Johnny Cash: The Life (29 page)

After the runaway success of “Ring of Fire,” Cash believed that he’d be on the charts with every new release. “The Matador” and “Understand Your Man” were solid hits, so he couldn’t believe the feedback from Columbia promotion men in mid-June 1964: DJs weren’t playing “The Ballad of Ira Hayes.”
Billboard
expected so little of the record that the magazine didn’t write about it all—the first time that had happened to Cash.

He was angry, not just at the DJs but at his record company. Likely egged on by Holiff, he didn’t feel that the company was promoting the record hard enough. He still believed that if Columbia had done more for “Busted,” he might have had the Top 10 hit in 1963 rather than Ray Charles, whose highly orchestrated version came out a few months later. He didn’t want to miss out again with “Ira Hayes.”

When Holiff pressed Columbia, the radio promotion staff told him the song was too long; for programming reasons, DJs preferred records that ran two to three minutes, and “Ira Hayes” ran just over four. But Cash didn’t accept that excuse; Marty Robbins’s “El Paso” ran more than four and a half minutes, and DJs jumped all over it.

Cash’s single did show up on the
Billboard
country chart—which was based on sales and radio airplay—on July 11, but at an unspectacular number forty-two. By contrast, “The Matador” and “Understand Your Man” had entered the same chart at number twenty and number thirty, respectively. “Hayes” climbed to number eighteen two weeks later before falling to number twenty. To reverse the slide, more radio airplay was deemed essential.

Hugh Cherry, a veteran country DJ with a maverick spirit to match Cash’s, shared Cash’s fury. Cherry, who wrote the liner notes for the
Bitter Tears
album, believed that the Columbia promotion staff was, in essence, missing in action. “They were gutless,” he said. “They found a lot of resentment from country DJs over the subject matter; they feared their conservative listeners would tune out, so they buried the record, and Columbia just rolled over. They could have pressured them in all sorts of ways, but ultimately they decided against it because they didn’t want to alienate the program directors.”

While Holiff vowed to keep working on the label, Cash struck out on his own by contacting Johnny Western, who, with partner Pat Shields, had set up a radio promotion company called Great Western Associates in Los Angeles.

“Johnny wanted us to do what the record company should have done—going back to the disc jockeys and fighting for the airplay,” Western says. “We sent another copy of the single to every DJ we had in our address file, regardless if it was a big station or a little station. Johnny felt so strongly about the song he came over to the office and signed dozens and dozens of personal notes to disc jockeys, saying things like ‘I really need your help on this one, pal,’ and ‘Give it a shot. Love, Johnny.’”

Included in every packet was a four-page brochure with the photo of the flag being raised on Iwo Jima and lines from the songs on the front and the slogan “
NOBODY BUT NOBODY MORE ORIGINAL THAN JOHNNY CASH
” on the back. Inside, the brochure contained a transcript of an editorial that ran on country radio station KHAT in Phoenix, praising Cash for doing a “magnificent job in recreating” the tragic story of Ira Hayes: “We wonder if, in years to come, people from all over this great nation of ours, when they visit Washington D.C. and pause before the statue of the Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima, won’t softly start humming ‘The Ballad of Ira Hayes.’”

The mailings were tied to a full-page ad Cash took out in the August 22 issue of
Billboard
magazine attacking radio’s resistance to the record. During what he admitted was a substance-induced rage, he drafted an open letter to all the disc jockeys who weren’t playing the record, especially those at pop stations.

Its key line: “Where are your guts?”

In the lengthy, rambling diatribe, he criticized the DJs for shying away from the record’s controversial theme. He appealed to their conscience by including American Indian rights among other headline-making social issues: “‘Ballad of Ira Hayes’ is strong medicine. So is Rochester—Harlem, Birmingham, Vietnam.”

He also argued that pop DJs were avoiding the record because of his country roots. Addressing this issue, he pointed to his appearance at the Newport Folk Festival, where “Ira Hayes” had stolen his portion of the show: “And we all know that the audience (of near 20,000) were not ‘country’ or hillbillies. They were an intelligent cross-section of American youth—and middle age.”

