Johnny Cash: The Life (25 page)

“Johnny’s voice was so shot he gave his secretary handwritten notes with instructions to all of us. He couldn’t sing a note. He had been taking diet pills to lose weight so he could get into that Jimmie Rodgers outfit [which Rodgers’s daughter had given Cash to wear at the show]. He was as skinny as rain.”

To add to the anxiety, Cash disappeared after the rehearsal and didn’t return until just in time for the show. “It was literally a minute before we had to go on and John finally shows up,” Grant later said. “He was just downright filthy, dirty, really nasty. It was embarrassing for all of us. I knew that this was going to be a bad night for us.”

When he walked onstage, Cash was intending to sing chiefly Rodgers’s songs, something that must have made Holiff and Columbia executives frantic. They wanted a Johnny Cash album, not a Jimmie Rodgers album. He even designed a dramatic entrance for his set. He lit one of Rodgers’s own railroad lanterns backstage and ordered the house lights turned off so that the only light on him would be from the lantern flame. He then walked through the dark to a chair at the center of the stage, put his knee on the chair—a signature move by Rodgers—planning to open with one of Rodgers’s most famous compositions, “Waiting for a Train.”

Cash expected an immediate wave of enthusiastic applause, but the audience was confused. Always nervous at the start of shows, he panicked.

“If there were any people out there who knew about Jimmie Rodgers (and I’m sure there were at least a few), they were slow to make the visual connection,” he wrote thirty-five years later in his second autobiography. “I thought they were going to be in awe—
this must be
something special
,
what’s he going to do
—but they weren’t. They were yelling out for ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ before I even got to the microphone.

“So I turned around and handed the lantern to somebody and I went into my regular opening number, whatever it was at the time. Which would have been fine, I guess, if I’d been able to sing. But I couldn’t. I was mouthing the words. All the people were hearing from me was my guitar.”

Aghast, Don Law signaled for the crew to turn off the recording equipment. Not knowing what else to do, Cash plowed on desperately, hoping to salvage something of the evening.

“I kept asking for glasses of water to ease my dry throat,” he wrote. “I kept hoping the pills I’d taken would boost me up to where I didn’t care anymore, but they didn’t. It was just a nightmare and I remember it all with perfect clarity. June came out dressed in a beautiful white robe with a heart sewn into it when I did ‘Ballad of the Heart Weaver.’ I whispered my way through ‘Give My Love to Rose,’ hoping to pull it all together somehow, but I failed. It was awful, start to finish.”

The mood backstage was near funereal.

June tried to encourage Cash, but he would have none of it. He snapped at her, then sat glumly in a corner of his dressing room, sending out such bad vibes that none of the regulars dared go near him. It took an outsider—Ed McCurdy, a folksinger best known for the antiwar anthem “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream”—to finally bridge the gap.

Johnny Western and Gordon Terry had made the rounds of the Greenwich Village folk clubs the night before and had run into McCurdy at the Bitter End. McCurdy said he knew who they both were and that he was looking forward to the show. They ended up spending much of the night together, and Western invited McCurdy to come backstage after the show to meet Cash.

At Carnegie Hall, McCurdy sat in disbelief as he watched Cash unravel onstage, but he sensed early on the reason for the problem. After the show, he followed Western into the dressing room and noticed Cash sitting by himself, his head down. He walked over to him.

“It’s called Dexedrine, isn’t it?” he said.

Cash looked up, wondering who this stranger was.

“What is?” he finally replied.

“What you’re taking,” McCurdy continued.

“Yeah. Why?”

“I just kind of recognized it,” McCurdy said. “I’m a kindred spirit. I’ve been into all that stuff myself. I’m in a program right now and don’t do anything, but I recognize Dexedrine. That stuff will kill you, y’know.”

Cash didn’t like people questioning him about his drugs and he snapped back, “Yeah? Well, so will a car wreck.”

But he loosened up when McCurdy introduced himself. He knew some of McCurdy’s songs, especially “Strangest Dream.” The talk helped distract Cash from the disappointment of the night sufficiently for him to go to a club with McCurdy, where he met a young folksinger named Peter LaFarge, who had recorded an album on Columbia.

