Johnny Cash: The Life (61 page)

Kathy Cash operated a souvenir shop in Branson at the time. “Dad hated the whole retirement aura of Branson,” she recalls. “One day he said, ‘Do you know the difference between
Jurassic Park
and Branson? Blue hair.’”

As the word got out that Cash wasn’t going to be available for all the gladhanding, attendance at his shows slowly decreased. Paid attendance the second week, for instance, ranged from 907 to 2,084. His guarantee was down $10,000 from the 1991 pact and the number of days was cut to forty.

Two weeks after the Branson engagement, Cash was back in Rubin’s living room offering new versions of songs from the May sessions as well as recording additional ones. Rubin continued to tape his vocals to help him decide which songs might work best together on an album.

Part of Rubin’s genius was that he didn’t simply portray Cash as a rebel. He wanted to break through the public image of Cash as a superhero by capturing his human side—the struggle and the pain and the grit. Says Rubin, “When I asked artists what they admired about him, that’s what they often mentioned—that vulnerable, hurt aspect, the man who wouldn’t give up.”

Rubin especially liked Cash’s rendition of Danzig’s “Thirteen,” and he asked Cash to open the new session by redoing the song, this time accompanied on guitar by Danzig himself. Pleased with the result, Rubin began thinking the tune could sound great on the album alongside “Delia’s Gone.”

Cash’s hopes for the coming album continued to rise, while many of those around him tried to caution him against putting too much faith in this “bearded hippie.” They didn’t want to see Cash set himself up for another painful fall.

Tom Petty, whose new album,
Wildflowers,
was being produced by Rubin concurrently, was confident that Cash was in good hands. A fan ever since buying the
Folsom Prison
album as a teenager and seeing Cash weekly on the ABC show, Petty admired him for his socially conscious music and for bringing so many cool guests on the show. “He wrote about real things and America in a way that didn’t feel phony to me,” says Petty.

Like so many, Petty lost track of Cash for years—remembering only one album from the 1970s and 1980s: the dreadful
Look at Them Beans.
After playing it, he asked himself, “‘God, what’s happened to him?’ It was obvious he was kinda lost,” recalls Petty, “but I still admired him for what he had done earlier.”

When Rubin mentioned to Petty early in 1993 that he was thinking about working with Cash, Petty urged him on. “Rick was just over the moon about working with Johnny. I don’t know if any record meant more to him than Johnny’s.”

Two days after returning to Branson on July 6, there was another death in Cash’s circle—his older brother Roy, who had been second only to his mother in encouraging him to become a singer. John and June attended the funeral in Memphis. He at first declined when his nephew Roy Jr. asked him to deliver the eulogy. “Oh, Roy, I don’t know if I can do that,” Cash objected. “I may come apart.” But he eventually relented, and he expressed his love for his brother. He was most moved that day when Roy Jr.’s daughter Kellye, Miss America 1987, sang the closing hymn, “I Bowed on My Knees and Cried Holy.” A few days later, Cash called her to say he’d had no “real peace in Roy’s passing and the funeral until I heard you sing that piece of music, and I now know that Roy is in heaven.”

There was still more reason for Cash to despair. He wasn’t the only one relying on pills to keep him going. Both June and John Carter were struggling against growing addiction problems.

John Carter, in his early twenties, had checked in to rehab units in 1991 and 1992, but he was showing signs of deepening depression. His world turned infinitely darker in 1993 when he found his mother passed out on the floor in Branson. He rushed to her side, flashing on all the times when he had feared for his father’s life in similar situations. “Mom!” he shouted, “Wake up! Please, Mom.”

If what happened next hadn’t been so tragic, he wrote later, it would have been almost comical. “She rolled over, her long hair splayed over her face, opened her eyes, and focused on me deliberately. ‘I am awake,’ she answered calmly. ‘I was in meditation.’”

It was John Carter’s introduction to his mother’s addiction, and it terrified him. Just as drugs stole his father from him in the 1980s, he feared addiction might now take his mother away.

In
Anchored in Love
he wrote: “For so long Mom had obsessed over the addictions of her husband, her daughters and her son. Next she moved into denial. Then came the time, I believe, when she had simply had enough, when the struggle with the addicts in her life overcame her strength and resolve. With no better way of describing it, I think the cumulative mental, physical and emotional pain combined in such a way that the drug use eventually seemed OK to her.

