Johnny Cash: The Life (37 page)

Any remaining hopes that the “month-long” Winston treatment had cured Cash’s drug use were shattered a week later in Baltimore.

Holiff had been trying to get CBC television in Canada to do a special for four years, and he found a sympathetic ear in Stan Jacobson, a producer at the network. It wasn’t until early 1968, however, that Jacobson could find an opening in the schedule for a one-hour music special featuring Cash and members of his troupe. To discuss the show with Cash, Jacobson flew to Baltimore, and he was worried by what he found.

“[Cash] was playing this small theater, maybe two thousand people tops, and his performance was all over the place, really ragged,” Jacobson says. “After the show, I rode the bus with him and June to the Howard Johnson, and he was slapping his face, time after time, as if there were bugs there. I was a huge fan, but I wondered what I was getting myself into. I ran into more problems because we wanted the O’Keefe Centre to sponsor the show, and a representative of the Centre said no way because Cash and the band painted all the dressing room mirrors black when they played there [before]. But we eventually made a deal, and the show went great. It finished number one in the ratings, which was remarkable because the Stanley Cup playoffs were the same week and nothing ever tops the Stanley Cup ratings.” Holiff then set his sights on U.S. television, using the CBC tape as part of his sales pitch.

Three days later, Cash asked June to marry him.

John and June were onstage at the Gardens hockey arena in Holiff’s hometown of London, Ontario, when Cash popped the question. June acted all flustered—and maybe she was caught off guard by the timing, but the two had been talking for weeks about getting married, even discussing specific dates. Excited to be part of such a special moment, the crowd showered the couple with affection when June accepted his proposal.

One person who wasn’t happy was Marshall Grant.

“When she walked off the stage that night, I said, ‘June, you’ve made a hell of a mistake. What about all the times you told me he’d have to get straight before you’d marry him? That was the only thing we had to get him off [drugs]…the promise that you’d marry him. Now what are we going to do?’ Because we both knew he was still on the pills.”

Others thought Marshall was being naive. The consensus among Cash’s musical family was that the only reason she hadn’t already married him was that he was still married to Vivian. They shared Vivian’s view that all June wanted was to be Mrs. Johnny Cash, period.

Talking about that night years later, Grant suspected that Cash’s proposal was simply a bit of showbiz flash. Country music entertainers had a history of getting married onstage (Hank Williams and Billie Jean Horton repeated their vows twice at the New Orleans Municipal Auditorium in front of five thousand paying fans at each show). But it’s also possible that Cash, fresh from the Folsom triumph and being honored at “Johnny Cash Day” celebrations in both Memphis and Dyess, was grateful for the way his life had rebounded from just months before, and he wanted to share the marriage news with his fans.

The couple returned to Nashville and attended the Grammy Awards dinner on February 29, where “Jackson” was named best country recording by a group or duo. Holding the statuette that night, June told a reporter, “What a nice wedding gift this is!”

With their obligations out of the way, John and June drove the following day to nearby Franklin, Kentucky, where they were married in the First Methodist Church in front of a few dozen family members and friends. It was an unusually modest event, hastily planned and without any fanfare. Merle Kilgore was best man and Micki Brooks, a longtime friend of June’s, was matron of honor. The couple returned to Cash’s house on Old Hickory Lake after the ceremony and hosted a reception for around 150 people. Nine days later they were on tour again.

Back in Nashville, Bob Johnston got a scare when he returned to the studio and listened to the Folsom tapes.

“I knew John had done a great show, but you never really know what you have on tape until you listen to it, and the one thing that bothered me was the high ceilings in the cafeteria,” Johnston recalls. “That could cause all sorts of problems—and sure enough there was this rumble in the tape that could have ruined the record if we didn’t get rid of it. We spent three weeks in the studio trying all sorts of things to get rid of that sound.

