Johnny Cash: The Life (48 page)

The producer brought some excellent songs to the project, including “The Lady Came from Baltimore” and “Reason to Believe” by Tim Hardin, whose work Cash already knew because of “If I Were a Carpenter.” Klein also brought Randy Newman’s “My Old Kentucky Home (Turpentine and Dandelion Wine)” and the Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” For his part, Cash threw into the mix such songs as his own “Lonesome to the Bone” and David Allan Coe’s “Cocaine Carolina,” a rowdy hell-raiser that could have been an album highlight in the irreverent contexts of either of the prison albums.

In interviews at the time Cash expressed optimism, singling out “The Lady Came from Baltimore” for special praise. That song was released as a single in December 1974, and Columbia’s promotion team pushed it hard. The label was encouraged when it made number fourteen on the country charts, the best showing of any Cash single in two years. But that initial airplay didn’t transfer into album sales. In fact,
John R. Cash
was the first top-level Cash album not to hit the country charts at all. The rejection may have been Nashville’s way of saying to New York–based executives: Leave us alone. The album garnered little pop airplay or sales.

In the early weeks of 1975, Columbia and Cash both asked the same question: Now what?

What the record company still didn’t understand was that Cash’s focus was no longer on music. He and June had signed up the year before for a correspondence course on the Bible. For three years, at home and on tour, they would work on lessons they received from the Christian International School of Theology. Cash threw himself into his Bible study the way he’d once committed himself to making albums. He even told a few people that he might give up his career and become a full-time minister, but he quickly abandoned the idea—fearing, he said, that he would simply be a “celebrity preacher” who would attract people who wanted their photo taken with him rather than his spiritual counsel. Marshall Grant for one never took the idea seriously: “I think it was just another part of John finding a place for himself after the music started slipping away.” Besides, June reminded him that he could reach far more people through his music than through any private ministry. But he didn’t lose his thirst for the scriptures, especially the story of Saint Paul, a man “I couldn’t get my mind off,” said Cash.

As his record career continued to stumble, Cash’s goal was to be the father he hadn’t been in the 1960s.

Cash’s struggle to regain the love and respect of his daughters was a lifelong one, as he documented in a series of letters to the girls, especially Rosanne. In May 1969, when he’d been feeling optimistic about the future, he wrote her: “Regardless of the mistakes your daddy has made in the past, the bad publicity I got, etc., please know that I’m above all that now. I really believe I’ve turned out to be a good man. I just wish I could spend more time with you girls. I miss you more than you know.”

Fifteen years later he would still be trying to exorcise his guilt over abandoning his family: “I suppose I will always agonize over the fact that I split on you in 1967….Maybe it was a selfish quest, but it was a quest for self-survival.”

IN THE TWENTY YEARS SINCE
he had cut his first record at Sun, Cash’s résumé included some 1,800 concerts, nearly fifty albums, five movies, dozens of television shows, a divorce, and thousands of pills—and he was tired. After achieving superstardom and sobriety, Cash, at forty-three, looked forward in 1975 to the comforts of faith and family at least as much as new career horizons. Except for projects like
The Gospel Road,
he no longer approached every album with a sense of occasion.

“John kept writing songs or looking for songs—and he had hundreds to choose from because every young writer in Nashville dreamed of having Johnny Cash record his song,” Marshall Grant recalled. “But everything was more casual.”

When it was time to go into the studio, Cash would just bring in the last bunch of songs that had caught his ear. He didn’t sit down and plan them. There wasn’t a feeling of life and death about them anymore. He had other priorities.

Years later Cash told me he was lulled by his success in the 1960s and early 1970s into taking his music for granted. He felt he could devote most of his attention to his family and spreading God’s word and still have plenty of time left over to make records. But suddenly, it seemed like everything dried up. By the time he realized what was happening, he didn’t know what to do about it. Besides, he enjoyed those new priorities.

It was a slow transition in his life that began the day John Carter was born in 1970. The child instantly became the center of his and June’s world. “He was like their dream come true,” Carlene says. “Everything revolved around him. Rosie and I used to laugh about it, but we also kind of doted on him. It was fun having a little brother.”

The couple put John Carter’s crib in their bedroom and took him on the road with them, including a trip to Australia when he turned one year old. Besides bringing John Carter’s nanny along on tour, Cash arranged for a bodyguard to stand outside the boy’s hotel room door when John and June were doing their shows. It wasn’t long, though, before they started taking him to the venues. When John Carter was barely old enough to walk, Cash would bring him onstage, eventually teaching him enough words to “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” for him to join the rest of the cast in singing it.

At the same time, Cash tried to rebuild a relationship with his daughters. In fact John’s daughters, in various combinations, had been going on the road with him since the summer of 1968—when the demand for Cash’s concerts was so great there was no way he could take six weeks off in the summer to be with them as he had in 1967. It was an eye-opening introduction to his professional world for the Cash daughters.

