—and when I hit the stage and start into “Cry, Cry, Cry” or “Hey, Porter,” I see the people start clapping and hear them singing along. Man, what a kick. What a thrill. They've been listening to my song on the radio, and they

like it! I'm on this stage in front of them, just me, and they're excited. They think I belong here the way Faron Young or Hank Williams did! What a deal this is. I love being one of the new guys, getting a hit record, being a somebody in my generation, and having girls all over me, but it's also very satisfying to sing for the older people. They send requests backstage for their favorite country songs—“My Grandfather's Clock,” “Sweeter Than the Flowers,” or “Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine”— and I accommodate them with pleasure. I love being able to give them the music given to me by the radio in Dyess, and I feel close to older people. There's something extra between us. So the whole Hayride experience is wonderful. For me it's everything good happening at once: being wanted, being appreciated, doing what I love, basking in a great big family, playing music with my friends. If my life is going to be like this, it sure will be a happy one. When this Saturday night at the Hayride winds down, we brothers and sisters in music will go our sepa- rate ways. Sometimes Shreveport is our staging point for a week on the roads of Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, and Mississippi. Other times, Luther and Marshall and I will wedge ourselves into my '54 Plymouth with all our gear (including Marshall's bass fiddle) and set out on the long drive home. We'll be rolling into Memphis as the sun comes up on Sunday, and won't that just be fine? What the writers have always said about Memphis is true: musically speaking, it was the capital city of the whole Mississippi Delta, not just a river town in western Tennessee. There was no question it was where I needed to be. Ever since that Sears Roebuck radio came into our house, Memphis had been the center of the world in my head, the one place where people didn't have to spend their lives sweating bare survival out of a few acres of dirt, where you could sing on the radio. I took myself there as

soon as I could after parting company with the air force. In a way, I had to. Or at least I had to take myself somewhere. Quite apart from getting on the radio, I needed to be someplace I could find a job to support myself, my new wife, and the family we wanted to have. The first place I went looking for work was the police department, where my brother Roy had a connec- tion and my work with the Air Force Security Service made me a likely candidate. But after talking a while with the chief of police, I decided that law enforcement wasn't really for me. The chief accepted that and suggested that I go over and see Mr. George Bates at the Home Equipment Company. I've come to think of George Bates as one of those angels who appear in your life just when you need them, holding out a hand to you in the right place at the right time. He took me on as a salesman, sponsored a weekly fifteen-minute radio show for me (“Hi. This is John Cash for Home Equipment Company”), and loaned me money when I proved to be a total failure as a salesman. He advanced me cash every payday, and after almost a year of that he called me into his office. “Do you think you're ever going to pay me back?” he asked. “How much do I owe you?” I asked. He looked it up. “Twelve hundred dollars,” he said. “Well, Mr. Bates,” I told him, “one of these days I'm going to walk in here and give you a check for that full amount.” He was great. “Well, I just hope you will,” he said. "I've taken care of you because I've believed in you. I

believe you'll do something one day—but I'll tell you, I don't think you're going to be a salesman, ever.“ Even after that he let me stay on and do my bad impersonation of a young go-getter. I spent a great deal of time in my car, listening to the radio. It was a good time to be listening. There was a lot of great country music in the early 1950s, and great blues, too. The blues were everywhere, and that was fine by me. I loved going to Home of the Blues, the record store. That's where I bought Blues in the Mississippi Night, the great anthology of Delta blues singers recorded by Alan Lomax, which is still one of my favorite albums (I bor- rowed a good song title there, too). I loved driving into Orange Mound, the black part of town, to sit on Gus Cannon's porch and listen to him sing and play the gui- tar. Gus wrote ”Walk Right In,“ which later became a big pop hit for the Rooftop Singers, and I thought he was wonderful even if he didn't buy a refrigerator (nobody did; they couldn't afford one or anything else I had to sell, and I didn't want to fool them into thinking they could). I loved Dewey Phillips's radio show on WHBQ, ”Red Hot and Blue,“ which mixed everything up together—hillbilly, pop, blues, gospel—without regard to what anyone but Dewey had to say about it. Of course, he knew the big secret: that there were a lot of white people listening to ”race music“ behind closed doors. Of course, some of them (some of us) were quite open about it, most famously Elvis. Elvis was already making noise in Memphis when I got there in '54. Sam Phillips had released his first single, ”That's All Right, Mama,“ with ”Blue Moon of Ken- tucky“ on the ”B" side, and it was tearing up the air- waves. The first time I saw Elvis, singing from a flatbed truck at a Katz drugstore opening on Lamar Avenue, two or three hundred people, mostly teenage girls, had come out to see him. With just one single to his credit, he sang those two songs over and over. That's the first time I met

