Johnny Cash: The Life (59 page)

A year later, after a European tour in December 1990, Cash stopped by Clement’s office and Ferguson could tell he was hurting. He told Clement and Ferguson about how hard he had fought to get off the pills and then this jaw thing happened and now he couldn’t help himself; he was back on the pain pills.

Ferguson wasn’t prepared for what happened next. This time his hero was the one who cried.

CASH WAS HONORED BY THE
record industry again with a Living Legend Award—for ongoing contributions and influence in the recording field—during the Grammy ceremony in Los Angeles on February 21, 1991, but the affair left him melancholy. What “ongoing contributions”? If he was a legend, why was his career in such bad shape? The evening’s other recipients—Aretha Franklin, Billy Joel, and Quincy Jones—were still going strong. The only future he saw for himself was more of the aches and pains that were coming at a distressing pace. Instead of the kick he used to get from the road, he longed more and more for the quiet comforts of home—reading his books, tending to his garden, and spending quality time with his family. In other words, retirement.

Retirement was a foreign concept to country singers; most of them kept performing the old hits as long as they could walk—or even be wheeled—onstage. Roy Acuff, the Grand Ole Opry patriarch, set the standard. When the singer’s wife, Mildred, died in the 1980s, the Opry was all he had left; he moved into a house on the Opry grounds and kept taking his turn at the microphone, singing “Great Speckled Bird” or “Wabash Cannonball” whenever his health permitted. Acuff was eighty-seven the night Cash got the Grammy award.

Before his mounting health problems, Cash had assumed that he too would always keep performing, but no longer. Still, he couldn’t figure out a way to retire; he had too many financial obligations. When Mark Stielper asked Cash about it, he said, “They won’t let me retire.” “They” were all those in the family, household, and band who depended on him for their income, a number that at any given time in the 1980s and 1990s ranged from thirty to forty. “Financially, he couldn’t [retire],” Stielper says. “He needed advance money from the next tour to pay the bills from the last one.”

And then there was more bad news from Mercury. Cash’s fourth album for the label,
The Mystery of Life,
was another commercial failure. Once again, Cash blamed the label for a lack of interest in him. He insisted for years that the label had pressed only five hundred copies of the album. It was another of his exaggerations, but the underlying point was accurate. He wouldn’t make another album for Mercury, which suited the label just fine.

Cash suffered the hardest blow on May 11 when his mother died of cancer at the age of eighty-one. In contrast to the ambiguity he felt after his father’s death, Cash had always looked upon his mother as an unending source of inspiration and love. He had been pleased in the late 1980s when she suggested he open a museum and souvenir shop near the house, and he watched proudly as she greeted fans. Even after her death, Cash felt her presence. Whenever he was honored or otherwise felt blessed, he imagined her sharing the moment with him. At the same time, her death left him feeling increasing vulnerable. “Closing my mother’s coffin was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do,” Cash told Ralph Emery, the Nashville TV version of Larry King.

Three days after the funeral at the First Baptist Church in Hendersonville, Cash felt the shadow of death again: eight members of Reba McEntire’s band were killed when their chartered plane crashed into the side of a mountain near San Diego. The tragedy reminded him of all the other country entertainers who had been killed in plane crashes—including Patsy Cline—as well as the close calls he had had in the air. Cash was forced to think about his own mortality even more when, at McEntire’s request, he delivered the eulogy at the funeral for the band members.

One positive thing about this season of darkness—which had begun with his heart surgery in 1988—was a deepening of his need and love for his wife. The illnesses and pills had pretty much erased his lingering sexual urges, leaving the infidelities a thing of the past. He was grateful to June for the way she had stayed by his side through all the tough times, and he felt increasingly responsible for her as she underwent trials of her own. June sensed this change in him, and she too felt closer and more devoted.

Until country music set up shop along the Highway 76 strip in the small town of Branson in the Missouri Ozarks, the community’s only claim to pop culture fame was that it was part of the character Jed Clampett’s old stomping grounds in the TV series
Beverly Hillbillies.
The show’s creator, Paul Henning, spent time in Branson as a boy, and the town was mentioned—along with several other Ozark towns—in the show’s early episodes outlining Clampett’s past.

