Johnny Cash: The Life (38 page)

Cash and Johnston resisted and pushed “Daddy Sang Bass” as a single. It was an ultra-catchy tune, and Johnston had captured its nostalgic sing-along spirit. Not wanting to alienate the man who was rapidly becoming its hottest artist, Columbia agreed. But the executives wanted to wait until December to take advantage of its Christmas season appeal.

The flip side of the single was “He Turned the Water into Wine,” a song Cash wrote for the album and was so well-crafted that it sounded like a gospel standard that had been handed down for generations. Cash felt it was one of the cornerstones of the album, but the tune would always have a bittersweet edge to it.

The July 31 session was the last time he’d ever be in the studio with Luther Perkins.

Luther’s second wife, Margie, had hoped her husband would go with her and their three-year-old adopted daughter, Kathy, to a friend’s house for a poker party the night of August 2, but Luther was ill. Margie phoned a couple of times to check on him, but stopped calling after he said he was going to have a cigarette and then try and get some sleep. Marshall Grant had often seen Luther fall asleep in a hotel bed or in the car with a lit cigarette in his hand, and he marveled at Luther’s luck at never having started a fire, though Grant often picked up the dropped cigarette butts and extinguished them just in case. That night, Luther’s luck finally gave out.

Margie returned to the house on Old Hickory Lake, not far from the Cash home, to find Luther passed out on the floor. The fire department rushed him to the hospital at Vanderbilt University, where doctors found that he had suffered third-degree burns to 50 percent of his body. Cash, too, sped to the hospital, but his friend never regained consciousness. Luther died two days later and was buried in the same Hendersonville cemetery where Cash had bought a series of plots for his own family.

Grant always looked back on the death as almost merciful. Doctors told him that if Luther had lived, they probably would have been forced to amputate both his hands. He would never have played the guitar again.

Perkins’s widow says Cash blamed himself. “Johnny told me, ‘Margie, I really believe I caused Luther’s death.’ He said he was the one who gave Luther pills years before because Luther used to get so tired traveling between shows,” she adds. “He never took as many pills as Johnny, but Johnny felt bad because he had gotten him into pills and would even go to Luther sometimes to get more for himself. He was worried that Luther took the pills the night he died.”

Cash had good reason to feel guilty. Luther had called Cash earlier the night of the fire, in an apparently drugged or drunken state, and asked him to come over and talk. But Cash didn’t pick up the warning signal. It was late, and he figured he could check in on him the next morning. Besides, he assumed that Margie was there to take care of him. In the days after Luther’s death, John and June insisted that Margie and her daughter stay with them until she could find a new place to live. Cash also contributed to the building of a $2 million burn center in Luther’s name at Vanderbilt.

Decades later, Dr. Nat Winston would recall Cash telling him that two of the events in his life that had had the greatest impact were the day his brother Jack was killed and Luther Perkins’s death. More than once, too, Cash said, “A part of me died with Luther.”

When Rosanne, Kathy, Cindy, and Tara returned to Hendersonville for their second summer visit, everything had changed. John and June were married, and the room the Cash girls shared the year before had been divided into separate spaces for Carlene and Rosie. Though the girls all got along well personally, the sleeping arrangements were the first in a series of slights that made the Cash kids think Carlene and Rosie were getting preferential treatment.

“We’d get here as teenagers,” Kathy Cash says, “and Rosie and Carlene would have a Porsche and an MG in the driveway. Then I’d go in their room and they’d have so many clothes and so much makeup that I was really jealous.”

In her 2007 memoir
I Walked the Line: My Life with Johnny Cash,
Vivian blamed June for the perceived slights, but she acknowledged they were really due to a difference of philosophy regarding parenting. Her girls “saw June’s two daughters living it up….Meanwhile back in California, Rosanne, Kathy, Cindy and Tara’s wardrobes consisted of their school uniforms and maybe two or three other outfits. No extras. No luxury items. I didn’t believe in spoiling them. So compared to June’s daughters, I know the girls felt second rate.”

Carlene and Rosie recognized that they were being treated royally.