In closing, he added, “I’ve blown my horn now, just this once, then no more. Since I’ve said these things now, I find myself not caring if the record is programmed or not. I won’t ask you to cram it down their throats. But as an American who is almost a half-breed Cherokee-Mohawk (and who knows what else?)—I had to fight back when I realized that so many stations are afraid of ‘Ira Hayes.’

“Just one question:
WHY
?”

Hugh Cherry urged Cash to place the ad in
Billboard,
even though the label had warned him about a backlash. “What backlash?” Cherry asked years later. “If they were offended, what could they do—stop playing the record? They weren’t playing it anyway; that was the whole point of the ad.”

Because the ad appeared in the country section of
Billboard,
many in Nashville thought it was only aimed at them rather than also at pop radio. People in the industry, especially in broadcasting, as Cherry told it, “were going, ‘Fuck him!’ and ‘Who does he think he is?’” There was even talk about boycotting his records. But the experience taught both Cash and Nashville something.

It showed broadcasters that “they couldn’t stop playing his records because the listeners wanted to hear them,” Cherry said. “The people who listened to the radio and bought records didn’t know anything about some ad in
Billboard.
It showed Johnny Cash was more important than any individual disc jockey.”

Despite the odds, the “Ira Hayes” campaign—much to the surprise of Columbia executives—worked. By mid-September, the single was number three on the country charts. Cash was so thrilled, he took the Apache tear stone from around his neck and gave it to Western in appreciation. Now he hoped the “Ira Hayes” momentum would carry over to the
Bitter Tears
album, but he soon learned there were still some bruised feelings in Nashville.

Ignoring the success of “Ira Hayes” on its own charts,
Billboard
gave
Bitter Tears
a lukewarm mention. Although most of the publication’s reviews of albums went on for several sentences, complete with generous praise, the text of the
Bitter Tears
review was a one-sentence kiss-off: “Cash, in narrative and song, documents the tragic history of the American Indian.”

To add to the insult, Cash’s own label ran a full-page ad in the same issue, but it didn’t mention
Bitter Tears.
The ad saluted Cash’s new single, a duet with June on Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me, Babe.” Despite the success of “Ira Hayes,” Columbia didn’t see much commercial potential in
Bitter Tears
—or perhaps, as Cherry suggested, the label still feared arousing any underlying hostility among country DJs over the “Hayes”
Billboard
ad controversy.

Columbia preferred to concentrate on “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” a record that had more obvious pop and country potential—and one that helped raise the profile of two of its artists. The single would be a smash on country and pop charts, but
Bitter Tears
—even with minimal marketing—also found an audience. It climbed to number forty-seven on the pop charts and all the way to number three on the country charts.

This experience strengthened Cash’s determination. His faith in “Ira Hayes” and
Bitter Tears
separated him even further from the relatively timid creative stances of his fellow country stars. Increasingly, he was building a national following that believed in him as a musician and an artist.

As 1964 came to an end, Cash had ties to the rock world (through Sun Records), the folk world, the country world, and even the pop world. At thirty-two, Cash was on his way to becoming a musical institution—and he could take pride in the fact that he had done it largely on his own terms. He was not the creation of a producer, a record company, or a manager. For better or worse, he had called the shots.

It was an enormously important period for him—and he wasn’t through.

His creative instincts heightened, Cash looked forward to doing an album of modern and traditional folk songs, largely because he wanted to record more Dylan. After spending most of November on the road, he went into the studio for a series of sessions in mid-December in Nashville. In the end, he recorded only two more Dylan songs—a second attempt at “Mama, You’ve Been on My Mind” and his longtime favorite, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” To add some of Dylan’s harmonica flavor, he brought in Charlie McCoy, who would later play on Dylan’s Nashville recordings.

The news that Cash was following up “It Ain’t Me, Babe” by recording more Dylan songs caused grumbling around Nashville that Cash was selling out—jumping on the Dylan folk music bandwagon as a way to make greater inroads into the more lucrative pop world. His detractors failed to recognize the creative similarities between Cash and Dylan.