Branson’s identity became tied to country music through a series of events in the 1980s. Developers saw country music as a way to lure tourists. First, the Roy Clark Celebrity Theatre opened early in the decade and served as a showcase for name entertainers. By the start of the 1990s, other country stars, including Mel Tillis, Ray Stevens, and Mickey Gilley, opened theaters, and millions of tourists a year were streaming into the entertainment center. To performers, Branson offered a place to perform without having to travel hundreds of miles between shows.

Cash was intrigued when a Southern California investor, David Green, approached him with a plan not only to build a 2,500-seat theater for him but also to construct a $35 million entertainment complex called Cash Country. Best of all, Cash didn’t have to put any of his own money into the eighty-acre project, which would include an amusement park, go-car track, and souvenir shop. He’d get a royalty for the use of his name. Branson also promised an easier lifestyle. “The idea was to cut down on the road,” Lou Robin says.

Not everybody thought it was a good move. Most contemporary country best-sellers looked at the city the way rock artists in the seventies and eighties looked at Las Vegas showrooms: it was decidedly unhip. “It was impulse,” Rosanne says of the project. “Like ‘Strawberry Cake’ and ‘The Baron,’ like ‘Chicken in Black.’ All impulse….He was floundering a bit; there was something desperate about it and confused. He was trying to find his center. I think he realized that. I have a letter from him where he asks me to come and play at his theater in Branson, and I remember when I got it, I just kind of groaned, ‘How long is this going to last?’”

Despite Cash’s reservations, the appeal was too strong; he was in. With his star aboard, Green held a press conference in Branson on April 30 to announce the project, and construction began six months later.

“David Green made it all sound so perfect,” Stielper says. “John and June could come off the road—a lot of expenses saved—and settle into Branson, in his own theater, where the people would come to him. At that point in his life—the Mercury relationship was dead, he was hemorrhaging money—it was too good to be true. And it was.”

With the opening of the theater set for spring of 1992, Cash continued to tour steadily in 1991. He spent most of May in Australia with The Highwaymen, then a week in June with the group in Las Vegas. After more than fifty shows on his own, including some in Europe, he re-teamed with The Highwaymen in November in the States. The only recording was for a Christmas album, which was released by Delta Records after Mercury passed. He and June spent the holidays in Jamaica, where he enjoyed many fun-filled hours on the golf course driving range—not swinging a club but driving a golf cart around at high speed while John Rollins’s son Ted leaned out of the cart and tried to grab golf balls off the ground. “It was best played when the driving range was active,” Rollins says. “We called the game ‘ball busters,’ and we both thought it should be an Olympic sport.”

Cash welcomed in 1992 with another major award. In an emotional ceremony on January 15 at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York City, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Introducing Cash, Lyle Lovett praised his music for helping show the world what happens when “rural sensibilities and values mix with an urban environment.”

For his part, Cash was on edge. He had never considered himself a true rock ’n’ roller, and he worried that performers who were closer to the rock tradition would resent his inclusion. Indeed, there was some public questioning of Cash’s credentials—enough for music journalist Karen Schoemer to write a stirring defense in the
New York Times:
“Mr. Cash’s voice has a somber, bracing dignity that seems willing to bend or flinch for no one. His songs take their imagery from American mythos: train wheels, state lines, prison walls, barroom brawls, cotton fields, rivers and floods as great as those that swept the Bible. His characters…live by a rigid code of ethics that harks back to the Old West, yet Mr. Cash gives them all a resonance that speaks to the rebellious spirit rock cherishes so dearly. Man in Black, outlaw of justice, friend to the downtrodden, Mr. Cash has always been poised on the cusp between right and wrong, shadow and light; he walks the line between country sincerity and rock and roll autonomy.”

To his relief, Cash found none of that questioning among the musicians and guests at the ceremony. He was touched by the warmth backstage of such major players as Keith Richards, John Fogerty, and record producer Phil Spector. Cash had spent the previous night working on a speech but ended up speaking extemporaneously. Rather than reflect on his own accomplishments, he thanked people who had helped him—especially Sam Phillips and Jack Clement. But he devoted most of his time, his voice quivering with emotion in places, expressing gratitude to the artists who had influenced him, country figures such as Hank Williams and the Carter Family, as well as blues and gospel artists, notably Sister Rosetta Tharpe. He also praised Alan Lomax’s field recordings in the 1930s and 1940s, saying, “I listened to those by the hour and by the day, and the week, and the month.”