“At our old home with Daddy Rip, when Mom was on the road, Rosie and I had chores,” Carlene says. “We mowed the lawn, did the dishes, dusted and vacuumed. When we moved in with Big John, which is what I called [Cash], those chores stopped. We had people cleaning up for us hand and foot. Mom said now that we had full-time staff and lawn workers, life would be different.”

But even when money was scarce for the Carters in the 1950s and early 1960s, June had made sure to put enough aside so she could show her daughters some of the high life that she craved. “Mom used to take us to New York religiously, at least twice a year all through our lives,” Carlene adds. “We would stay at the Sherry-Netherland, go out to eat at Delmonico’s, go for a ride in a buggy in Central Park, and see Broadway shows or the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall. It was just me and Mama and Rosie, usually for a long weekend.”

Back in Tennessee, Cash, for all his misadventures, tried to be a strict parent to June’s daughters. It was a big deal, Carlene remembers, when she asked permission to go on her first date.

“I had just turned fourteen and we wanted to see the rock band Steppenwolf in Nashville and Big John was in a tizzy about the whole thing. He thought he should set a curfew, but he didn’t know what time it should be. He finally asked me what time the curfew should be. I figured the show would be over around ten thirty, so I told him, ‘What about this: I’ll see the band, then go to Shoney’s with the others for a hamburger and be home by eleven.’ He said, ‘That sounds good. Go ahead.’

“Well, I get home around eleven thirty and he was waiting at the door, smoking cigarettes like there was no tomorrow. He grounded me for three months. The next day he runs into Braxton Dixon, who went to the same show, and Braxton told him he was being too harsh. Braxton had gone out to dinner too, and he didn’t get home until midnight.”

To everyone’s surprise, Steppenwolf’s tour bus pulled up outside the house the next day. The band’s leader, John Kay, was a big fan and wanted to meet Cash. “They just fawned all over him,” Carlene recalls. “I think it made him feel even guiltier about grounding me, but he held me to it. The whole thing showed me how little experience he had as a father. I mean, Vivian handled all the discipline in that family. It was totally new to him.”

Tragedy hit Cash’s world again on September 16 when the neighboring home of Roy Orbison burned down, killing two of the singer’s sons. Orbison, who was on tour in England, rushed home. It was the second horrific loss for him. His wife, Claudette, had been killed in front of his eyes when her motorcycle was struck by a semi-trailer truck in 1966. When Orbison told Cash after the fire that he could never live on the site again, Cash bought the property and planted an orchard so no one else could build there either. Orbison was forever grateful.

With the shock of Luther’s and the Orbison boys’ deaths, Cash started cutting back on his drug use, according to Grant. “I think those deaths reminded him of how close he had come to death himself. In the months after Luther’s death, he’d still slip up,” Grant noted. “But he was definitely better.”

Reluctant to look for a replacement for Luther, Cash asked Carl Perkins to take over Luther’s part, but even though Perkins was a far superior guitarist, he couldn’t duplicate the steady, unbending rhythm which maximized that signature sound. Cash also thought it was unfair to set such narrow limits on Perkins’s talent. So he put out the word in Nashville that he was looking for a new guitarist—and he got lots of applicants. Everyone knew Cash paid his band members handsomely.

Cash was in Fayetteville on September 17 for a show in support of the reelection campaign of Arkansas governor Winthrop Rockefeller when he found his new guitarist. Marshall and Carl were scheduled to fly in from Memphis, but their flight was canceled because of bad weather. Cash was getting ready to do the show when June introduced him to a young woman who said her boyfriend knew all his songs and could play just like Luther. Cash invited the young truck driver backstage, where he played “Folsom Prison Blues” and “I Walk the Line” almost exactly like Luther. His name was Bob Wootton, and Cash brought him onstage that same day. He soon became the newest member of the Tennessee Three. Though he’d remain an important part of the group for almost two decades, and was even married to Anita Carter for a while, Wootton never became as close to Cash as Luther had been.

One of Wootton’s first dates was at Carnegie Hall on October 23, Cash’s first engagement there since his embarrassment six years earlier. Cash faced a star-studded crowd that included Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin, and he triumphed. In a rave
New York Times
review, Robert Shelton contrasted the new Cash with the one he’d seen in 1962.