Cash already knew of LaFarge because Gene Ferguson, a promotion man at Columbia and a Cash crony, had given him a copy of LaFarge’s “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” a dramatic account of the life of Ira Hamilton Hayes, a Pima Indian who was one of six Marines featured in the historic photo of the flag raising on Iwo Jima during World War II. The photo was a powerful symbol of American courage and determination, one of the most celebrated images of the war. Never comfortable with the attention, Hayes returned to his native Arizona and tried to lead a normal life, but he couldn’t escape fame. People would even seek him out on the reservation to thank him for his heroism. He re-created the famous moment in the John Wayne movie
Sands of Iwo Jima.

But Hayes’s life proved tragic. Feeling unworthy of the attention because other soldiers had given their lives in battle, the ex-Marine sank deeper and deeper into alcoholism. He was arrested fifty-two times for public drunkenness before he was found dead in an abandoned adobe hut. The county coroner labeled the death the result of exposure and alcohol poisoning. Hayes’s story was told in
The Outsider,
a 1961 film starring Tony Curtis as the ill-fated war hero.

The meeting with LaFarge reminded Cash of the song, and he told the songwriter he was going to record it someday.

Though the damage to Cash’s reputation from the Carnegie Hall fiasco was severe in the industry, the fallout could have been even worse if Robert Shelton, the
New York Times
music critic, hadn’t treated the episode with restraint. He wrote, “Although the star, Johnny Cash, was suffering from a throat ailment, which made it difficult to judge his performance, the evening afforded several divergent moments.”

When Cash read it the next morning, he was relieved. He was pleased that Shelton went to great lengths to pay respect to Maybelle Carter and the Carter Family tradition and declared that Cash was a singer and songwriter in the vein of country greats such as the late Jimmie Rodgers and the late Hank Williams. That, after all, was what he had hoped the concert would demonstrate.

It was a sign of Cash’s lifted spirits that morning that he went around to the musicians on the Carnegie bill to thank them for sticking by him. “That made a big impression on us because he often would blame everyone else when things went wrong during those drug years,” Western says. “He’d also stay away from everyone. There were many, many times when Gordon and I didn’t know if he was going to speak to us all day. Sometimes we never saw him until showtime. But this time he was very sheepish. He took responsibility. He said, ‘This was my fault, that mess last night. I apologize.’”

No one would ever mistake the Mint Hotel in downtown Las Vegas for one of the world’s most prestigious concert stops, but Cash welcomed the chance to check in on May 17 for an eight-night engagement in the hotel’s two-hundred-seat lounge. After the pressure cooker of Carnegie Hall, this was a chance to relax. He also didn’t have to get into the car after the show and drive hundreds of miles to the next venue. Most of all, he was looking forward to spending time with June Carter.

Though he’d barked at her at Carnegie Hall, he was touched by her show of concern. As he looked back, he also valued the way she seemed to understand his need for time by himself to regroup emotionally. Yes, he was thinking, there is a lot to like about June Carter, and he knew he was kidding himself when he said he would settle for friendship. During a brief East Coast tour between the New York and Las Vegas dates, John told June of his deepening feelings. They stuck to their pledge of friendship only, but he did kiss her for the first time. Other commitments prevented June from joining him for the first three shows at the Mint, but they spoke by phone every day, sometimes twice a day.

As soon as she arrived on May 20, Cash went to her room and kissed her for the second time. It was clear the pledge was over. No longer trying to keep up her guard, June asked John to give her some time to unpack and get into something comfortable. He returned to his room and drank a half pint of brandy and three or four beers to get up his courage. Then he went back to June’s room.

By the end of the Mint run, everyone attached to the show knew the affair was under way. Because he had witnessed Cash’s flings with other singers on the road, Marshall Grant wasn’t too surprised until Cash started talking about how this time was different.

“I’m the last person in the world to get onstage and try to be a jokester, never was my thing,” Cash wrote in one of his autobiographies. “She’s an outgoing, exuberant personality and I’m very reserved when I’m around people I don’t know.... I can walk into a room with 12 people and I’m more nervous than I would be in front of an auditorium filled with 10,000 people. She’s not. If I’ve got to meet a lot of people backstage and she’s there, I’ll grab her and say, ‘You’ll go with me, speak to them.’ She starts conversations with them and I can never think of anything to say.”

