Johnny Cash: The Life (39 page)

The “carnal” reference was surprisingly revealing. Despite the image that John and June painted in public, he was acknowledging the rockiness of their courtship and the fact that he had sometimes turned to other women. Some of those relationships had been serious enough, according to one Cash confidant, that four women were shocked when he asked June to marry him. They each thought he was going to ask them. One of the women was reportedly Anita.

Even if the 1968 letter lingered mainly over his career accomplishments, he was starting to realize that it wasn’t enough simply to express his faith in his music and his frequent good deeds. He wanted to live up to his spiritual obligations. For years, his gospel recordings and even his spiritual statements were made in part out of a sense of duty; he was doing it for his mother and his brother Jack. But Ezra Carter did much to kindle his true spirituality through the hours and hours he spent reading the Bible with Cash and trying to explain how to reconcile the conflicts Cash felt between his personal ambition and his Christian humility.

That process intensified near the end of another tour of Far East military bases with the USO. Cash was greatly troubled by the Vietnam War. His natural instinct was to support his country at all costs, but his visits to hospitals and talks with soldiers hit him hard, and he admitted his doubts to his brother Tommy. “Maybe,” he said, “they may be dying for a cause that isn’t just.”

The soul-searching made him further question his own behavior. He was in bad shape physically by the end of the Asian tour. June told reporters he was ill; others feared he had relapsed. Just then, he bumped into an old friend, the Reverend Jimmie Snow, the son of Hank Snow and a onetime country singer himself.

“We were in Vietnam and we got together and reminisced for a while,” Snow says. “It was pretty casual, but I could see something was troubling him. When he turned to go, he stopped and looked at me and asked if I’d call him when we got back home. He said, ‘I need to talk to you.’”

Two weeks later, Snow went to see Cash at his house.

“We talked about God for probably four or five hours,” Snow recalls. “He said he had slipped away from his faith over the years and he wanted to get back in touch with it, but didn’t know how. I took his hand and I said, ‘Let’s pray.’”

FOR THE FIRST TIME
in a decade, Cash was waking up most mornings without feeling the need to reach for pills. The Far East trip reminded him how vulnerable he was and how much was at stake if he had another relapse. With the validation of the
Folsom
success and his relationship with June finally stabilizing, Cash wanted to embrace the moment, not escape from it. He felt reborn creatively in February 1969. During those four weeks he went into the recording studio with Dylan, recorded a second prison concert, and signed to host a weekly TV show. The last two projects had been in the works for months.

Cash had no interest in returning to Folsom for a sequel even though there were several high-profile examples of successful live album sequels, including
Belafonte Returns to Carnegie Hall
in 1960 and Johnny Rivers’s
Meanwhile Back at the Whisky à Go Go
in 1965. Bob Johnston didn’t push the idea. He wanted Cash to feel free to explore his own creative instincts.

The trail to San Quentin began in an office at Granada Television, an independent TV network in England. Geoffrey Cannon, who was also rock critic for the
Guardian
newspaper, was part of an ambitious “think tank” charged with coming up with “far out” programming ideas. The group, including Jonathan Cott, who was also serving as
Rolling Stone’
s first European editor, had a special affinity for documentaries that placed music in a provocative cultural context. They had already contributed to
The Doors Are Open,
an acclaimed 1968 TV documentary that interspersed footage of a Doors concert in London with scenes from Vietnam and rioting in the United States to underscore the music’s reflection of the decade’s social upheaval.

After hearing the
Folsom
album, Cannon thought of exploring the sociological ties between country music and prison life, but hopes to get Cash to return to Folsom for another concert were sidetracked when Holiff told the production team in late December 1968 that Cash had no interest in the idea. Even so, Cannon remained intrigued. “Nothing like a concert where a jailbird sang songs about desperation to no-hopers and lifers in prison had ever been transmitted on national network television, and this was one of our touchstones,” he says.

Meanwhile, Holiff, always eager for more television exposure, began thinking about how the Granada project could build fans for Cash in England and, presumably, throughout Europe. When Cannon contacted Holiff a second time later that month, Holiff repeated that Cash had no interest in going back to Folsom. Just as Cannon was about to hang up, Holiff added, “But Johnny is going to San Quentin. He’d be happy to make a film with you there.”

As Holiff worked hard to convince Columbia execs in New York that they should record the show for another album, the Granada team rushed to prepare for the February 24 performance. Things were moving so fast that Granada reps didn’t actually meet with Cash until two days before San Quentin.

