Johnny Cash: The Life (57 page)

There was no $1 million offer, nothing even close. The Mercury deal was such a modest one that it would have been unthinkable during Cash’s glory years at Columbia, but Robin and Cash weren’t in a position to demand more. In fact, they felt fortunate to find anyone to sign him. During the search for a new label, Cash went around to one major company and actually auditioned as he had for Sam Phillips long ago. He played guitar and sang some of his new songs. The label head never even got back to him.

Five weeks after Oermann’s Columbia bombshell, the
Tennessean
reported the move to Mercury.

“I feel great,” Cash told Oermann in his usual upbeat way of talking about his latest recording. “I’m so happy. This did wonders for my little ego.” Cash added that he’d spent the night before at his farm in Bon Aqua, thinking about the move. “Then Thursday morning I went to CBS [Columbia] and told the folks there of my decision. We had a big hug and a few tears.” Then he walked across the street to pose for photos with Popovich, who had gained a reputation as an artist-friendly executive for his work at CBS with such figures as Cash, Bruce Springsteen, and Cheap Trick. He was best known for his development of Meat Loaf while founder and president of Cleveland International Records.

“It’s a great honor to be working once again with Johnny. I love the man,” Popovich said. “At CBS we enjoyed much success. The world is waiting for more great Johnny Cash music.”

Looking back years later, Popovich recalled how nervous Cash was that day in the office; he had even brought Waylon Jennings along for support.

Rival labels shook their heads over Mercury’s decision to sign Cash.

“I can’t overemphasize the odds against him,” Popovich said years later. “I was on a panel at a country music convention shortly after we signed John and someone in the audience asked, ‘Why did you sign Johnny Cash? Don’t you think he’s had his better days?’ I looked at him and said, ‘I’ve got news for you, young man. If Johnny Cash is over, country music is over.’”

CASH MAY HAVE HAD A NEW LABEL
, but he didn’t have a plan.

It was a reminder that even our greatest artists can lose their way. Some never recover their creative instincts and drive, but the strongest fight boldly and courageously, and often reconnect with their art. But it’s never easy—and Cash showed neither boldness nor courage in the fall of 1986.

At a time when he should have realized he was making a last stand in Nashville, Cash timidly turned to the usual suspects when he went into the studio on September 3 to make his Mercury debut. His good-time buddy Jack Clement, who hadn’t given Cash a significant hit since “The One on the Right Is on the Left” in 1966, would be his producer. The songs were from, among others, old regulars Guy Clark and Merle Travis, the musicians were mostly from his band, and the Carter Sisters—the wounds of the Cleveland breakup mended—were always ready to step forward with more backing vocals. No one approached the album as if Cash’s music was a problem in need of fixing. Everyone around him blamed Columbia, the DJs, and the fickle fans for his career slump.

Looking at most of the late seventies and eighties albums, Cash supporters could point correctly to one or two tracks per album that were good enough to have been monster hits in earlier days, but those days were gone. The truth was this: For the rest of his life, Cash was going to have to fight for everything he got. None of the awards he continued to receive were going to cause people to buy albums.

Yet Cash kept on telling himself it was just a matter of time before all was well. He had seen many artists go through dry spells, notably Dylan, only to rebound. What he failed to notice was that Dylan didn’t feel the need to crank out an album every few months; he waited until he had something to say. He also failed to see that Dylan didn’t keep chasing after another “Blowin’ in the Wind” or “Highway 61 Revisited.” Following his motorcycle-related absence from the scene in the late 1960s, Dylan went in a softer but challenging new direction with “John Wesley Harding” and followed that with a country-edged album.

Then in 1975 Dylan changed directions again with the ballad-heavy look at romantic wreckage in
Blood on the Tracks,
only to return four years later with the fire-and-brimstone gospel of
Slow Train Coming.
Indeed, he changed paths so fast in search of new musical ideas that he often left his fans scratching their heads—or booing. About the latter, Dylan quipped, “You can’t worry about things like that. Miles Davis has been booed. Hank Williams was booed. Stravinsky was booed. You’re nobody if you don’t get booed sometime.”

Cash often quoted his friend’s line “He not busy being born is busy dying,” but he didn’t apply that principle to his music.

The first Mercury album,
Johnny Cash Is Coming to Town,
did have a welcome sense of energy and drive, but at its core it was as generic as many of the LPs Cash had made at Columbia. The standout track was the Bobby Braddock–Charlie Williams song “The Night Hank Williams Came to Town”—one of those tunes that would probably have been a smash in earlier times. Cash loved the sentiments of the song, which were wrapped in an infectious sing-along arrangement, because it reminded him of the time the Louvin Brothers came to Dyess.