“He was a different person on the road,” Kathy says. “He had his mind on his work. It was intimidating because he was the boss of all these people. You could tell he was glad we were there, but it was often, like, ‘Be quiet.’ He’d take a nap every day before the show. It was like we were on the bus and then in the hotels and backstage waiting for him; it was just go, go, go. Then suddenly we’d be home, and it was fun again.”

Rosanne remembers that period at the house vividly.

“We were all just so happy,” she says. “He had gained weight and he looked so good and he seemed so happy. Sure, there were still problems of adjustment, but my main memory is joy. I had my dad back.”

With his career going nonstop, Cash felt an increasing need to get away from the demands on him. He and June had been spending time at Eck and Maybelle’s modest house in Port Richey, Florida, for years.

True to his enterprising nature, Eck Carter didn’t just stumble upon the sleepy village north of Tampa. When he wanted a retirement home in the 1960s, he researched possible locations and found a magazine article that named Port Richey the ideal spot for value and lifestyle. Eck bought a bungalow on a river that fed into the Gulf of Mexico. John loved the fishing and the quiet,

At Port Richey, John and June became intrigued by an even more exotic vacation spot just a short flight away: the Caribbean.

“We went to the Virgin Islands,” Carlene says. “It was our first time out of the country. We had incredible times. John would spend all day in his swim shorts, and we’d go fishing and snorkeling. We’d be there for a week one time, then ten days, then two weeks—and we went to different islands. St. John, then St. Thomas. They just loved the area, and they were always looking for new places, trying to get more seclusion, which is how they eventually got to Jamaica.”

John and June made their first trip to Montego Bay in the early 1970s, and Jamaica became their new vacation spot of choice. The moment Cash spotted Cinnamon Hill, an eighteenth-century plantation house nestled 280 feet above the sea, he felt much the same attraction that he had for the Hendersonville house. When he and June learned it had been built by the great-grandfather of one of their favorite poets, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, they felt even more attached to the grounds. There was something about the bright evening sky, he said, that reminded him of the stars at night in Dyess on his walks to town when he was a boy.

John W. Rollins, a wealthy American businessman, had bought the old place and was planning to renovate it. But Cash’s charm worked again, and Rollins, a onetime lieutenant governor of Delaware, soon sold him the house.. The Cashes would try to spend at least part of the year—often the Christmas holidays—at Cinnamon Hill for the rest of their lives. The Rollins family would remain good friends.

Wanting a place closer to home, Cash also bought a one-hundred-acre farm named Bon Aqua about an hour from Hendersonville. He frequently went there by himself for a day or two to unwind after a tour. Because John and June were together almost constantly on the road, they welcomed occasional breaks from each other during their time off. While John went to Bon Aqua, where he loved to trim his grapevines or just walk the grounds, June enjoyed going to New York for a weekend of often lavish shopping. (A favorite joke among the Cash inner circle was that “she had a black belt in shopping.”)

As his fame continued to grow, Cash found there were more demands on his time than just touring and recording, many of them attached to his new role as a national icon. Cash felt it was his responsibility to use his money and fame to help others, however costly or time-consuming. His support for causes close to his heart sometimes led him into strange alliances. Besides sharing the stage with segregationist Lester Maddox for prison reform in 1970, he joined Texas billionaire and future third-party presidential candidate H. Ross Perot at a press conference the same year to build a grass-roots movement to help free American prisoners of war in North Vietnam.

Another demand on his time came from financial advisers and accountants who encouraged him to invest his money. He didn’t feel comfortable making business decisions, but he had seen how his country music heroes and peers had often ended up broke because they hadn’t handled their money wisely. In 1970 he paid just under $1 million for 146 acres of undeveloped property that stretched from Gallatin Road, Hendersonville’s main street, the equivalent of several city blocks, to his property by the lake. His immediate goal was to preserve the natural tree-lined state of the property, but he didn’t rule out its eventual use for commercial purposes.

It was a big deal in town in 1972 when he finally opened his recording studio at the House of Cash, but it did not, as hoped, jump-start his recording output.

All too often Cash’s busy schedule wore him out mentally and physically, causing him to enter the studio unprepared.

“John would come in, pick up his guitar, sit down on a stool, and literally start trying to write songs,” Grant said. “Sometimes we’d stay for several days but accomplish nothing. Oh, we’d record something, but it was usually thrown together with no thought or arrangement.”

In that busy summer of 1972, Cash also took time away from his weeks with the girls to become one of the first musicians of the rock era to use his celebrity to lobby Congress. Most of his contemporaries felt uncomfortable stepping into the political arena, but Cash knew the media attention and, he hoped, the public pressure that could accompany his visit.

On July 27 he appeared with Glen Sherley and Harlan Sanders, another songwriter who had done time in Folsom, before a U.S. Senate judiciary subcommittee hearing on a prison and parole reform bill that had been introduced at Cash’s urging by Tennessee Republican William Brock. As expected, Cash was mobbed by autograph seekers in the Senate Office Building corridors, and his testimony was widely reported.