From his earliest days with Cash, Holiff felt that television was the key to gaining a wider audience, believing that seeing Cash was more compelling than just listening to him. In July 1965 Holiff pitched a TV series to CBS, hinting that Cash might be playing the lead in a new Edward Padula production on Broadway. (There were talks with Padula, who had produced
Bye Bye Birdie,
but nothing materialized.) Holiff had concentrated on CBS because it was the dominant U.S. network.

ABC, however, was a distant third in the ratings and was looking for a way up. The network saw Cash as a way to piggyback on the success of CBS’s brightest new star, Glen Campbell, who hosted a weekly county music–leaning variety show. Not only were both male country singers with pop potential, but also they were both from Arkansas and about the same age. Even more important in ABC’s eyes, Cash, thanks to
Folsom,
was starting to create the same buzz in pop circles that Campbell had months earlier thanks to such crossover hits as “Gentle on My Mind” and “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.”

Having no relationship with Holiff, Bill Carruthers, a director and producer who got his start in television directing the zany Soupy Sales show, approached Cash directly soon after
Folsom
hit the charts about doing a weekly variety show for ABC. Cash was torn. All the way back to
American Bandstand
and “Ballad of a Teenage Queen,” he knew how uncomfortable he could be if he wasn’t presented in the right setting and surrounded by compatible acts. But Holiff had done a good job convincing him of the importance of television to his career, so Cash decided to give it a try—if Screen Gems, the production company that would develop the show for ABC, agreed to some terms. Cash told Holiff he wanted to choose his own musical guests, and he didn’t want to move back to Los Angeles, where the Campbell show was taped. He insisted on the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville.

Screen Gems was fine with the Ryman and assured Cash that his input on guests would be welcome, which, in the adrenaline rush of putting a show together, must have sounded like more of a commitment to Cash than it proved to be. The contracts were drawn up and the series was announced the first week in February. Cash would be the summer replacement for the Saturday night variety show
Hollywood Palace.

Two weeks later, Cash met with Carruthers to go over preliminary plans. When Cash then spoke to the press, his remarks seemed directed as much to Screen Gems as to his fans; in fact, his remarks sometimes conflicted with ABC’s own description of the show. According to a network press release, the show would draw guests from all fields, even rock, which was referred to as “Now Generation” music. In Los Angeles, Carruthers suggested that the show would be “85 percent music and some comedy too.”

In Nashville, Cash told local reporters, “We will have three or four guests on each weekly show and although many will come from the popular field, the show will not be a major departure from the country music that we came from. If there is a theme to the show, it is to illustrate the contemporary nature of modern country music. So the integral part of each week’s show will be country music.” He made no mention of comedians, even though they were a component of most variety shows at the time.

Though Cash’s success with
Folsom
swept away most of the strained feelings along Music Row left over from the 1964 “Ira Hayes”
Billboard
ad flap, there were still pockets of resentment among Nashville’s elite, and there was considerable grumbling about all this talk of non-country artists being featured, including Bob Dylan.

Dylan began recording his albums in Nashville with the
Blonde on Blonde
sessions in February 1966 at Bob Johnston’s suggestion, but his love of country music dated back to his childhood in Hibbing, Minnesota. He would listen to many of the same recording stars that Cash enjoyed in Dyess and in the Air Force, especially Jimmie Rodgers. During his teens, he was also spellbound by the music of Cash and other Sun artists. “Of course, I knew of him before he ever heard of me,” Dylan wrote years later about Cash. “In ’55 or ’56, ‘I Walk the Line’ played all summer on the radio, and it was different from anything else you had ever heard. It was profound, and so was the tone of it, every line: deep and rich, awesome and mysterious all at once.”

Given their restless curiosity as artists, Cash and Dylan might have made shifts into folk and country, respectively, in the 1960s quite independent of each other. Just as Cash’s admiration for Dylan added enthusiasm to his embrace of folk music in the early 1960s, however, Dylan’s respect for Cash made Dylan’s transition from rock to country easier.

Dylan’s move began in the fall of 1968, when he recorded the
John Wesley Harding
album not with the rock ’n’ roll crew who had joined him on
Highway 61 Revisited
but with two of the Nashville musicians Johnston had recruited for the
Blonde on Blonde
sessions, drummer Kenneth Buttrey and bassist Charlie McCoy. Except for “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight,” the album wasn’t full-blown country, but it was a softer and more rural sound than Dylan fans had come to expect. Dylan was ready to move even deeper into country when he returned to Nashville in February 1969 to record
Nashville Skyline.