Dylan has frequently said he didn’t set out to change songwriting or society, but he was clearly filled with the high purpose of living up to the ideals he saw expressed in Woody Guthrie’s work. “I always admired true artists who were dedicated, so I learned from them,” Dylan says. “Popular culture usually comes to an end very quickly. It gets thrown in the grave. I wanted to do something that stood alongside Rembrandt’s paintings.”

Like Cash, Dylan found his musical heroes in the past—not just the legendary names like Guthrie, Jimmie Rodgers, the Carter Family, and Robert Johnson, but scores of Irish, Scottish, and English balladeers. Cash and Dylan delighted in talking about and playing those traditional ballads.

In advising young songwriters how to develop their craft, Dylan stresses the roots of today’s music. “It’s only natural to pattern yourself after someone,” he says. “If I wanted to be a painter, I might think about trying to be like Van Gogh, or if I was an actor, act like Laurence Olivier.

“But you can’t just copy somebody. If you like somebody’s work, the important thing is to be exposed to everything that person has been exposed to. Anyone who wants to be a songwriter should listen to as much folk music as they can and study the form and structure of stuff that has been around 100 years. I go back to Stephen Foster.”

Beyond their mutual respect for tradition and purposeful themes, both men believed it was essential not to let anyone else set their agendas. They wanted to be free to move in any direction at any time. For all his love of country music, there were few artists in Nashville who inspired Cash at all. He did admire Marty Robbins for moving from teen hits to honky-tonk to Old West themes. But he was discouraged by the way most of his peers played it so safe.

For all the speculation that Cash was recording an entire album of Dylan songs (maybe even calling it, some joked,
Johnny Cash Sings Bob Dylan
), he used only the three Dylan compositions. When it was released, Nashville was surprised to find that the album—which he’d called
Orange Blossom Special
—wasn’t any more folk-based than some of his earlier efforts. However much he identified with the commentary and spirit of folk music, he was still, at heart, a country artist. Once again, those around Cash marveled at his ability to step away, even if only temporarily, from the instability of his personal life and rise to the occasion—not that they appreciated what struck many of them as unusual, if not downright weird, twists and turns in his musical direction. Grant measured Cash’s success almost exclusively by chart position. Though he rarely said it to Cash directly, Grant thought the drugs were responsible for many of Cash’s seemingly erratic artistic decisions.

As the two headed to their respective homes for Christmas, Grant asked, “Well, John, what you going to do next?” It was just a casual question, but Cash took it seriously. He sat with Grant and outlined in detail a long series of possibilities, including an album about the Old West, a gospel album recorded in Israel, and that album of prison songs that he had been thinking about for years. Grant just hoped there were some hits in there.

Columbia execs and Nashville DJs were relieved when they heard the
Orange Blossom Special
album; this was something they all could feel comfortable with. When the album was released early in 1965, the label took out a full-page ad in
Billboard.

The trade publication, too, embraced it: “Cash is in fine form here and he has been coupled with a great choice of material. There are train songs like ‘Orange Blossom Special,’ country songs like ‘The Long Black Veil,’ revival-type material such as ‘Amen’ and his hit ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe.’ Cash displays a sense of drama and wit.” By the end of March, both the single and the album were in the country Top 5. They also made the Top 50 on the pop charts.

As he had told Grant, Cash had already moved on. When
Orange Blossom Special
was beginning its chart rise, Cash was back in the studio in Nashville working on the album about the Old West. He had enough songs after two days for an entire LP, but he was on such a roll, he kept recording for five more days in March and one more in April, ending up with enough material for two albums.

Because Cash viewed the collection as a unified work, complete with a few linking narratives à la
Ride This Train,
he wanted to release the songs in a double album, which was a bit much even for the obliging Law. A double album? How could Law get his bosses at Columbia to agree to such a risky commercial move? It was hard enough to get people to buy a full album, much less shell out the added bucks for a double one. But Cash was so hot that everyone signed off on the project. It sounded crazy, but maybe Cash would pull off another surprise.