“Finally, I went into the studio with my engineer on a Saturday so we could go over every step to see if we could figure out what was causing the rumble. Just as we sat down, I saw him turn a knob on the speaker and I asked what he was doing. He said, ‘Nothing, man, just putting a little Nashville on it.’ Well, that was the problem. He was putting an echo on it. I walked over and turned it off and there went the rumble. I hadn’t noticed what he was doing until that day. With that fixed, I mixed the entire album that night.”

Johnston captured the spirit of the concert brilliantly, not only picking the final song list but also supplementing the music with actual sounds from the prison, including loudspeaker announcements to the convicts. Cash couldn’t have been happier.

One reason why New York was optimistic about the album’s pop potential was that the
Los Angeles Times
had devoted an entire page in its Sunday entertainment section to the Folsom concert—largely unprecedented attention from a mainstream newspaper for a Nashville project. The execs were further encouraged when other publications endorsed the album. In
Cosmopolitan,
noted jazz critic Nat Hentoff defined Cash’s new place in the music spectrum: “He started as a country-and-western storyteller, but he’s gone on to make so strong an impact on the folk and pop fields that now there’s no hemming Johnny Cash into any one category.”

Time
magazine, the biggest national journalistic platform of all in the 1960s, added its own rave, calling the collection one of “the most original and compelling pop albums of the year.”

Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison
was also embraced strongly by the underground rock radio and press, especially a new national rock journal named
Rolling Stone.
Aware of the biweekly magazine’s growing cultural impact on the careers of Dylan, Janis Joplin, and other Columbia rock acts, Clive Davis took out a flashy ad for the Folsom Prison album. More significantly,
Rolling Stone
co-founder Jann Wenner saluted Cash in a passionate and thoughtful essay praising the singer’s profound artistry and his role in the rapidly growing merger of country and rock. At the same time, Tom Donahue, a San Francisco FM disc jockey who helped pioneer underground rock radio in America, started playing the album, which led scores of other FM stations to follow suit.

In building an audience for the live album, Cash benefited greatly from his ties to the rock ’n’ roll legacy of Sun Records. If any other Nashville country artist, including someone as gifted as Marty Robbins, had made
Folsom,
it wouldn’t have been embraced by rock tastemakers in the same way; Cash was the only country star (apart from other members of the Sun stable) viewed by rock critics and DJs as one of them. These writers and commentators had grown up adoring Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis—and Johnny Cash.
Folsom Prison
reintroduced him. Wenner’s
Rolling Stone
essay outlined the case.

“Cash, more than any other contemporary [country] performer, is meaningful in a rock and roll context,” he wrote, placing Cash in a time line that stretched from Presley (and Sun Records) to Dylan. Underscoring that rock foundation, Wenner pointed out that Cash’s backup group included Carl Perkins, “the man who wrote ‘Blue Suede Shoes.’”

He stressed the link between Dylan and Cash: “They are both master singers, master story-tellers and master bluesmen. They share the same tradition, they are good friends and the work of each can tell you about the work of the other.”

In both its influence and its insight,
Rolling Stone
was proclaiming Cash an artist for the times—someone equally relevant to rock, pop, and country audiences. The essay provided an enormous sales boost for Cash, because the young rock audience was beginning to control the national sales charts. Wenner’s words also helped increase respect for country music among the cultural elite, which in turn helped open the eyes and ears of people at network radio and television.

Cash’s reputation as a maverick who’d done jail time, and the El Paso drug bust, too, strengthened his link to rock ’n’ roll; it was his music as well as his image that paved the way for the country-rock coalition that Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings would tap into with their outlaw movement in the late 1970s.

Folsom Prison
would have been a major country seller regardless, but it took the rock ’n’ roll connection to turn it into a cultural and commercial breakthrough. The single, “Folsom Prison Blues,” eventually spent eighteen weeks on the country charts, including four at number one. The album stayed on the pop charts for 122 weeks. The album eventually sold more than 3 million copies in the United States alone.

On the Folsom stage, Cash combined the raw charisma and creative vitality of his Sun days with the artistic discipline and ambition of the Columbia years in an explosive package. Among those who stepped forward to congratulate him was his old mentor Sam Phillips. “From our first record together, I knew he was a talent and he could be a star,” Phillips said years later. “But he went even further than I imagined. With that album, he became a great talent and a superstar. I told him how proud I was of him because I know what he went through to get there.”