“I’ve seen things that would chill the blood of the average citizen,” Cash told the senators, then gave some examples of prison brutality that had come to his attention, including the case of a fifteen-year-old boy who was dying in an Arkansas prison after being raped by older prisoners, and of a young man who hanged himself after being stripped of his clothing as punishment. “Prisoners have to be treated as human beings. If they’re not, when they’re turned out, they’re not going to act like human beings.” In his turn at the microphone, Sherley pushed for laws that kept young first-time offenders from being incarcerated and for better ways to deal with hardened criminals.

Afterward, Cash generated additional publicity for his cause by meeting with President Nixon. When asked by the press if he would support the president’s reelection campaign, Cash remained loyal despite his misgivings about the war. “If he asked me, I would,” he said. “The dignity of the office should be upheld and respected by all citizens, and I will do anything I can for him. President Nixon has done a lot for peace.” According to Cash’s nephew Roy, who served in Vietnam, “he was opposed to the Vietnam War, but he was not a draft-card-burner kind of protester.”

While Cash continued to advocate for prison reform, he was increasingly having doubts about Sherley. Things had gone well at first. Sherley joined Cash on tour, and he married a House of Cash employee, Nicki Robbins, at Cash’s home in December 1971. Cash even arranged for Sherley’s two sons from his first marriage to be flown in for the ceremony. But by the time of the Senate hearing, Sherley was showing signs of instability, and his songwriting was so weak that some in the Cash camp, including Grant, began to question whether Sherley had actually even written the song Cash sang during the Folsom concert, “Greystone Chapel.”

One story widely circulated among Cash’s inner circle was that Harlan Sanders, who was at Folsom at the same time as Sherley, wrote the song and Sherley, in effect, stole it. According to one version of the story, when Sanders learned that Cash was going to record it, Sherley promised to give Sanders the royalties.

“Glen was with us for about eight months when John started getting songs from Sanders, and they were good, a lot better than anything Glen had given us,” said Larry Butler. “One day John walked in and said, ‘I think we got the wrong man out of jail.’”

The Cash party became further disillusioned with Sherley after a few months on tour. “I think that because Glen had spent so much of his life in prison, he felt out of place and was very insecure on the outside,” Grant said. “You couldn’t get Glen into bed at night, and you couldn’t get him out of bed in the morning, which began to be a problem because of our busy travel schedule.”

The breaking point was when Sherley, apparently angered by being ordered around, looked Grant in the eye and said, “I’d like to take a knife…and just cut you all to hell. It’s not because I don’t love you, because I do. But that’s just the type of person I am. I’d rather kill you than talk to you.”

When Grant relayed his concern to Cash, Sherley was dropped from the tour. He returned to California, where he ended up working on a cattle ranch. Apart from the Cash connection, his country music legacy was limited to his name appearing in stories over the years with those of Cash, Merle Haggard, and David Allan Cole whenever roundups were written about country stars who had done jail time. On May 11, 1978, at his brother’s home near Salinas, Sherley—the man who provided the feel-good heart of the Folsom concert—committed suicide with a gunshot to the head. Cash was rattled. He continued to support prison reform, but he stopped using Sherley as an example of redemption. In his 1993 autobiography, he didn’t mention Sherley’s name.

That didn’t mean Cash lost his empathy for prisoners. In January 1997 he would phone Gary Gilmore the night before he became the first person executed in the United States in a decade. Gilmore’s case gained worldwide attention because Gilmore, who was sentenced to death after killing two people in Utah, demanded the state carry out the execution rather than use legal maneuvering to prevent it. In
Shot in the Heart,
a gripping, award-winning book about his brother and his family, Mikal Gilmore said Cash was Gary’s “biggest hero” and that Gary told him about the phone call from Cash: “When I picked up the phone,” I said, ‘Is this the real Johnny Cash?’ and he said, ‘Yes, it is.’ And I said: ‘Well, this is the real Gary Gilmore.’”

Despite family obligations, charity projects, awards dinners, Billy Graham Crusades, and endless touring eating up 90 percent of his time, Cash still found opportunities to keep his hand in acting and television, including a guest star role in an episode of the popular TV detective series
Columbo
in 1973 and a documentary about the history of American railroads in 1974. He was also beginning to outline his novel about Saint Paul. But the most dramatic moment of 1974 revolved, once more, around John Carter—only this time it was a moment of terrifying fear.

It was Labor Day, and Cash felt especially drained. He canceled a TV appearance and headed to Bon Aqua with June. Soon after arriving, he got a phone call: John Carter had had an accident and was in Madison Hospital.

John’s sister Reba had taken John Carter and seven other youngsters for a ride through the woods near Cash’s house. The front wheels of her Jeep hit some loose gravel on the road on the way back to the lakefront house, and the vehicle flipped over, hurling the children to the ground. A Grand Ole Opry tour bus had been following the Jeep; the driver and other passengers turned the Jeep right-side up and freed the children, who were then rushed to the hospital.