Johnny Cash: The Life (30 page)

Almost as remarkable as the music were the liner notes that Cash wrote for the album. As if tired of having everyone, including his own bandmates, question his motives and direction as an artist, he recounted the history of the album in considerable detail. The result countered the notion that he was stumbling blindly from one concept to another, or that he was following the pop charts for inspiration.

In the notes for the collection,
Johnny Cash Sings Ballads of the True West,
Cash explained that he got the idea from Law, who even gave him some books on Western lore. As he read more on the subject, he came across a magazine called
True West
and began reading it religiously. He even looked up Joe Small, the publisher of
True West,
as well as
Frontier Times
and
Old West,
and visited his office in Austin, Texas. He eventually dedicated the album to Small, among others.

After reading all he could find about the period, Cash turned to his friend Tex Ritter to put together a list of traditional songs—and Cash used several of them, including “I Ride an Old Paint,” “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie,” and “Streets of Laredo.” Another key song was “Mister Garfield,” an old folk song he learned from Ramblin’ Jack Elliott about the shock of an earlier presidential assassination. But Cash wrote a few himself, most notably “Mean as Hell,” a vivid portrait of the spirit and challenges facing the outsiders Cash so identified with in the Old West. In the song, the Devil, after being confined in God’s hell for thousands of years, asks the Lord if he can find a hell of his own, and God points him to the desert wasteland of the Rio Grande in the American Southwest.

Cash’s liner notes also chronicle what amounted, collectively, to weeks he spent alone on personal journeys in the desert, trying to get as close as he could to the spirit of the Old West figures. He became so engrossed in the project that he put in countless more hours on the road and at home in California, going to antique and junk stores to search for items from the period.

“I followed trails in my Jeep and on foot, and I slept under the mesquite bushes and in gullies,” he wrote, possibly taking poetic license in places, but weaving a mostly convincing narrative. “I heard the timber wolves, looked for golden nuggets in old creek beds, sat for hours beneath a manzanita bush in an ancient Indian burial ground, breathed the West wind and heard the tales it tells only to those who listen.”

Grant and others assumed that Cash was wandering around aimlessly those many days and nights when he was nowhere to be found, and indeed he was on the night of May 11, when he was arrested for public drunkenness at five a.m. after a concert in Starkville, Mississippi, and spent three hours in jail before being released. But Cash himself characterized much of his “missing” time as a lonely but obsessive quest for his next song.

While Cash was following his own musical path, Hollywood kept after him to do songs for movies. Just after the Starkville arrest, he recorded a song he wrote on spec for the latest James Bond film,
Thunderball,
but the producers chose Tom Jones’s version of a song written by John Barry and Don Black—and it’s easy to see why. Cash’s “Thunderball” has one of the clumsiest sets of lyrics he ever wrote, and the musical arrangement—which leaned toward a sort of rambling, Old West “Ghost Riders in the Sky” feel—lacked the contemporary edge needed for a Bond thriller. A month later Cash applied the same “Ghost Rider” undercurrents to the title track of a John Wayne western,
The Sons of Katie Elder,
and it worked better. The song was used over the film’s opening credits.

Looking ahead, Cash decided to forget about his long-standing goal of recording an album of prison songs in favor of doing a live album taped at a prison. This is where he belonged, he told Law, not Carnegie Hall. After the embarrassing foul-up in New York and all the times Cash hadn’t shown up for recording sessions, Law was wary. But once again, he went along with his star. Cash and Holiff decided on the Kansas State Reformatory because they’d already set up a date there for July 6. It would be, Law believed, the first time a big-name singer had ever cut an album inside a prison.

Bob Dylan once said that ideas for songs were coming to him so fast in the 1960s, he didn’t want to go to sleep because he was afraid he might miss them. Cash was moving at the same speed. Some of those around him—especially Grant—continued to shake their heads at many of Cash’s ideas. Others were crossing their fingers as Cash’s private life continued to spiral out of control.

“The farther we got into the mid-1960s, the more worried we were,” Johnny Western says. “There were times we’d find him when we thought he was dead, like the morning in Waterloo [Iowa] in 1965. It was a week before the
True West
sessions and it was colder than hell. John had the window wide open in the hotel and he was passed out on top of the covers with just his boxers on…cold as ice. Marshall called the doctor, who gave him some shots and got him under some warm blankets. And you know what? He gets up and does the show that night. It was touch and go like that for years.”

