Johnny Cash: The Life (60 page)

Then, unexpectedly, Branson came calling for a second time. A federal bankruptcy judge approved Green’s $4.1 million sale of the property in November to Branson-based developers, who announced they hoped to begin hosting shows at the theater the following spring. Jim Thomas, one of the new buyers, had doubted that Cash would want to perform at the theater because of his hard feelings from the Cash Country experience. But he was wrong. Cash still needed the money, and his body was pleading for a break from the road. As Cash continued to tour on his own and with The Highwaymen, Lou Robin worked out a deal for him to play the newly renamed venue which was now set to open in the spring of 1993: the Wayne Newton Theatre.

What proved to be the most important thirty-day stretch in Cash’s career since Folsom began in early February 1993 with an encounter in Dublin with the Irish band U2 and ended with his meeting an admiring record producer in California.

Cash had first met Bono in the late 1980s when Jack Clement brought Bono and bassist Adam Clayton by Cash’s house for dinner. In most cases when Cash met with admiring young rock musicians, including the Beatles in San Francisco in the 1960s, the visits were pleasant, but little more than that. It was different with U2, especially the group’s young lead singer. A bit like Cash himself, Bono was at once respectful and rebellious.

Cash had liked the way this articulate and entertaining young man was interested not just in music but in history and spirituality. Cash ended up talking about Saint Paul with Bono that night at dinner and gave him a signed copy of
Man in White.
The pair even tried writing a song together, titled “Ellis Island,” though they never finished it. Cash enjoyed it when Bono good-naturedly challenged his claim that he was descended from Scottish royalty, insisting instead that Cash was Irish. Recalling the meeting years later, Bono says, “I told him there was this large Cash family in Ireland and they all looked exactly like him.”

The Irishman’s favorite moment came at dinner. “We were all holding hands around the table and Johnny said the most beautiful, most poetic grace you’ve ever heard. Then he leaned over to me with this devilish look in his eye and said, ‘But I sure miss the drugs.’ It was that contradiction that I admired about his music as well. It was hard and it was caring, it was about sinful behavior and devotion.”

Bono and Clayton had such a great time that the band paid homage to Cash in their
Rattle and Hum
album package with a huge photo of them in the Sun studio just beneath a framed photo of Phillips and Cash.

In the early weeks of 1993, Bono was working on a song, originally called “The Pilgrim,” for the band’s upcoming
Zooropa
album. The narrative was inspired by a character in the Book of Ecclesiastes—specifically a sinner’s lonely, tortured search for wisdom and faith. To freshen the story, Bono gave it a futuristic spin. The band had the melody down, but Bono wasn’t pleased with the words or his vocal. When he heard about Cash’s upcoming concert date in Dublin, he realized the song would be perfect for Cash. Changing the title to “The Wanderlust” and then “The Wanderer,” Bono wrote the final version of the tune with Cash in mind.

On the day of Cash’s Dublin show in February, Bono invited him to join U2 in the studio to record the song. He was flattered but anxious. It had been three years since he’d had a meaningful solo recording session, and here he was with the biggest rock band in the world. To make him even more unsettled, the band’s swirling, highly layered techno-ish sound was a long way from
boom-chicka-boom.
Was he really right for this song? Was the band just trying to be nice and help him gain some attention?

As soon as Cash read the lyrics, however, he began to feel at ease. Talking about the song later, he said, “It’s the search for three important things: God, that woman, and myself.” He delivered each line with a conviction and empathy that rivaled his performance on “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down.” These weren’t his words, but they were his story:

Bono has frequently said there’s a moment during the band’s best nights onstage when the feeling in the venue is so joyful that it’s as if God is walking through the room. Bono and Cash both felt that spirit during this session.

