Johnny Cash: The Life (16 page)

No problem.

Cash, however, soon sensed there was something wrong in his growing need for the pills, and he did a good job of not letting those close to him—especially Vivian—know about the drugs. It would be months before even Marshall realized that this newfound energy and vitality weresn’t natural. By that time, Cash was taking five or ten pills a day—and before long, he and Grant would both look back on that number as the innocent days.

As royalty checks continued to roll in, with the prospects of bigger ones soon from Columbia, Cash celebrated by buying another new house—a 3,300-square-foot ranch-style house at 5676 Walnut Grove Place. Not coincidentally, it was in one of the city’s most exclusive areas, not far from where Sam Phillips and George Bates lived. The move showed that Cash, for all his concern about coming up with another pop hit, was feeling pretty confident about his future. Shortly afterward, Vivian learned she was pregnant again.

It was in the midst of all this that Phillips started hearing rumors about Cash and Perkins leaving Sun. Losing Elvis was bad, but he at least got some money in return. In the case of Cash and Perkins, he wouldn’t get anything. On top of that, Phillips prized Cash, he felt he had the talent to be a star for years and years. Who was going next? Jerry Lee? Phillips tracked Cash down to see if the rumors were true. Knowing he had to work with Phillips for several more months, Cash didn’t want to anger his boss. He assured Phillips that he hadn’t signed with Columbia.

“I looked Johnny right in the eye and I said, ‘John, I understand that you have signed an option to go to another label at the expiration of your contract with Sun,’” Phillips said. “‘I want you to look me straight in the eye and tell me, have you or have you not?’ I knew when he opened his mouth he was lying. The only damn lie Johnny Cash ever told me that I’m aware of. That hurt. That
hurt.
”

Phillips went straight from Cash to Perkins, who admitted he had signed an option to go to Columbia as soon as the Sun deal expired. Hoping he could still change Perkins’s mind, Phillips made a long, impassioned plea to stay with Sun, David McGee recorded in
Go, Cat, Go!,
a book he wrote with Perkins.

“I think you’re makin’ a bad mistake,” Phillips said. “You’re gonna get up there and get lost. I understand John’s leavin’ too.”

After Perkins confirmed that Cash had indeed signed, Phillips told Perkins that Cash would be okay at the larger label, but warned that Perkins needed more personalized treatment. “I know what you do, and they don’t understand in Nashville,” he said. “If anybody does, it’s Chet Atkins, and you’re not going on RCA Victor. There ain’t nobody over at Columbia Records that knows anything about rockabilly music.”

Perkins, perhaps offended by Phillips’s suggestion that he wasn’t as strong-minded and talented as Cash, struck back.

“Mr. Phillips,” he said. “It ain’t gonna do me no good to stay down here.”

When Phillips asked what he meant, Perkins expressed the frustrations he shared with Cash.

“You got Jerry Lee on the brain,” he snapped. “That’s all you talk about when I’m in here and it has been that way for the last year. Every time I come in here you wanna play me something he’s done. All you’re bragging on is him. I’m sure he’s making you a lotta money. I know he’s got hit records. But you put on his records, ‘Jerry Lee Lewis and His Pumping Piano.’ You ain’t never said nothin’ about me and my guitar.”

Clearly pleading, Phillips offered to start calling Perkins the “Rockin’ Guitar Man.”

But it was too late.

Angrily, he called Cash to ask why he had lied to him.

“Well, I don’t think you’ve been all that truthful to me about a lot of things,” Cash told him. “I thought I’d just kinda pay you back.”

Phillips felt betrayed.

When asked about their relationship over the years, Phillips and Cash would go back and forth between expressing great respect for each other and restating their separate versions of how the relationship deteriorated.

Phillips often argued that Cash and Perkins were immature. He felt that he had given both of them the same kind of special attention he was now giving Lewis back when they were both getting started. But “they saw it as if we were petting Jerry Lee,” he said. “They had forgotten that we had brought them along in the same way. They were young people and there was an awful lot of jealousy.”

Clement blamed Phillips for letting Cash get away.

“Sam was stupid,” Clement says. “Sam was willing to give John an extra penny or two in his royalty, but he wanted John to have to come back and plead for it. That was Sam’s way of showing John who was boss. But John didn’t want to argue. When Sam said no that first time, John never asked again.”