He wrote: “Soul music of a rare kind—country soul from the concerned and sensitive white South that Northerners tend to forget—was heard Wednesday night at Carnegie Hall as Johnny Cash made a stirring comeback to New York….His performance was testimony that his own personal bouts with illness and control have been resolved, putting him at as strong a level as he has had since the middle nineteen-fifties.”

By now there were more offers coming in for concerts and TV shows than Holiff could handle. Cash moved on from Carnegie Hall to England for a tour, during which he recorded the
Holy Land
songs for a radio special that would air after the album was released in December. He then returned to the Midwest for a series of dates that concluded with a benefit for Native Americans.

Because of
Bitter Tears,
Cash had been approached even before the
Folsom
success to do a benefit that was scheduled for December 9 at the St. Francis Mission on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. On the following day he visited the site of the Wounded Knee Massacre, where in 1890 some 150 men, women, and children of the Lakota Sioux were killed and 51 wounded by members of the U.S. Seventh Cavalry. During this and other selected dates during the year, he was accompanied by a film crew who were gathering footage for a public television documentary,
Johnny Cash: The Man, His World, His Music,
by director Robert Elfstrom.

When Cash sat down for his annual New Year’s Eve reflections, he was too close to the situation to appreciate fully that he had just finished one of the most remarkable years in pop history. He’d not only made what is perhaps the greatest country album ever—a work so powerful and rich that
Rolling Stone
magazine would one day name it one of the hundred best albums regardless of genre—but also recorded a gospel album that was light-years away from the conventional collection of hymns. Country music is filled with tales of Saturday night sin and Sunday morning salvation, but no country artist had ever addressed the subjects so forcefully in back-to-back packages.

Cash didn’t forget the dark times—the death of Luther and of family friend Jimmy Howard, and the Orbison fire—but he felt that he had finally turned a corner in his life. Holiff was telling him he might get movie offers, and maybe even his own TV show. He was slowly emerging from the long nightmare of pills. And he had June. He decided he wanted to write down his New Year’s Eve thoughts for the first time.

In a six-page note addressed “To myself” on the stationery of his House of Cash publishing company, he began: “I feel that this year, 1968, has been, in many ways, the best year of my 36 years of life. It has been a sober, serious year. And probably the busiest year of my life, as well as the most fulfilling.”

He cited several significant moments, from his marriage to June and the Holy Land trip to the Folsom concert and the sold-out shows at Carnegie Hall and the London Palladium. He even mentioned that his concert fee had shot up from $4,000 to $12,000. He cited Wounded Knee and fishing on Old Hickory Lake, Ezra Carter, and the documentary as high points in his year.

What the letter didn’t convey was his personal hunger and his fears—a craving in his own life for the redemption he outlined in his music. Looking back in 1972 on that note and others he wrote in 1969, 1970, and 1971, Cash dismissed most of them as superficial, too focused on material matters rather than on spiritual health.

“Yes, congratulations John Cash on your superstardom. Big deal,” he wrote in 1972.

“True you must be grateful for God’s showers of blessings, but regardless of all you have been quoted as saying to the contrary, you are too excited over your personal wealth, career successes and other vain, fleeting things.

“OK.

“I hereby resolve, asking God’s help, that I shall court wisdom more and more in this my 41st year. Especially heavenly wisdom.”

The shift in his emphasis was profound. He highlighted the change in thinking in his 1975 autobiography,
Man in Black,
where he focused on his spiritual rededication. In it he referred to New Year’s Eve 1968 as a turning point in his life. Once again, he took poetic license. Rather than reprint the actual 1968 letter, he wrote a new letter expressing what he felt he should have written the first time, and he passed it off as the original.

It read: “Dear Cash, Let’s look at 1968. You did all right in a lot of ways. You blew it in others….You stayed off pills but you’re still awfully carnal. You know what those little vices of yours are. Get to work on them before they multiply and lower your resistance to other temptations, like pills for instance. You still think about them from time to time. You need to pray more. You hardly ever pray. Big deals ahead in 1969, possibly a network TV show, but the biggest deal you’ve got is your family and home. You’d better hang with God if you want the other deals to work out….Your friend, Cash.”