Cash included another song with a similar message about the uplifting power of music: James Talley’s “W. Lee Daniel (and the Light Crust Dough Boys).” Cash had listened to Daniel’s western swing band (Bob Wills was an early member) on the radio in Dyess, and he loved Talley’s ode to it.

If Cash had been more on top of his game, he would have realized he had a theme in those two songs and searched for others that spoke to the power of live music to enchant. Instead, he surrounded them with tunes that not only had no connection but were rarely more than passable, or were even annoying—such as Guy Clark’s toast to a tractor, “Heavy Metal (Don’t Mean Rock and Roll to Me).”

This wasn’t an album that was going to reestablish Cash in the best of times, much less when Nashville was viewing his Mercury project with skepticism. Jack Clement later acknowledged there was no guiding purpose during the sessions. “I felt like he was a little bit bewildered and confused at that point. He didn’t know exactly what to do, so we would try a bunch of different things.”

Cash, in turn, may have felt let down. After all, Clement could have stepped in to provide a direction, and he certainly should have erased some of the album’s cluttered arrangements. Marty Stuart, always trying to get Cash back to the basics of
boom-chicka-boom,
returned to the studio some nights after hours to create his own versions of several of the tracks, removing what he felt were excessive touches. He played his remakes for Cash, but Cash was too loyal to Clement even to hint at a change in approach. Work continued through February as Cash and Clement, in their search for something that felt right, recorded enough songs for two albums.

When Cash handed in the debut, Popovich was in a position to advise him gently to rethink parts of the album, but the big-hearted executive respected Cash too much to cast any doubts. He wanted to build Cash’s confidence, not shatter it. Popovich realized that the album was dead in the water in March 1987, as soon as he heard country radio’s cool response to the “Hank Williams” single. If country DJs were already thinking Cash’s days as a radio star were long over, Columbia’s decision to drop him made him seem more dated than ever. No one wanted to play a has-been. “I thought we had some good stuff,” Popovich said. “The world just wasn’t waiting.”

Not everyone was so generous. In a humiliating review,
USA Today
called
Johnny Cash Is Coming to Town
one of the year’s ten worst albums.

Cash’s creative lethargy wasn’t the only factor when it came to understanding the challenges of a stalled career. The problems ran deeper than the demanding tour schedule, the weeks wasted on the made-for-TV movies, the drugs, or the mounting fiscal responsibilities. By the spring of 1987, the years of abusing his body had left him worn down. He was fifty-five going on seventy-five, and for the rest of his life he’d have to battle another unforgiving enemy: his declining health and the accompanying pain.

There’s no way you could look at those album covers from the 1960s and not realize that Johnny Cash was one sick puppy, but by the mid-1980s his addiction was becoming a secondary problem. Those close to Cash on the road knew within six months of Betty Ford that Cash was again taking pills; they could see it mostly in his sometimes careless or distant performances. But he wasn’t out of control—nothing close to the old ODs. He’d suddenly be his old self, then slip back into mild pill use for another six months or so. The real fear was his deteriorating health.

That fear was heightened when Cash suddenly stopped singing during the second song at a Saturday night concert May 16, 1987, at Lincoln High School in Council Bluffs, Iowa. He tried to say something to the audience, but his speech was slurred and he appeared ill and shaky. June rushed in from the wings and escorted John backstage, where he was then transported to Mercy Hospital.

A backstage photo of the moment showed a dazed, frightened man. He was treated for stress and exhaustion as well as an irregular heartbeat. As news spread across the country, the hospital was flooded with calls, cards, and flowers for its famous patient. On Sunday he flew home. The show was his thirty-seventh of the year. After some rest, he resumed touring on June 13 in North Platte, Nebraska. He insisted he felt fine. He’d do seventy-seven more shows, including a tour of Europe, before the end of the year.

Taking a break from touring in early November, Cash attended a meeting of the Hendersonville Regional Planning Commission to request the rezoning of ninety-five of the acres he had purchased near his house on Old Hickory Lake. In his most ambitious investment move to that point, he planned to build 219 houses, priced between $75,000 and $175,000, and to use part of the land for a commercial strip.

Counting on his goodwill in the community to sway the commissioners, Cash was deeply disappointed when more than thirty landowners from the area showed up to protest his plan. They maintained that the proposed 1,300-square-foot houses weren’t compatible with the larger, more expensive homes in the area. In the end, the commissioners denied the request.

Following a week of shows later in November, Cash called it quits on touring for the year. He planned to devote December to recording and rest in Jamaica. On December 2, 3, and 10, he went into the studio to finish work on an album featuring new versions of his old hits. The collection, for which recording had started in the fall, was originally to be released only in Europe, but it was issued in the United States the following year in conjunction with an exhibit on Cash at the Country Music Hall of Fame.