“She would never have acknowledged that she too was an addict. I believe she always had the illusion of control, as though the drugs were her friends, her helpers. I think she thought of herself as the master, not the slave, of the pills she took. After all, she never got angry, fell down or picked a fight with her loved ones when she was under the influence of narcotics. She simply stopped speaking in full sentences and went off into her own world. Her mind was not the same.”

With all this heartache around Cash, music once again became his chief escape and hope, a way to rally against the tensions and pressures—physical, emotional, and financial—in his life. Though he still drew upon his faith, he was finally back to a place where he was looking to music for self-affirmation. Through every concert and every bus ride and every sleepless night, he longed for the day when he would go back to Rubin’s living room and sing his heart out.

When recording resumed July 21, Cash was unusually productive. Over three days he sang more than two dozen songs, including two more that had been suggested by Rubin: Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold” and Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on The Wire.” He also played a new one of his own, “Redemption,” a solemn tale of the liberating power of the blood of Jesus.

As Cash headed back on the road for most of August, Rubin brought in some musicians to explore dressing up some of the tracks—guitarist Mike Campbell from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and bassist Flea and drummer Chad Smith, both from the Chili Peppers. To experiment further, he later went through the songs again with the Red Devils, a blues-rock band that was generating a lot of excitement on the L.A. club scene.

One song Cash recorded during this period was “Devil’s Right Hand” by an acclaimed young singer-songwriter in Cash’s own maverick country-rock tradition. Steve Earle was one of scores of musicians who would name Cash’s TV show as a major influence. “That show was my main cultural touchstone,” Earle says. “Where else could I see Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and Derek and the Dominos alongside Roger Miller and Merle Haggard? The show made me feel that having long hair and wearing cowboy boots in Texas wasn’t so weird after all.” (When Earle spent two months in jail for cocaine and weapons possession in 1994, he remembers fondly that Cash was one of only three musicians who wrote him a note. The others were Emmylou Harris and Waylon Jennings.)

After weeks of experimenting, Rubin decided that less was more; he favored the intimacy of the solo recordings. In fact, he would use those living room vocals for the record. “I didn’t want anything to distract from Johnny,” Rubin recalls. “I wanted his presence to fill the record.” With the format resolved, Rubin felt it was time for the next step. He wanted Cash to perform the songs live, so he booked the hip Viper Room on the Sunset Strip for the night of December 3.

He chose the Viper Room, which was partly owned by Johnny Depp, because it was small; Cash’s appearance there would be more of an exclusive event than if he had played one of the bigger mainstream clubs, such as the Troubadour or the Roxy. Mainly, however, Rubin had Cash’s needs more in mind than the audience’s. He wanted to introduce John to the role of facing an audience alone.

“That was an enormous leap—to go from the safety onstage or in the studio of singing with a band behind you to just facing an audience with your own guitar,” Rubin says. “Once we decided that we were going to make it a solo acoustic album, I noticed a change in him when he was just singing in my living room. Before, he had been relaxed and singing in a very personal, intimate way. But suddenly he changed. He began
performing
the songs, and it wasn’t the same.

“What I was looking for was a direct transmission from his heart, and we had that at first. There was even a point—and we have it on tape—where I am saying to him between songs, ‘Can we try to do it a little more personal?’ and he understood, because he says to himself, ‘Get off the stage, Cash.’”

For Rubin, the Viper Room show was part of the process of getting Cash comfortable singing the songs by himself. He figured once Cash got over the anxiety of singing in front of an audience—and he was terrified that night—it would be easier for him to sing when he returned to the informality of Rubin’s living room.

Cash had his usual second thoughts about the whole approach. To try the solo role on someone whose judgment he trusted, he sang several of the songs he was planning to sing at the Viper Room for Marty Stuart in Nashville. “I could tell he had done this for four or five other people, looking for [affirmation],” Stuart says. “I told him, ‘I can’t see nothing wrong with this; this is as pure as it gets. I think it resets country music’s clock. It absolutely takes it back to a new beginning, setting it up for the twenty-first century. In some way, it can parallel what the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers did at Bristol.’ I said, ‘Country music needs that, and in broader terms, American music could use it too.’”