Now that he was leaving, Cash was becoming more comfortable with Clement. They had gone into the studio a couple of times over the summer to cut some tracks for what would be Cash’s first full-length album. The title,
Johnny Cash with His Red, Hot and Blue
Guitar,
was a nod to Sam Phillips’s radio buddy Dewey Phillips’s show,
Red, Hot and Blue.
Much to Cash’s mother’s delight, the collection contained the gospel song he’d first sung for Phillips, “I Was There When It Happened.”

During a tour break in mid-November, Cash went to Clement with a song that he’d written after reading a magazine article about the Mississippi: “Big River.” In some ways it is his most richly poetic song—the one that Bob Dylan often mentioned when talking about how much he admired Cash as a writer. “There are so many ways you can go at something in a song,” Dylan says. “One thing is to give life to inanimate objects. Johnny Cash is good at that. He’s got the line that goes, ‘A freighter said, “She’s been here, but she’s gone, boy, she’s gone.’” That’s great. That’s high art. If you do that once in a song, you usually turn it on its head right then and there.”

Clement was enthusiastic; he even contributed some striking guitar licks to the recording. Cash felt it was the best thing by far he had done since “I Walk the Line.” It even had rhythm. But he still needed something for the other side of the single. The answer was the most unlikely of Cash recordings on Sun, the song he would somewhat apologetically describe as this “teenage thing.”

Sitting around the studio a few weeks before the November session, Clement mentioned to Cash that he’d like to make records himself, either for Sun or for another label. When Cash asked him if he had recorded anything, Clement played a song that was so teen-oriented that Cash couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

With its corny pop vocal backing and clichéd lyrics about a young starlet who gives up everything for the love of the boy who works at a candy store, “Ballad of a Teenage Queen” had almost nothing in common with the best of Cash’s music. Besides, Cash later pointed out playfully, the melody sounded like it was lifted from “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Still, he admitted it was catchy. Maybe, he thought, it could be another smash like “Whole Lotta Shakin’.” Clement couldn’t have been more surprised when Cash said he’d like to record it. He certainly wasn’t going to refuse Cash the song, so they recorded both the marvelous “Big River” and the flimsy “Queen” the same day.

Billboard
predicted big things for “Ballad of a Teenage Queen” and “Big River” when the single was released a month later. Its review read: “This is the most popish try for Cash in a while. ‘Queen’ tells a cute story that can appeal to teens, and the artist’s approach is highly attractive. Flip has more of a traditional c&w flavor, but the rhythmic presentation can also appeal in pop marts. A dual-market contender.”

To help promote “Ballad” in that market, Sun’s Canadian label partner sponsored a series of contests to name a local “teenage queen” in each stop of a fifteen-day December tour of Canada. Cash made personal appearances at record stores, and a drawing was held to name a winner who would be announced at the concert each night. Teens packed the stores.

Cash ended the year with a couple of shows in California. Again, he was looking forward to going back to Town Hall Party on December 28. He wanted to see Lorrie Collins to find out if what he had heard from some of the Party cast members was true: Was she really engaged to teen idol Ricky Nelson?

Nelson, whose exposure on the weekly TV show
The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet
had led to a successful recording contract, had seen the Collins Kids one night on the Town Hall Party telecast, and he loved their high-energy rockabilly style. He asked a mutual friend, Glen Larson of the pop vocal group the Four Preps, if he would go with him to Town Hall Party and introduce him to Lorrie.

“I thought he was cute on the TV show, just like any other teenage girl,” Lorrie recalls. “When he walked into the room backstage, everyone was speechless. No one could imagine Ricky Nelson coming to Town Hall Party, but he was really into the music. He was like Johnny a little, very shy, wearing a white leather coat, black and white shoes—a real fifties outfit. He mumbled a little about how much he liked what Larry and I did. At the end of the evening, he asked if he could have my phone number and I said sure.”

Ricky, who was a huge fan of the Sun Records roster, was so enamored with Lorrie that he eventually persuaded his father, Ozzie Nelson, to bring her on the TV show, where they dueted on “Just Because,” an old country song that the Collins Kids and Elvis had each recorded. They were soon engaged.

When Lorrie confirmed the engagement to Cash backstage at Town Hall Party, he just walked away, she says. Later that evening, Lorrie felt Cash glaring across the room at her. Finally he went over to her and whispered, “Lorrie, don’t ever send a boy to do a man’s job.” It sounded like a joke, but Johnny wasn’t smiling.