On the day after the ceremony, Cash relaxed in his hotel suite, taking phone calls from well-wishers, including Bob Dylan, and joking with family members, including Rosanne, whose favorite moment was when her father joined a line of celebrated rock guitarists on a freewheeling version of Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.”

“That was the most psychedelic experience of my life,” Rosanne said, laughing so hard that she doubled up in the chair. “I mean, I’m the kid who wore a black armband to school the day Hendrix died…so the last thing I ever thought I would see was my daddy on a stage playing acoustic guitar on ‘Purple Haze.’”

Cash laughed along. “I got the biggest kick out of it [the jam] when Keith Richards saw that I was watching Fogerty to get the keys we were supposed to be playing and Keith leaned over and said, ‘Thank God you’re watching him, because I sure don’t know what the hell I’m doing either.’

“But you know what really blew me away? I was standing at the urinal in the rest room before the dinner and I heard this voice behind me singing ‘Loading Coal,’ which is probably one of the most obscure songs I ever recorded [from the
Ride This Train
album]. I wondered who in the world could be singing that song, and when I looked around, I saw Keith, and he had this big smile on his face. So I turned around and we sang the chorus together. That’s when I guess I knew everything was going to be okay.”

This was one time when Cash was not making up a story. Keith Richards once described himself as a Johnny Cash freak—to the point of paying him this remarkable compliment: “As far as early rock ’n’ roll goes, if someone came up to me and for some reason they could only get a collection of one person’s music, I’d say ‘Chuck Berry is important, but, man, you’ve got to get the Cash.’”

Cash was only a month away from turning sixty, but he was feeling briefly renewed. After two nights performing at the Trump Castle Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, he and June headed back to Israel to film an Easter TV special for the Nashville Network. When the cable channel eventually passed on the project, Cash and aides redesigned the footage into a forty-five-minute home video titled
Return to the Promised Land,
which was released in the fall of 1993 by Billy Graham’s World Wide Pictures. It was finally time for Branson.

Most of the complex in Branson was still in the early stages of construction, but the Johnny Cash Theater itself was scheduled to open on May 15, even though it looked far from finished when Cash did a national TV interview early that month with Larry King. Cash had been increasingly dubious about the project as he learned of various setbacks in construction. Still, he was prepared to fulfill his contract.

Under his deal with Green, Cash would perform ninety-four dates between May and December, sometimes a matinee as well as an evening show. He was guaranteed $30,000 per day and 35 percent of box office grosses if receipts totaled $65,000 for the day. The main lure continued to be the break from highways and airports. Cash planned to be joined onstage in Branson by June, the Carter Family, John Carter Cash, and a four-piece band that included W. S. Holland.

Because Cash wouldn’t be appearing there full-time, Green asked Lou Robin to book some other acts to fill in the vacant nights. Among those Robin signed were Wayne Newton, who had been a huge draw for years in Las Vegas and was a real coup for upstart Branson, as well as magician David Copperfield, rock veterans the Everly Brothers, and such country stars as Eddie Rabbitt and Crystal Gayle. But it was all for nothing. The theater wasn’t ready by May 15 or July 15. In August, Green threw in the towel and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

The news jolted Cash. He worried that his reputation would take another hit, because many people in Nashville, not realizing he hadn’t actually invested in the project, would see Cash Country as his failure. He also felt bad for the workmen and suppliers who hadn’t been fully paid. Even before the official bankruptcy, Cash was angry—doubly so because he had been seduced into what he had come to see as a demeaning career move. In a May 30 letter to Marty Stuart, he took a slap at the pandering entertainers and undemanding audiences he saw in the tourist center: “If he (or she) is an entertainer each show should be opened with the line—‘Good evening. Elvis will be out a little later.’”

With his plans suddenly up in the air, Cash headed to New York in mid-October to appear on
Late Night with David Letterman
and then pay tribute to Bob Dylan during a televised thirtieth-anniversary salute to the singer before sixteen thousand people at Madison Square Garden. During the show, whose cast also included Tom Petty, Eric Clapton, and Dylan, John and June sang “It Ain’t Me, Babe” to a warm response.