After years of wariness caused by the singer’s many no-shows, concert promoters were again scrambling to book Johnny Cash. The success of
Folsom
built upon that frenzy. Sensing this was Cash’s moment, Holiff booked as many dates as possible, from the Midwest in March and April to Britain in May. Amid this euphoria, Cash told Johnston he wanted to do another gospel album, but not like before. He wanted to produce the most ambitious gospel album ever in country music—and record it live in Israel.

“He said it was something he’d always wanted to do, like the prison album, but that he couldn’t talk anyone into it,” Johnston says. Columbia hadn’t trusted Cash enough after Carnegie Hall to spend money on a live album in the United States, much less Israel. But that was before
Folsom.

According to the producer, Cash asked him to put aside a couple of weeks and go with him and June to Israel, where they would walk the streets together to get inspiration for the live album.

But Johnston had a counter-proposal. He remembers telling Cash, “‘That’s a great idea, but you don’t need me. You and June go. Walk around and write songs. I’ll give you a camera and a tape recorder and you just put down what you see and feel. Then bring it back here and we’ll do the album.’ He was quiet for a second, then he winked at me and I knew we were all right, because that’s what he always did when he liked something. He winked.

“The label had reservations when I told them about it, but they had reservations about everything. Hell, they told me to take the guitars off Dylan’s album. I didn’t care what the hell the label thought. If Johnny Cash wanted to stand under an elm tree and sing ‘Jingle Bells,’ I would have been all for it. You’ve got to believe in your artists.”

John and June headed back to Israel at the end of the British tour, carrying a tape recorder to capture their thoughts as they visited the historic sites they knew from the Bible. They were deeply moved, and the passion showed in the narrations Cash taped on the trip.

After a few weeks touring in the States, John returned home and spent most of July going over plans for the album, which he titled
Holy Land
. Unlike with previous theme albums, he wasn’t looking for traditional material. He wanted everything in this album to be his personal statement.

One key exception was “Daddy Sang Bass,” a song Carl Perkins wrote backstage one night. He had been humming the melody to “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” the gospel standard popularized by the Carter Family, when he started reflecting on the family sing-alongs of his childhood days. He played the opening verse for Cash, who thought it would be perfect for the album.

When Cash got together again with Johnston in mid-July, he outlined his grand plans for the album. He was working off the same narration-plus-song blueprint he used on
Ride This Train,
but he wanted to mix several of the narrations that he taped in Israel with studio recordings of new songs. It was a daunting task, but the always upbeat Johnston said, “Well, let’s get started.”

The two men went into the studio on July 19 and recorded the prologue for the album. Cash recited the words in a reverential tone that couldn’t have been more different from the raucous, occasionally four-letter-word spirit of
Folsom.
If Cash understood the soul of a convict, he also knew the faith of a believer.

Before bringing in the musicians, Cash went to Los Angeles to tape a guest appearance on
The Summer Brothers Smothers Show,
hosted by Glen Campbell, a sign that TV execs were noticing the growing popularity of country music. Back in the studio July 29 to 31, he recorded most of the songs for the album.

“John was very absorbed with that album,” the Statlers’ Don Reid says. “I think he felt he was doing something he would be remembered for. Like most sessions, he was still arranging as we were recording. Whatever crossed his mind, he would just stop and say, ‘You guys come in on the second line and then we’ll all hit it big on the last chorus’ or some such instruction. He arranged by feel and always on the spot.”

When Johnston finished piecing the
Holy Land
album together, Cash felt he had another major work, and he was ecstatic, but Johnston knew it wasn’t what Columbia wanted to follow
Folsom.
Sure enough, the promotion department in New York looked at
Holy Land
as just another concept album that the public was bound to ignore. There was some thought about not even bothering to release a single. The fans seemed to like the rough-edged Cash image. Why confuse everybody with this choirboy stuff?