“To me, Johnny Cash—with all his contradictions—was a quintessential character of the scriptures, or at least the characters in the Bible that interested me,” Bono says. “I remember at Trinity College [in Dublin] when someone put out a pamphlet pointing out how flawed all the people in the Bible were….David was an adulterer, Moses was a murderer, Jacob was a cheater. These were some wild blokes. Well, one day someone put out the same pamphlet, but wrote on it something like ‘That’s why I’m a believer. If God had time for these flawed characters, then God has time for me.’ And I think Johnny and I shared that view.”

At the Dublin concert, Cash brought Bono, The Edge, and Larry Mullen on stage that night to sing “Big River” with him.

Despite the excitement of the session, Cash left Dublin in much the same melancholy mood that followed the Grammy Award ceremony. The brilliance of the song made him feel all the more uncertain about his place in the music world. He couldn’t even imagine U2 actually putting the track on the album, and he thought about calling Bono to say he’d understand if the band wanted to redo it with Bono’s voice. But Bono beat him to the punch. He called to assure Cash that the song was going to be on the album. “I felt like it was a real connection, a very spiritual thing,” Cash said of his work with U2. “These guys are really spiritual people. I also loved the way they reached millions of people with their message.”

Heading back to the States, Cash tried to prepare mentally for what he expected to be the last chapter of his musical career: his Branson debut in May. But first he had some more tour dates, starting with a couple of routine club stops in California—the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco on February 26 and the Rhythm Café in Santa Ana the following day. For someone used to playing 18,000-seat arenas in both regions, the size of the clubs—about 550 seats each—was too significant to ignore. But Santa Ana was where he met Rick Rubin.

THE ONLY CHILD OF AN
upper-middle-class family from Long Island, New York, Rick Rubin grew up on hard rock and punk, but his entry into the record business was via hip-hop, a genre he became obsessed with while a pre-med student at New York University in the late 1970s. He especially loved the way DJs in clubs came up with dynamic sounds by “scratching”—rapidly twisting and turning vinyl recordings on spinning turntables. When he noticed that rap recordings lacked that club energy because producers used real musicians instead of turntable DJs, Rubin began making records in his NYU dorm room employing “scratching” and other bits of turntable wizardry. The difference was immense.

After gaining attention around New York City when the first record he produced was a huge club hit, he teamed with a bright young entrepreneur named Russell Simmons to start Def Jam Recordings, which they would build into the Motown of hip-hop. At Def Jam, Rubin produced such hit acts as the socially conscious Public Enemy and rap ’n’ punk rockers the Beastie Boys. In the early 1990s, wanting to expand his musical terrain, he moved to Los Angeles, where he won even more success and acclaim working with rock and heavy-metal acts, including the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Slayer, and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. By his late twenties he was being hailed as his generation’s Phil Spector.

The path to Cash grew out of a desire to set new challenges for himself. Instead of working just with youngish rockers, he wanted to connect with someone who was “great and important, but who wasn’t doing their best work. I wanted to see if I could help them do great work again.”

Cash was skeptical when Lou Robin told him a rap producer wanted to make a record with him, but he figured, what the heck. He invited Rubin to come to the show at the Rhythm Café, about an hour’s drive south of L.A. When the burly young man with the long, unruly beard and gentle, Zen-like manner walked into the dressing room, Cash didn’t know what to make of him. Cash later described his first impression of Rubin as “the ultimate hippie, bald on top, but with hair down over his shoulders, a beard that looked as if it had never been trimmed and clothes that would have done a wino proud.”

Rubin was a man of as few words as Cash, which meant there wasn’t a lot said that night. Robin remembers them sitting on a couch, just staring at each other for several minutes. June thought the idea of John working with a heavy-metal producer was absurd, but Cash sensed an independence in Rubin that he liked. Besides, there were no other options. He thought his record career was over. He agreed to get together with Rubin to see what they could come up with.

Thanks to Mercury’s lack of interest in Cash, who still owed the label one more album, Rubin was easily able to work out a deal. He paid Mercury a modest royalty on Cash’s future album sales and got the rights to sign Cash to his American Recordings label. “More than anything, I got the feeling that he was curious about why I would want to work with him,” Rubin says. “My first challenge was to rebuild his confidence.”