him. Vivian and I went up to him after the show, and he invited us to his next date at the Eagle's Nest, a club pro- moted by Sleepy-Eyed John, the disc jockey who'd taken his name from the Merle Travis song and was just as important as Dewey Phillips in getting Sun music out to the world. Sleepy-Eyed John didn't like Sam Phillips, though, so while he'd always put Sun singles on the air, usually he'd preface them with some disparaging remark: “Here's another Sam Phillips sixty-cycle-hum record,” or “This record don't belong on here, but you people asked for it—which was a sorry thing for you to do—so here it is.” Sleepy-Eyed John said and did anything he wanted on the air. He'd let new singles play halfway through, then jerk them off the turntable and throw them into his trash bin. “That guy ain't worth a hoot!” he'd say. “Let's find something worth playing. All right, here's Bud Deckleman's new one. Now there's a record!” He was right about that, too: Bud Deckleman, obscure today, was a really good country singer. Despite his act, Sleepy-Eyed John knew exactly what was going on. He saw the rock 'n' roll turnaround com- ing and he helped it along. He was a nice guy, too, hand- some, just a few years older than me, happy-go-lucky and friendly, a good man to have minding the gate to the lis- teners. Dewey Phillips was quieter, more reserved and relaxed than Sleepy-Eyed John, but on the air he was a maniac, one of those midnight howlers like Wolfman Jack; that was his act. He was good to talk to about music and good to me, and he worked his tail off at that station. His “Red Hot and Blue” show went on at mid- night, but he was on the air during the day too. I remember Elvis's show at the Eagle's Nest as if it

were yesterday. The date was a blunder, because the place was an adult club where teenagers weren't wel- come, and so Vivian and I were two of only a dozen or so patrons, fifteen at the most. All the same, I thought Elvis was great. He sang “That's All Right, Mama” and “Blue Moon of Kentucky” once again (and again), plus some black blues songs and a few numbers like “Long Tall Sally,” and he didn't say much. He didn't have to, of course; his charisma alone kept everyone's attention. The thing I really noticed that night, though, was his guitar playing. Elvis was a fabulous rhythm player. He'd start into “That's All Right, Mama” with his own guitar alone, and you didn't want to hear anything else. I didn't, anyway. I was disappointed when Scotty Moore and Bill Black jumped in and covered him up. Not that Scotty and Bill weren't perfect for him—the way he sounded with them that night was what I think of as seminal Presley, the sound I missed through all the years after he became so popular and made records full of orchestration and overproduction. I loved that clean, simple combination of Scotty, Bill, and Elvis with his acoustic guitar. You know, I've never heard or read anyone else praising Elvis as a rhythm guitar player, and after the Sun days I never heard his own guitar on his records. That night at the Eagle's Nest, I remember, he was playing a Martin and he was dressed in the latest teen fashion. I think his shirt came from the National Shirt Shop, where you could get something loud and flashy or something in a good rich black for $3.98 (I did), but per- haps by then he'd started shopping at Lansky Brothers on Beale Street. If he hadn't, it wasn't long before he did. I was in there myself two or three times in '55 and '56. Elvis and I talked about music, but I never spoke to him about Sun Records or any other connection into the music business. I wanted to make it on my own devices, and that's how I set about doing it. Buoyed by Marshall's, Luther's, and my perfor-