Those on the road with Cash weren’t the only ones who felt at times like they were on constant alert. In California, Vivian was in such bad shape—from worry and depression, lack of sleep, and little interest in food—that her oldest daughter, Rosanne, feared the worst. She says, “It got so bad that I remember coming home from school every day, wondering if my mother was going to be alive.”

ONE OF ROSANNE AND KATHY CASH’S
most vivid childhood memories was watching their mother puffing anxiously on a cigarette as she stared through the living room window of their Casitas Springs house on those rare nights in the mid-1960s when she thought her husband might actually be coming home. Vivian imagined him in the arms of June Carter, or dead somewhere, and she prayed to see the headlights in the driveway that would prove her wrong. On most nights, Vivian gave up around one a.m. and tried to grab a few hours’ sleep before getting the girls ready for class at St. Catherine-by-the-Sea elementary school.

Though Cash was showing up less and less often, she held out hope that he would be home one night in mid-June 1965 after Saul Holiff phoned from the airport in Los Angeles to say that Johnny was on the way. Vivian took her familiar place at the window and let the girls stay up late to greet their father, whom they hadn’t seen in months. By two a.m., she knew she was going to be alone with the children again. As she headed for the bedroom, she figured that Johnny was at Reverend Gressett’s ranch, where no one would yell at him for taking pills. The next day she was too embarrassed to call Gressett or anyone else to ask about her husband’s whereabouts, so she just waited again.

It was nearly a week of day-and-night vigils for Vivian before Cash’s camper—which he named “Jesse” after the outlaw Jesse James—headed up the driveway. Despite all the pain he had caused her, she wanted to run to him just like the day he arrived home from Germany at the airport in Memphis eleven years earlier. As he approached the front door, her nostalgia gave way to resentment. Why was he doing this to her? Why was he abandoning his family? Cash, feeling guilty and defensive, sensed her fury, and an argument broke out immediately. Finally, he shouted that he wanted a divorce. He had broached the subject before, but only fleetingly, never so angrily, and it was always quickly dropped. This time he tried to force the issue.

Johnny Western says Cash told him that he offered Vivian a half-million-dollar settlement if she’d give him the divorce, though his finances remained in such bad shape, he must have been kidding himself if he thought he could put that much money together. Most of the new Columbia contract income was going to pay off old loans. Vivian shouted back, refusing even to consider a divorce, and he stormed off to his sanctuary, an office at one end of the house.

Rosanne thinks her mother would have given up on the marriage earlier except for her Catholicism. “Her father was such a devout Catholic that a divorce would have been one of the worst possible things for his daughter, and I know my mother felt the weight of that.”

As her sister Kathy recalls, “Dad would try so hard to stay positive, to make light of things, to always have a great sense of humor, but he would get into these moods where he just seemed to shut down and didn’t want to talk or really do much of anything except spend time by himself in his office.

“The office became a symbol for us when we were little. There was a time when we were always welcome in the office. He might be working on a song or reading one of his magazines about the Old West, but the door was open and he’d stop everything and we’d have a good time. After a while, however, the door was shut. You’d have to knock and sometimes he’d go, ‘
WHAT
?’ and you’d think ‘Why does he have to talk like that?’ This wasn’t always because of drugs; he was like that up until the day he died, but it was worse—more highs and lows—when he was using.”

Kathy feels that her mother was easier to read.

“My mom was an incredible person,” she says. “They were fire and water. She was very open and very honest. If she didn’t like something, you knew it in a heartbeat. She was the disciplinarian in our house. I think that’s one thing that appealed to him about her—that and her high religious morals. He got a lot of his strength from Mom, especially in the early days. I think he was so lonely and felt so out of his element during the Air Force. He had never been out of Arkansas, and she was his attachment to the States. She gave him something to hold onto during those hours he was stuck in that room, trying to listen to that Morse code.