Twenty-four hours after finishing that project, Cash and Clement resumed work on the second Mercury album. They had several tracks left over from the first album, but they wanted to see if they could come up with some stronger tunes. Again, Cash and Clement had no direction in mind. After one day’s work, they took a break, and Cash headed to Jamaica for the holidays. When they resumed recording on January 8, 1988, they were still haphazardly accumulating tracks.

After a break for a press conference at which Cash made his first endorsement in a presidential race (supporting Democrat Al Gore Jr.), he and Clement finally came up with a concept—or at least a strategy—for the album, and it made sense. If country DJs weren’t interested in a Johnny Cash album, maybe they’d play the record if he were teamed with a “hot” artist. What about a duet with Hank Williams Jr., who was red-hot, registering seven number-one singles in the 1980s, two in 1986 alone? What about one with Paul McCartney, whom John had met in Jamaica? What about—get this—a duet with Rosanne Cash? That would bring more than the human interest angle of father and daughter; Rosanne was almost as hot as Hank Jr., with five number-one singles in the 1980s and two Top 5 singles in 1986. In fact, her version of her dad’s song “Tennessee Flat-Top Box” had just gone to number one.

Popovich loved the idea, especially the Hank Jr. track, a spiritually tinged feel-good song by Jennifer Pierce called “That Old Wheel.” He told everyone at PolyGram in New York that he had a smash. He also thought that a remake of “Ballad of a Teenage Queen,” featuring both Rosanne and the Everly Brothers, could be huge. He had hoped the McCartney duet could be the third single, but “New Moon over Jamaica,” a song written by Cash, McCartney, and Tom T. Hall while sitting on Cash’s porch at Cinnamon Hill one night, was so devoid of character that not even Popovich on his most enthusiastic day could muster much praise for it. Even if it wasn’t a single, he figured the McCartney name would still lure buyers. The eventual album, titled
Water from the Wells of Home,
would also feature duets with Hall, Waylon, June, John Carter, Emmylou Harris, and Glen Campbell.

In late March, the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville unveiled its two-thousand-square-foot Cash exhibit, the most elaborate salute to an artist in the museum’s twenty-year history. Cash attended a private preview, then left for a brief engagement in Las Vegas, during which he experienced hoarseness onstage. He had canceled three shows earlier in the month in the Midwest for the same reason. He was now concerned enough to check in to the Eisenhower Medical Center in Palm Springs on March 30 to have tests done for laryngitis and bronchitis. The doctors found nothing serious and advised him simply to rest his voice. But Cash had more concert obligations. Within a week he was back onstage in the Midwest, where he did four shows before heading to Europe for more dates. He also agreed to play frontier hero Davy Crockett in a multi-part TV tale that would air as part of NBC’s
Magical World of Disney
series.

Making no effort to rest his voice, Cash found another project that appealed to his missionary role: he’d record the entire New King James version of the New Testament for a cassette package marketed by Thomas Nelson, a gospel-oriented media company in Nashville. Work began on September 13 and continued, off and on, for nearly a year. “To turn the written word into the spoken word has long been my dream,” he wrote in the liner notes that accompanied the nineteen-hour package. “But little did I dream that speaking the New Testament aloud in its entirety would so much further enrich my spiritual life.”

September was also when Mercury released “That Old Wheel” as a single, hoping to build interest in the forthcoming album. But even Hank Williams’s presence couldn’t push it any higher than number twenty-one on the country chart. That was better than any Cash single in nine years, not counting The Highwaymen teaming, but not enough to turn the album into a winner. The CD fared even more poorly than
Johnny Cash Is Coming to Town.

As Cash thought about his next recording move, he felt abandoned. His “angels” at Mercury—Asher and Popovich—had both left the label.

“I felt bad about leaving John, but my mother was dying, plus Dick Asher wasn’t at the company any longer and the people in New York just didn’t get what I was trying to do,” Popovich said. “A lot of people worked really hard to help John turn things around, but we just couldn’t do it.”

The headline on a story in the
Nashville Tennessean
on Wednesday, December 14, 1988, seemed straightforward enough: “Cash Enters Hospital for Regular Checkup.” But there was apprehension in country music circles. Roy Orbison had died of a heart attack at fifty-two just five days earlier, and Jennings, fifty-one, had undergone a triple bypass heart operation at the same Baptist Hospital the day before Cash’s physical. Before meeting with his doctor, Cash visited his old roommate in intensive care. Jennings told Cash that being in a hospital can be a great leveler. “When they get you up to walk you, you can hardly stand up, and they put that little gown on you,” Jennings said. “You’re about halfway down the hall, and you feel the draft from behind. You know you ain’t got no back, and you got no shorts on, and people are looking at your ass. That superstar shit goes right out the window.” Twenty-four hours later, Cash learned he would also be having heart surgery.