Over the next few months he began to think of June as his new Billie Jean, and he didn’t want to lose her, too. Because Billie Jean had been frightened off, in part, by his drug use, Cash tried to keep that side of him from June, but he was fooling only himself. If she didn’t know about Cash’s drug dependence, she would have been the only one in the country music industry who didn’t.

June felt equally strongly about Cash. With Cash, she could picture having the life she wanted. But they both had tempers and strong wills, and she knew the relationship could be more stormy than storybook.

Rather than return home after the Mint shows, Cash flew to Nashville for some recording sessions and to be with June. After spending June 6 working on a Christmas album, he devoted the next evening to an ambitious idea that grew out of the weeks he had spent planning his Carnegie Hall concert.

While working on “Waiting for a Train” and other Jimmie Rodgers songs, Cash began imagining an album that would feature traditional folk songs about railroads and working people, songs like “John Henry” and “Casey Jones.” The problem was that those songs were too familiar, even to schoolchildren. He needed to redesign them to give them fresh identity and impact. The easy thing would have been to repeat the narration-song, narration-song format of
Ride This Train;
but Cash wanted to move beyond that. To supply backing vocals and, no doubt, encouragement, he brought June, Maybelle, Anita, and Helen into the studio with him.

During the session, which stretched from seven p.m. to two thirty a.m., Cash created an expanded eight-and-a-half-minute version of “John Henry.” He turned the tale of a steel-driving man trying to beat a steam drill in laying railroad tracks into an epic expression of a workingman’s courage and will—and the belief that a machine can never take the place of a human heart.

Besides customizing the lyrics, Cash employed several special techniques, including narration, spoken dialogue, and sound effects (a hammer striking steel rails among them), as well as variations in tempo to accentuate the drama of the heroic struggle. Cash had been experimenting with the song live, and the strong audience response inspired him to keep expanding it until he felt it was ready for the studio. For her encouragement and input, he gave June half the songwriting credit on the track, which he titled “The Legend of John Henry’s Hammer.” He was pleased with how the music turned out, and he began to think of it as the centerpiece of another concept album, this one about the constant struggle of the workingman in America.

While in Nashville, June introduced Cash to her father. Cash had worried that Eck Carter would look with disfavor upon him because of the drug rumors; and, after all, he was a married man having an affair with Carter’s married daughter. But Eck welcomed the singer into the family home in Madison, a Nashville suburb, and said he should feel free to stay there whenever he was in town. At that first meeting they went off by themselves for much of the evening, caught up in their mutual passion for books and their shared interest in religion. It was especially stimulating to Cash, because books had been a solitary pursuit for him over the years; he often wanted to talk about the latest history or religious book he had read, but no one in his circle seemed the least interested.

Dixie Dean, who later married songwriter Tom T. Hall and edited the Nashville country music weekly
Music City News,
was living with Maybelle and Eck at the time, and she remembers Cash’s early visits to the house. Maybelle was still appearing on the Opry on weekends and doing an odd live date elsewhere, but it wasn’t enough to live on, so she worked at hospitals, watching over ill patients, earning about $10 to $12 a night. Eck was no longer working and was dividing his time between Madison and a second home in Florida.

“Maybelle and I were co-writing songs, and I was sitting at the kitchen table working on a lyric on a yellow pad when John came in,” Dixie says. “The first thing he did was take off his boots, the ankle-high kind they had back then, and he had these big holes in his socks and I thought it was so funny.

“Then he came over to the table and looked over my shoulder at my notepad. He asked if I wrote that song and I said I did, and he just looked at it and finally said, ‘You’re halfway smart.’ He was always joking like that. Later, when he was getting ready to leave, he walked back over and said, ‘I’d like to record that song if I may.’”

Dixie knew that he was trying to get together with June and that June was nervous because of the drugs. “He was in bad shape at the time,” Dixie remembers. “He was gaunt and very thin, and when he’d stay over in the spare room, we’d find pills all over the floor the next day. But we were pulling for him. He was warm and he treated me like a big sister. In those days there were always two camps—the people who were in John’s camp and the people in June’s camp. I was in both camps. I cared about them both.”