“He told me the reason he wrote ‘Folsom Prison’ was it captured the loneliness he felt in that room night after night. He told me, ‘I felt terrified sometimes because I knew the door was locked for security reasons and I couldn’t get out. It was like being in prison.’ My mother was his light at the end of the tunnel. That’s what was so hard on him later, when he found out they had different goals—that she wasn’t happy just sitting at home without him.”

It wasn’t just the increasing conflict that made Kathy realize things had changed. After that night in the parking lot at the Hollywood Bowl, she gradually noticed that her dad not only wasn’t coming home but also wasn’t carrying an armful of presents every time he did make it. “I thought, ‘How could he forget our presents?’ because it used to be a big deal when he would have a bag and there would be presents for everybody and we’d sit on the floor and he would always give Mom hers first and then he’d give us our presents. So we got to where we would go, ‘Where’s our presents, Daddy?’ He’d say, ‘I didn’t have time…I had to do this-or-that.’ He had never said that before. He’d even tell us about the times he almost missed his flight because he was in the gift shop looking for something extra for us.”

Rosanne remembers the period as frightening and heartbreaking.

“It just got to where it was like somebody else was coming home, not my daddy,” she says. “The drugs were at work. He’d stay up all night. He and my mom would fight. It was so sad. He would always be having accidents. He turned the tractor over one day and almost killed himself, and we had to call the fire department after he set fire to the hillside. One time he took me on his lap and put his arms around me and said, ‘I’m glad to be alive,’ because the tractor could have rolled over on him. He held me so tightly. I felt so close to him. I wished it could always be like that. But then he’d be gone again.”

The girls finally got to see their dad before they left for school the next morning, but he was gone by the time they returned home. As he had so often, he needed to escape. He drove his camper to the nearby home of his nephew Damon Fielder.

Damon slid in beside Johnny in the camper on the morning of June 27, and the pair started out on the half-hour drive to the Sespe Creek entrance of the Los Padres National Forest watershed. The Los Padres forest is one of the many natural wonders of California and one reason why Cash was drawn to Casitas Springs. Covering nearly 1.8 million acres in all, it stretched from the breathtaking Big Sur coastline south of Monterey to lakes and mountain ranges to the south, and was home to many protected species, including the American condor.

Getting into the passenger seat was Damon’s first regret of the day. Cash was a terrible driver under the best of circumstances—and it was clear from his dazed look that he had already been into the pills. The resulting series of starts and stops made the camper feel like something from a slapstick comedy.

As Damon crashed against the door time and again while the camper careened along the rugged dirt road, his patience was also taking a beating. Watching Cash take a swig of whiskey and down a few more pills on the ride, Damon couldn’t hold his tongue any longer.

“Why do you take those things?”

“I like to control my moods and they help me do that,” Cash replied unapologetically.

“Well, you’re an idiot.”

Cash just scooped up more pills from an old fruit jar on the floor as the camper bounced along a rugged dirt road.

Finally, Damon reached over and turned off the ignition, bringing the camper to a halt. Before Cash could react, Damon pulled out the key, walked around to the driver’s side of the vehicle, and demanded that Cash let him drive. Surprisingly, Cash obliged—and the camper resumed its journey, much more smoothly this time.

Damon was so upset, though, he didn’t even want to sit near Cash as he stopped the camper near a promising fishing spot at the end of one canyon. “I’m going to fish over there. I don’t want anything to do with you,” he told Cash, who replied, “That’s fine. I don’t want to be by you, either.” Damon headed to a secluded stretch of water, cast his line, and closed his eyes, trying to brush away his anger.

His tranquility was broken around four thirty p.m. by a strong smell in the usually pure Los Padres air. It was smoke, and it was coming from the direction of the camper. He rushed back to find Cash on his knees in front of the truck, fanning a fast-spreading blaze. There was a spent package of matches on the ground by his side. Damon figured his uncle had started the fire to keep warm and in his drugged state had let it get out of control.

As flames swept through the nearby brush, he realized they needed to get out fast. He called for Cash to come along, but the belligerent singer said he wasn’t going anywhere. Damon tried to grab his uncle, but Cash resisted, and he was too strong to budge. In a panic, as the fire surrounded them, Damon grabbed a thick tree branch about three feet long and swung at Cash’s head as hard as he could. The blow brought Cash to his knees, but it didn’t knock him out as Damon had hoped. Cash got up and stumbled over to the shallow creek, where he sat down, thinking he’d be safe.