“I’d love to hear some of your favorite songs.”

Those were Rubin’s first words to Cash when they sat down in the producer’s spacious home high above the celebrated Sunset Strip in Los Angeles on May 17, 1993, to begin exploring the process of making an album together. It was just two weeks before Cash’s debut in Branson.

Normally, Rubin would spend lots of time talking to acts he was working with for the first time, trying to learn about them so he could better understand their music. With the reserved, soft-spoken Cash, Rubin realized he needed to reverse the process; he would learn about Cash the person through his music. Wanting to keep things informal, Rubin didn’t even turn on the recording equipment when he asked Cash to sing some of his favorite songs. Accompanying himself on acoustic guitar, Cash responded with all kinds of tunes—cowboy songs, train songs, gospel songs, heartbreak songs, funny songs.

On their second night together, Cash went into a number that caught Rubin’s attention. The producer didn’t know if it was a song or a poem; he just knew it was the kind of strong personal statement he associated with Cash’s best work in the 1950s and 1960s. He reached over and turned on the recording equipment and asked Cash to repeat the number. To Rubin’s mind, he wasn’t recording songs for a record, just assembling ideas. The song was “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie,” a popular nineteenth-century folk song that Cash learned as a boy in Dyess and included in the
Ballads of the True West
album. But it wasn’t the song that intrigued Rubin so much as the two-minute recitation that preceded it, a personal statement of faith.

“It got back to the sort of mystical root of who Johnny Cash is,” Rubin says. “It was something that sounded like it was coming from someplace deep inside of him. It was epic, and that’s what Johnny was to me—epic.”

The recitation, in fact, was a poem, “A Cowboy’s Prayer,” written in the 1920s by Charles Badger Clark, who was the first poet laureate of South Dakota. The words summarized Cash’s own feelings about finding his greatest connection with God outside church walls.

When he finished the number again, Cash paused, then started it a third time, perhaps feeling he could do a better version of it. Apparently satisfied, he went on to “Just the Other Side of Nowhere,” a song from one of the first demo tapes Kris Kristofferson had ever given him. Again, Rubin cheered him on.

Warmed by Rubin’s show of enthusiasm, Cash then did something that surprised even him. He started singing a song he had written four years earlier but refused to record because he was too protective of it; he didn’t want it wasted on a Mercury album that no one would hear. The song, “Drive On,” was an evocative look at buddies from Vietnam and the emotional scars of that war. Again Rubin was intrigued. Cash later explained that the song was “really a piece of history.” The lines, including the “drive on” exhortation, came right out of the mouths of troops, and he wanted the song to demonstrate their resilience and resolve. “It wasn’t pro-war or antiwar or anything else,” Cash said. “It’s just pro-people.” The song also echoed the “Sail on!” optimism of the Joaquin Miller poem he’d loved as a boy.

It was the next song Cash played that night, however, that proved to be the breakthrough in the pair’s relationship: “Delia’s Gone.”

Looking back at those early meetings, Cash often drew a parallel between Rubin’s patient manner and Sam Phillips’s similar approach in the studio. As he told music writer Sylvie Simmons, “Sam Phillips put me in front of that microphone at Sun Records in 1955 for the first time and said, ‘Let’s hear what you’ve got. Sing your heart out,’ and I’d sing one or two and he’d say, ‘Sing another one, let’s hear one more.’”

The even more remarkable parallel, Cash would come to understand, was between what Rubin did for him in those Sunset Strip get-togethers and what Phillips did with a fledgling Elvis Presley in 1954. When Elvis sat down with Phillips, he needed direction—he needed an outside listener to point out where his strengths lay. During Presley’s first recording session, Phillips gave it to him by declaring after the impromptu version of “That’s All Right,” “That’s it.”