Cash backed off, but not far enough so that Lorrie didn’t continue to sense an interest on his part. “Johnny was still there watching during our engagement,” she remembers. “I could feel that.”

JOHNNY CASH KNEW HE WAS
at a crossroads at the start of 1958, much of the uncertainty growing out of his move to Columbia Records. Even though the new contract wouldn’t take effect until August 1, he was already thinking about other changes in his life. By the time he would actually go into the studio for the first session with Don Law, he would also have said good-bye to Memphis and the Grand Ole Opry and be looking forward to Hollywood, his dream of making it in the movies, and seeing more of Lorrie Collins.

It was both a tense and a celebratory time, made all the more disorienting because the popularity of “Teenage Queen” led to an increasingly hectic tour schedule. The first six months of the year would be a haze of traveling to shows that stretched all over California, Texas, the Midwest, the Northwest, and Canada—and sometimes back again. He also did more television, including the Lawrence Welk show in Los Angeles, a guest appearance at the Grand Ole Opry, and even a return visit to the Louisiana Hayride. To cope, he began slowly upping his reliance on amphetamines.

The Hayride stop on January 25 gave him a break from the stress by allowing him to spend a few days fishing with Johnny and Billie Jean Horton. It felt good to unwind, making him think at least fleetingly of moving his family to Shreveport to be near his two special friends.

“We were three buddies who went hunting together, and you never tired of talking to each other,” Billie Jean says. “We were as close as three feet in the same sock.”

One thing he didn’t talk about was the growing strain in his relationship with Vivian.

“He didn’t have to,” Billie Jean continues. “She didn’t like the music. She was a homebound person. He wasn’t. I could see from the very beginning that…it was a marriage that wasn’t meant to be. They stayed in my house, and Vivian wouldn’t sit around the breakfast table and talk music with us. She would wander around the house. It was very clear that she didn’t have any interest in the music.”

Cash kept his drug use secret. “As far as we could tell, Johnny was not on drugs,” she adds. “Horton wouldn’t have let him get away with it. Horton didn’t even drink, and Cash respected that.”

Similarly, Vivian hadn’t yet suspected that her husband was becoming addicted to pills. He had always been restless and moody. Besides, she felt such joy having him home from one of his lengthening absences that she probably wouldn’t have noticed anyway. At that time in their marriage, Cash tried whenever he was at home to be the caring, loving husband and father he had always intended to be. In family photos, his eyes are as clear as can be.

“I don’t think any of us really knew it at that time,” Roy Cash Jr. says about his uncle’s drug use. “Even after he moved to California that summer, I visited them a couple of times and I didn’t see anything unusual. He might have been a little out of it once, but I just thought he must have had a rough time on the road.”

Cash’s road was expanding to include a new kind of TV exposure. Thanks to the appeal of “Teenage Queen,” Dick Clark booked Cash for appearances on both
American Bandstand
and later the new, more formal concert-style
Dick Clark Show.
Though eager for the exposure, Cash had mixed feelings about both programs.

When he went on Jackie Gleason’s and Paul Winchell’s TV shows to plug “I Walk the Line,” he was singing to adults mostly, both in the studio and in living rooms across the country. Going on Dick Clark’s shows, he was singing—sometimes lip-synching—to kids. He felt a little foolish, Grant remembered, but Cash kept comforting himself with the fact that “Big River” was a Top 10 hit in the country field. That record, he told himself, showed what he was really about.

The popularity of “Teenage Queen” was bittersweet to Sam Phillips, too. It was great to have another pop hit, but it reminded him of what he was losing in this young man. Not that it was all losses for Sam: Cash stopped by Sun Studios during a tour break in February just as Clement was enjoying success again with a new Jerry Lee Lewis single, “Great Balls of Fire.” It was another knockout slice of full-throttle rock ’n’ roll, establishing Lewis to many industry observers as the leading challenger to Elvis’s rock crown.

Even Hollywood was clamoring for Lewis, who headed to California to film a cameo for a major studio release (from MGM, no less) titled
High School Confidential.
The film, a tale of juvenile delinquency no doubt inspired by the earlier success of
Blackboard Jungle,
starred bombshell Mamie Van Doren. Though Lewis’s only time on screen was performing the title song, he created most of the buzz among the teens who bought tickets to see the movie when it was released in June.