At the Viper, where Cash was introduced by Depp, the tastemaker audience—including Sean Penn and members of the Chili Peppers—was enthralled. Rubin sensed a buzz starting even before Cash concluded his ninety-minute set with renditions of some of his early hits. “Cash was nervous, but the show was a triumph,” Petty recalls. “Johnny was so happy. He felt like he was starting to matter again.” (Depp was Cash’s first choice when asked who he would like to see portray him in any future movie.) To follow up quickly, Rubin took Cash back into his living room three more times that week to make the final series of recordings—and sure enough, Cash was looser. The Viper Room experience had made him more comfortable singing on his own. On the first night, Cash even played Rick another of his unrecorded songs, “Let the Train Whistle Blow,” a bittersweet farewell that combined warmth, independence, and bravado.

After those sessions, Rubin and Cash picked thirteen songs for the album, and Rubin then listened to all the various solo versions to pick the most evocative take on each song. Most of the final choices, as it turned out, dated back to the original living room sessions in May. Cash was pleased with the decision to make the album barebones. He told Rubin he had been thinking about a solo acoustic album for years; he even had a title,
Late and Alone.
Rubin preferred
American Recordings.
He felt it better fit Cash’s classic status in American popular music, and, of course, it was the title of Rubin’s record label. With the content settled during the early days of 1994, Rubin and his staff focused on marketing.

He got an unexpected assist when U2’s
Zooropa
became not only an international best-seller that stayed on the U.S. sales charts for forty weeks but also a huge critical success, thanks in part to “The Wanderer.”

Writing in
Rolling Stone,
Anthony DeCurtis couldn’t have given more glowing praise to the collaboration: “It’s a wildly audacious move that could so easily have proved a pathetic embarrassment—U2 overreaching for significance again—but it works brilliantly. Speak-singing with all the authority of an Old Testament prophet, Cash movingly serves as a link to a lost world of moral surety, literally replacing the various corrupted and confused personas Bono…had occupied in the course of the album. Cash’s ‘Wanderer’ is no less lost than the album’s other dead souls, but his yearning to be found and redeemed sets him apart.”

Cash didn’t know what to expect in the weeks before
American Recordings
was released in May 1994. He even mailed advance copies to a few people whose judgment he valued, asking the straightforward question “What do you think my fans will think of this?” He was encouraged by the responses. At the same time, an equally anxious Rubin was heartened when his marketing and publicity teams reported they were finding lots of interest in the project. He was overjoyed the day he got an early copy of
Rolling Stone’
s review of
American Recordings.

The write-up wasn’t just a rave; it was a game changer in every sense for Cash and Rubin. Not only did the magazine give the album the coveted lead review space, but it was paired with a review of an album by another American musical landmark, Frank Sinatra. To make things even better, Anthony DeCurtis gave the Sinatra album high praise, calling it the “finest available glimpse of the singer onstage: easy, affable and in command,” but went on to say the Cash album was “an even more crowning achievement.”

He called the album at once “monumental and viscerally intimate, fiercely true to the legend of Johnny Cash and entirely contemporary.” And DeCurtis was just warming up. He maintained that Cash’s voice sounded better than it had in more than forty years, and his singing reflected “a control reminiscent of Hemingway’s writing. Not a feeling is flaunted, not a jot of sentimentality is permitted, but every quaver, every shift in volume, every catch in a line resonates like a private apocalypse.”

Cash read the review time and again, trying to convince himself that his years in musical exile were over. It was, to his knowledge, the first time in two decades that
Rolling Stone
had even bothered to review one of his albums. Over the next few weeks, he read scores of raves in other publications as well. “It’s been ages since anyone of Cash’s stature bared himself so completely—and successfully—as the Man in Black does on his first album for Rick Rubin’s record label,” Randy Lewis wrote in the
Los Angeles Times.
“With just his own unmistakably craggy voice and acoustic-guitar accompaniment, Cash has collected 13 songs that peer into the dark corners of the American soul. In that respect, it’s akin to Clint Eastwood’s ‘Unforgiven,’ both in its valedictory, folklore-rich tone and in its wealth of characters who embody good and evil in varying proportions. A milestone work for this legendary singer.”