Though Rubin had never heard it before, “Delia’s Gone” was the old folk-blues song that Cash had rewritten in the 1960s into his own statement about violence and remorse. By singling the song out, Rubin was saying, in essence, “That’s it.” It went:

This was the tough, hard-edged side of Cash that Rubin wanted to hear, the side he felt had largely been missing from Cash’s recordings since he became a symbol of American goodness and family in the 1970s. What Cash had lost during that period was the confidence and inner drive to continue pushing musical and cultural boundaries. Rubin’s goal was to help Cash regain his confidence in ways that would brush away all those years of uneven, sometimes indifferent recordings—almost as if Cash had never lost track of the bold, maverick tradition of his best fifties and sixties recordings. Rubin didn’t want to take Cash back to the earlier decades, but he did want to see what kind of music Cash, at sixty-one, would make if he could recapture the spirit of the singer-songwriter who first electrified the pop world at Folsom Prison.

“I’m talking about the original Johnny Cash who loomed large and was surrounded by all this darkness, yet who still had vulnerability,” Rubin says. “I wanted, if you will, to take him back to the ‘I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die’ Man in Black, and ‘Delia’s Gone’ did it perfectly. He kills the girl, and then is remorseful. I loved how the brutal act was followed by this haunted life. I was trying to get him to go from all these years of thinking his best stuff was behind him and just phoning in records to thinking we could make his best albums ever. I don’t know if he really believed that, but he was willing to give it a try.”

Not only was Rubin surprised by how good a song “Drive On” was, but he was even more impressed by “Like a Soldier,” another song Cash wrote during the Mercury period but kept to himself until he felt he was in good hands. In it, Cash used the image of a duty-bound military survivor to describe his own struggles and the prospects for a blessing of salvation. In some ways it was a sequel to Kristofferson’s song “The Pilgrim, Chapter 33,” with its Cash-inspired lines about “a walkin’ contradiction partly truth and partly fiction / Taking every wrong direction on his lonely way back home.” In “Like a Soldier,” Cash was back home and looking back over his journey.

The lyrics of the graceful song go in part:

Rubin was amazed by what he was hearing. This was even more than he had imagined. Almost immediately, he began thinking about ways to enhance the impact of the songs by applying more musical shading, but he wasn’t ready to bring musicians in yet. He wanted more of the pure Cash. Things were going so well that Rubin began suggesting a few songs for Cash, notably “Thirteen,” a tale of bad luck and hard times written for Cash by heavy-metal rocker Glenn Danzig, and “Down There by the Train,” a story of sin and salvation by Tom Waits.

“I wasn’t trying to look for songs that would ‘connect’ Johnny to a younger audience,” Rubin says. “I was just trying to find songs that really made sense for his voice. By that I don’t mean baritone. I mean resonate with his character so he could sing the words and have them feel like he wrote them.”

After three days they had nearly three dozen songs on tape. Rubin was ecstatic. And as he left for Branson, Cash was cautiously optimistic.

Going from Rubin’s living room to the Wayne Newton Theatre in Branson was a case of culture shock in the extreme. Cash wasn’t even able to enjoy the luster of playing in his own theater, as he had earlier envisioned. All the attention in the venue was focused on Newton. When the theater opened in early May, the newspaper account told it all: “If anyone still doubted that Branson had hit the big time, they needed only to be on hand last weekend when a glowing spaceship arrived amid blasts of smoke and streams of laser lights. In a stage show the likes of which this southwest Missouri town has never seen, the King of Las Vegas took his place on his own Ozarks throne.”

A concluding paragraph underscored Cash’s secondary role: “When [Newton’s] away from Branson for short stints back in Las Vegas this summer, Johnny Cash will fill in.”

Things were worse than Cash imagined when he opened his first two-week engagement on May 31. The atmosphere was touristy, leading him to wonder if the audience even cared about the music. Most of the crowd were bus tour groups who were simply attending shows that the tour organizers had lined up for them. They expected to be led backstage after the show for autographs, pictures, and chit-chat, things that Cash might have enjoyed at one time in his career but not now that his health was such an issue.