Elvis’s old Sun label mate was doing so spectacularly well that you could almost picture Colonel Tom Parker asking himself whether he should cover his bet and try to pick up this youngster’s management contract too. But Lewis would prove to be no Elvis. He was too headstrong for anyone to know quite what to do with him. He wasn’t good at listening to advice, either in the studio or in his personal life. Clement was wise enough just to sit back and let Lewis rock out when it came time to do another record. From a distance, all Cash could see was that Clement kept coming up with hits.

As soon as he met with Clement on that February visit, he asked good-naturedly, “Got any more hits for me?” As it happened, Clement had just written a song patterned after the seductive lilt of one of Cash’s favorite pop recordings, Dean Martin’s “Memories Are Made of This.” Clement played a rough demo of his tune, “Guess Things Happen That Way,” and Cash said he’d love to record it. The problem was, Clement had already promised the song to Marty Robbins.

“Marty Robbins!” Cash responded.

Cash liked Robbins, but he was on Columbia Records. What was his producer doing writing songs for someone on another label? As it turned out, Robbins was one of several recordings artists who had come to Clement after the success of “Teenage Queen,” asking if he had a song for them. The producer played Robbins a couple of songs, and Robbins jumped on “Guess Things Happen.” Not about to turn down such a hot artist, Clement said sure. There was just one hurdle.

Though based in Nashville, Robbins had been under the wing of Columbia’s pop division ever since his single “A White Sport Coat (and a Pink Carnation)” became such a huge pop teen hit in 1957. That meant Columbia’s New York’s pop boss, Mitch Miller, had to approve Robbins’s song choices, not Don Law. To Cash’s good fortune, Miller didn’t like “Guess Things Happen That Way,” allowing the song to fall into Cash’s hands. He and the Tennessee Two were joined in the studio on April 9 by drummer James Van Eaton and pianist Jimmy Wilson to cut the track.

It took six attempts before Clement was comfortable with the prized mix of sad lyrics and happy beat. This record wasn’t in the heartfelt tradition of Cash’s best compositions, but Cash was far more satisfied with it than with “Teenage Queen.” Despite the added instrumentation, the arrangement returned to their original
boom-chicka-boom
style.

For the back side of the single, Clement turned to “Come In Stranger,” a Cash song they had recorded before “Teenage Queen.” Cash called it his “life-on-the-road song,” but it’s better seen as his second “Vivian song,” this time focusing on his long road trips from her point of view. With more dates coming all the time, he had gone from fewer than 75 days on the road in 1956 to more than 140 in 1957. If his songs can be considered either personal J.R. songs or purely commercial songs, this was a J.R. song. The closing verse goes:

Together, “Guess Things Happen That Way” and “Come In Stranger” made easily the most appealing Cash single since “I Walk the Line” and “Get Rhythm.” Cash was especially pleased because the record appealed to an older audience than the Dick Clark fans.

The success of “Guess Things Happen” meant money in Phillips’s pocket, but it also caused Sam to fret again about Cash’s leaving the label. He sent Cash an angry letter demanding that the singer record twenty more songs to fulfill the sixty-five-song requirement of his contract. When Cash flatly refused, Phillips threatened to sue. Carnall and Neal told Cash not to worry—that Phillips would never sue him over the contract provisions because he wouldn’t want anyone to go through his business records in case Cash challenged his royalty statements.

Seeing he was getting nowhere, Phillips asked Clement to use his friendship with Cash to get the singer into the studio. Cash again refused, but Clement asked him to reconsider, saying he was afraid that Phillips would fire him if he couldn’t come up with the additional recordings, which Phillips wanted for future singles or albums. Clement was as big a storyteller as Cash, so he may have made up the threat, but it worked. “I pretty quickly realized that Jack was one of us,” Cash said, meaning a “worker” at Sun rather than the boss. “He was just doing his job, and I saw right away that he was really good at it.”

Cash agreed to go into the studio, but he told Clement that he’d have to get everything he needed in one day. That was as much as he was willing to do for Phillips. The result was a mad scramble on May 15 when they got together at nine a.m. for the first of three three-hour sessions, the Tennessee Two again supplemented by drummer James Van Eaton and pianist Jimmy Wilson. Cash kicked things off with two of his own songs, including a ballad titled “You’re the Nearest Thing to Heaven,” which Cash co-wrote with Hoyt Johnson and Jimmy Atkins.