Fearing the worst, Damon raced for help, warning other campers along the trail and eventually hooking up with a fire helicopter crew who flew him to the fire site to rescue Cash. Damon’s heart was racing until the helicopter landed and he saw his uncle was still alive in the creek. This time he had no trouble persuading Cash to vacate the area. The pills and whiskey had begun to wear off, and the water was cold.

Watching Cash get into the helicopter, Damon knew he’d helped save his uncle’s life. He was crushed a few days later, however, to hear that Cash—whose near-death experience did nothing to curb his pill intake—told Carrie that Damon had left him in the forest to die.

Cash was equally disingenuous when asked by forestry officials, investigating the cause of the 508-acre burn, how the fire got started. He blamed it on sparks from a defective exhaust system on his camper. When a judge later questioned Cash about the fire, he was equally defiant: “I didn’t do it, my truck did and it’s dead, so you can’t question it.” Asked during a deposition about the loss of forty-nine of the region’s fifty-three condors in the blaze, he certainly didn’t make any friends when he snapped, “I don’t care about your damn yellow buzzards.”

Cash was in such bad shape after the fire that Law had to cancel plans for the live recording on July 6 at the prison in Kansas, causing the mild-mannered producer to vow not even to think of doing any more live album projects with Cash.

Touring resumed in mid-July and continued steadily into the fall, breaking only for a couple of recording sessions, until a fateful Texas swing that ended in Dallas the first week in October. Things had improved enough that Grant, who normally handled tour receipts, wasn’t on guard when Cash volunteered to take the receipts with him to California and deposit them in the group’s joint business bank account.

Grant dropped Cash off at the airport and then continued on to Memphis in the mobile home the group used on the road. When he got home that afternoon, he called Vivian to see if everything was okay, and she all but laughed. She hadn’t even heard from her husband. Grant’s heart sank.

The origins of amphetamines can be traced back to the late 1880s, but their effects weren’t widely known until a 1935 study showed that the drug gave people incredible energy and enhanced their mood—qualities that led to its being widely distributed to soldiers during World War II to combat fatigue. In 1965 the Federal Drug Administration tightened prescription requirements, making it harder for heavy users to get the virtually unlimited amounts they were accustomed to. This made it increasingly difficult for Cash to satisfy his craving for pills, especially when he was on the road.

After the Dallas show, he flew to El Paso, one of his favorite supply points, where he asked a cab driver to take him to Juárez and get him some pills. The driver assured him that it would be no problem, so Cash waited—feeling like an outlaw, he said—as the driver went into a Juárez bar to buy the drugs. “I slid down a little lower in the backseat each time someone looked my way,” he wrote in
Man in Black
. “I had never done it this way before.”

Back at his hotel, Cash popped a few pills and killed time before the evening flight to Los Angeles by searching for antique guns in some downtown pawnshops. He was looking at a Colt .44 Army pistol, which had long been one of his favorites, when he was approached by a man he immediately suspected was a plainclothes policeman. Cash assumed he was curious about the gun in his hand.

“I collect antique pistols,” Cash volunteered, holding the weapon out to the man.

“It’s a nice one,” the man replied, in what Cash described as a friendly manner.

After some more small talk, the man asked Cash what time his plane was leaving, and Cash told him nine p.m.

On the way back to the hotel, he started worrying about the flight, worrying that the policeman might intercept him. But why, he asked himself? The gun was an antique, which meant it was legal. And he had hidden all his pills in two socks, one of which he’d put inside his guitar and one in the lining of his suitcase.

By the time Cash got to his seat on the plane, he figured he was home free, that he was just feeling a bit paranoid.

Then he saw two men walking down the aisle toward him. One was the man from the pawnshop.

The man asked Cash if he had a gun, and when he nodded that he did, he was ordered off the plane. In an empty room in the terminal, the men went through both his luggage and his guitar case. They found the pills, but they still didn’t seem satisfied. They went through the suitcase and the guitar again.

Finally, one asked, “Where’s the heroin?”