While Dylan was in town, Johnston set up a separate session at the Columbia Studios for Cash, mainly, a conspiracy theorist might suggest, so that he could lure Cash and Dylan into a studio to cut some tracks together—and that’s what happened. After recording two songs on February 17, Cash was back in the studio the next evening when Dylan stopped by to say hello. Cash was delighted to see him, and they went to dinner. When they returned, they found that Johnston had rearranged the microphones and brought in some chairs and a table to give the room the informal feel of a music club. As Johnston remembers it, “When they came back and saw the little café setup, I knew they were going to sing together. They looked at each other and went out and got their guitars and started singing. People started yelling out song titles…‘How about this one or that one?’ I even yelled out songs too, and they came up with some. They were laughing and having fun.”

It wasn’t a repeat of the “Million Dollar Quartet” sessions at Sun, where the artists just sang bits and pieces of old favorites, but it was close. Backed by Cash’s musicians, they opened with Dylan’s 1964 composition “One Too Many Mornings” and later traded verses on the even earlier “Girl from the North Country.” They followed with numbers identified with Cash, including “Big River,” “I Still Miss Someone,” and perhaps a bit playfully “Understand Your Man,” the song Cash wrote after stealing a Dylan melody.

Then they turned to two Sun favorites, Elvis’s “That’s All Right” and Carl Perkins’s “Matchbox,” before reaching into their country memory bank for two Jimmie Rodgers tunes as well as the country standards “You Are My Sunshine” and “Careless Love,” plus the gospel favorite “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.”

When they finished, Johnston knew that the music was ragged; Dylan and Cash had messed up lyrics in places and lost track of the melody in others. But he felt that what he had was a wonderful piece of history. Here were two great figures in music having fun in an unguarded moment. It was magical, and Johnston was proud of being the catalyst that made it happen. To his immense disappointment, the only track to emerge officially from the session would be “Girl from the North County,” which Dylan used on
Nashville Skyline.

“Columbia didn’t want to put the sessions out,” Johnston says. “They cringed. The only thing they could hear was [that Cash and Dylan] were laughing in the middle of some songs or didn’t come out exactly together at the end of others. Maybe Columbia was just trying to protect their stars; they didn’t want to let people hear them like this—which was typical of how stupid record companies are. This was history!”

It’s also possible that Columbia execs, without Johnston’s knowledge, had learned that even Cash and Dylan were uncertain about the album. Years later Cash referred to it as “musically inferior,” adding, “It’s not up to par for either one of us. I think [Bob] was embarrassed over that and I don’t blame him.” As with the “Million Dollar Quartet” sessions, however, tapes of the Dylan-Cash recordings eventually found their way onto bootlegs and became prized underground possessions for decades.

Johnston didn’t have more clout in the decision because he was on shaky ground at Columbia. He had butted heads with the New York brass too often, and his announcement in the spring of 1967 that the label planned to drop half its sixty-artist roster caused enormous resentment among Nashville traditionalists. When Clive Davis went to Nashville that fall for an industry dinner, he was surprised when the comedienne Minnie Pearl, a beloved figure in country music, cornered him. “We have a way of doing things in Nashville,” she told the Columbia president. “Although we compete, we do it with civility and respect. I’ve got to tell you that your man Bob Johnston is conducting business with neither of those adjectives. He is creating such an image problem for Columbia Records. On behalf of the Nashville community, we don’t like him.”

Adding this to what he was hearing from his own executives, Davis took action: he replaced Johnston as head of the Nashville office with writer-producer Billy Sherrill. Davis agreed to let Johnston continue to work, under the title “executive producer at large,” with Cash and Dylan. “What choice did they have?” Johnston says. “Who else did they have who Cash and Dylan would work with?”

On the day after the Dylan session, Cash got a phone call from Don Davis, a music publisher and two-time husband of Anita Carter. Davis, who had earlier tipped him off to “Jackson,” told Cash he had a song that would be a natural for him. It was written by
Playboy
cartoonist and songwriter Shel Silverstein, whose earlier parody, “25 Minutes to Go,” was a highlight of the
Folsom
album.

Cash got a kick out of the zany tune about a father’s odd way of teaching his son to stand up for himself, and he promised to record “A Boy Named Sue” as soon as he got back from the West Coast. But June placed a copy of Silverstein’s song in a stack of material John was taking with him on the trip—on the outside chance he’d want to use it in the prison show.

San Quentin was just two days away when Cash met with the Granada TV representatives before a concert in San Diego, the second stop on the tour. Only vaguely aware of their plans for the documentary, Cash had been approaching San Quentin as just another show date, which meant his regular set list. When the Granada team of director Michael Darlow and producer Jo Durden-Smith asked him to write a song to commemorate the occasion, Cash was cool to the idea. Afterward, however, he began to think about the prison concert more seriously. Over the next forty-eight hours, he did what he did best—tried to find common ground with his audience by looking at the world through their eyes.