None of the four songs they laid down at the two p.m. session were noteworthy. Searching around for something to record at the five p.m. session, Cash noticed a Hank Williams songbook in the studio. “Let’s do some of these,” he told Clement, and they recorded five songs, including one that Williams had written for his second wife, the future Billie Jean Horton. Cash knew about the song because Billie Jean had told him about the day Williams sang “I Could Never Be Ashamed of You” to her while driving from Nashville to Shreveport.

Despite the busy day, Cash and Clement finished with only twelve songs, so Clement asked Cash to come back to the studio again. Sensing Cash’s fondness for “Nearest Thing,” Clement said he’d talk Phillips into releasing it as a single if Cash would cut another song for the back side of the record. Clement even had a couple of songs in mind, both written by Charlie Rich, a marvelous singer, songwriter, and pianist who would become a major pop and country star after joining Epic Records in the late 1960s. The song Clement especially liked was “The Ways of a Woman in Love,” a tale of romantic infatuation with a sing-along feel that was reminiscent of “Ballad of a Teenage Queen,” though far less syrupy lyrically. In the end, Clement was able to get Cash to record eight more songs, which pleased Phillips.

Billboard
predicted a big future for “Guess Things Happen That Way” and gave it a coveted spotlight position in its pop section. But the publication gave it less favorable attention than a new Jerry Lee Lewis recording, “High School Confidential.” In addition, Sun Records’ half-page ad in the same issue featured only the Lewis record. Imagine the surprise, then, when “Guess Things Happen” climbed higher on the pop charts. The reasons weren’t strictly musical.

While Cash went on the road again in West Texas, Lewis headed to England on what was billed as the biggest tour ever by an American rock ’n’ roller. But the trip turned into a nightmare as soon as Lewis’s plane landed at London’s Heathrow Airport on May 22. A reporter for the
Daily Mail
noticed a young girl traveling with the twenty-three-year-old Lewis. Looking for quotes for his story, the reporter asked her if she was related to the singer. The girl, Myra Gale Lewis, replied proudly, “I’m Myra, Jerry’s wife.”

When the reporter asked Lewis how old Myra was, he answered “fifteen,” adding two years to her real age to avoid raising eyebrows. But reporters still sensed a scandal in the making. By the end of the day, the press learned that Myra was Jerry Lee’s first cousin and the couple had been married several months before Lewis’s divorce from his second wife was finalized. The headlines caused a backlash even among Lewis fans. Instead of sellouts, Lewis found himself performing to half-empty houses, his onetime fans booing him ferociously.

The tour was canceled after a few dates, and Lewis returned to the States, only to learn that the scandal had caused DJs around the country to boycott his records. “High School Confidential” stalled at number twenty-one on the pop charts, which was higher than Lewis would ever climb again in the pop world. Cash was again Sun Records’ number-one attraction.

The lure of Hollywood was strong for Cash. Stew Carnall kept telling him about the good times they could have there, and Neal was still dangling the prospect of a TV and movie career in front of him. California also appealed to Cash because it would distance him even further from the country music scene in Nashville. He didn’t want to be identified with what he saw was the provincial thinking there, and he liked to think of himself as an outsider—someone like the characters played by Marlon Brando in
The Wild One
and James Dean in
Rebel Without a Cause,
two films that Cash loved. Even onstage, Cash tried to stand apart. He didn’t indulge in the rhinestone suits and “aw-shucks” demeanor of so many country stars. He wasn’t overtly rebellious like Elvis or Jerry Lee, but in his mind he saw himself standing alongside Brando and Dean rather than Roy Acuff and Webb Pierce. When he wore black shirts and pants, because he liked the way they looked and they didn’t show dirt, some of the other entertainers took a look at his colorless appearance and nicknamed him “The Undertaker.”

Marshall and Luther were both against the move west because it didn’t make sense logistically. Living near the center of the country made driving around the States and Canada a lot easier than trying to route everything through the West Coast. Plus, they’d be far from Columbia’s recording studios in Nashville. When Cash mentioned the complaints to Carnall, his friend just smiled and said, “Johnny, that’s what airplanes are for.”