Johnny Cash: The Life (62 page)

Though he wanted desperately for all his albums and artists to succeed, Rubin had developed a special fondness for Cash, and he dearly wanted him to regain the respect and attention he deserved. He also felt a responsibility: he had led Cash into this new, unknown territory.

To spread the word, Cash did a show and delivered the keynote address at the annual South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas, a prestigious showcase for vital new music. Knowing the importance of video in reaching record buyers, Rubin showcased Cash in a stark black-and-white video of “Delia’s Gone” in which Cash tossed dirt over the murdered Delia’s face as she lay in her open grave. MTV objected to some of the imagery in the video, which was directed by Anton Corbin, the Dutch photographer who had shot U2’s
Joshua Tree
album cover. Corbin defended his work, calling the video’s message “anti-violence.”

The resulting controversy delighted Rubin, who wanted to position Cash on the cutting edge of contemporary music. “From the beginning of rock ’n’ roll there’s always been a stark figure that never really fits,” he told
Rolling Stone.
“He’s still the quintessential outsider. In the hip-hop world you see all these bad boy artists who are juggling being on MTV and running from the law. Johnny was the originator of that.”

To further emphasize that maverick image, Rubin selected a photo for the album cover that showed a menacing Cash, wearing a full-length preacher’s coat and standing in the wilderness holding onto his guitar case with two dogs at his side. It was an image reminiscent of Robert Mitchum in the role of the crazed preacher in the film
The Night of the Hunter.
“They did the photo shoot while Johnny was on tour in Australia, and the idea was just to show him with his guitar,” Rubin says. “This stark image fit the mood of the album, but the whole thing about the dogs was an accident. John thought it was great—the fact that one was black and one was white. To him, it was the idea of sin and redemption.”

By most standards, the album was only a modest success. It’s easy to see why the country music establishment—including country radio—would turn a cold shoulder. Here was an “outsider,” Rick Rubin, stepping in and tampering with a Nashville artist. Plus, they maintained, this wasn’t even a country record. Cash was doing songs by a heavy-metal rocker and Tom Waits, for goodness’ sake. And finally, country radio had already turned Cash out to pasture; there was no reason to backtrack now.

Even so,
American Recordings
made it to the middle of the country charts, likely propelled by old fans intrigued by all the media praise. But the real audience for the album proved to be the young, adventurous wing of the rock ’n’ roll market. The album sold nearly 80,000 copies in its first two months—a figure the
New York Times
called disappointing. But it was a victory for Rubin and Cash. The CD sold more copies than any Cash album since
Man in Black
in 1971. By the end of the year, the figure had reached nearly 150,000.

More important to Rubin, the album’s impact on critics and tastemakers laid a foundation. “I felt as if we were starting from scratch and introducing a new recording artist,” Rubin says. “By those standards, the album was a huge success.”

For Cash, making music was once again a consuming force in his life. He was no longer, as he had for years, leaving everything to chance. He felt relevant.

“I was worried that I had blown everything by not treating my music seriously enough for all those years,” Cash told me. “I was even starting to think that no one would care about it after I was gone. But Rick made me think I might have a legacy after all…and even add to it. I vowed not to let it slip away again.”

Cash’s daughter Rosanne looked at the new relationship in even more dramatic terms. “Rick came along at exactly the right time,” she says. “Before Rick, Dad was depressed, discouraged. It was a powerful thing that happened between them, and Dad was completely revitalized and back to his old enthusiastic self. I think Rick saved his life at that moment. Well, maybe ‘saved his life’ is too strong, but…maybe not.”

CASH’S CREATIVE RESURGENCE
with
American Recordings
should have led to a victory lap—and a few shows served as just that, starting with an invitation-only industry audience at Fez Café, an intimate music club in New York City. It was three days before the release of the album in April, but the buzz was already strong. Cash was as nervous as his friend Mark Stielper had ever seen him. “He thought they would laugh at him,” says Stielper. “Instead, he was a god…and he was astonished.”

After years on the family circuit, Cash was self-conscious about playing to young rock audiences. “I feel a little pressure with this new surge, this new promotion,” he told me at the time. “It’s like ‘the old rebel is back,’ and what do I have to rebel about? There’s nothing right now, and it makes me feel like I’m playing a role, but that’s what show business is about. The important thing is I enjoy being out there again.”

To relate better to this new audience, Cash spent time familiarizing himself with some of the best young bands, especially Nirvana and its gifted leader Kurt Cobain, who spoke about youthful insecurities with such sensitivity and insight that he was widely hailed as the John Lennon of his generation. Cash identified strongly with the young man from Seattle, not just his struggle with drugs and early poverty, but also the fact that Cobain felt he didn’t deserve the adoration of fans around the world.

This was on Cash’s mind in the days after Cobain killed himself on April 5. “I can understand why Cobain felt that way, but he wasn’t justified in thinking he was a fraud,” Cash told me. “He was successful because he was speaking honestly from his gut, but we all worry about whether we deserve the attention. In the early years, I felt guilty about it all. I had come from this real poor background and I didn’t feel like I deserved all this money and attention. I kept thinking, ‘I’m not what they think I am. I don’t have all the answers. I’m not magic.’ But then you grow with it and you learn that it really doesn’t matter what other people think of you. You’re just one human being, and you’re doing the best you can. But it’s not easy. It almost destroyed me, too.”

The high point of Cash’s reconnection with the adventurous wing of the young rock world came when he appeared before more than fifty thousand fans on June 26 at one of England’s most popular outdoor festivals, Glastonbury. The safe thing would have been for him to perform on one of the festival’s secondary stages, but he agreed to test himself on the main stage. Sharing the bill with such established stars as Peter Gabriel and such upcoming ones as Radiohead and Rage Against the Machine, Cash—backed this time by his band, including John Carter on rhythm guitar—was again embraced by the audience during a set with a solo stint featuring four songs from the new album, including “Delia’s Gone” and “Let the Train Whistle Blow.”

Interviewed backstage for a TV broadcast, Cash was asked, “How does it feel to be cool again?”

Cash chuckled and acknowledged it felt great.

The audience looked so young to him when he walked onstage, he told the interviewer, he thought of saying, “Hello, grandchildren,” but the young faces mainly reminded him of the days when he and Elvis did shows together. “Feels like déjà vu,” he said. “No time has passed; it feels like that sometimes, no time has passed.”

British critics were as enthusiastic over the “new” Johnny Cash as their U.S. counterparts. Writing in
New Musical Express,
England’s most influential music weekly, Paul Moody declared, “Here’s a man so capable of putting on a show that we simply fall into the palm of his hand and let him take control…it’s a legend come to life before our eyes.” The rival
Melody Maker
agreed: Cash was “absolutely brilliant.”

Rubin and Lou Robin had hoped to follow Glastonbury with a main stage appearance two months later in the States before hundreds of thousands of fans at the twenty-fifth-anniversary salute to the granddaddy of all rock festivals, Woodstock. Other main stage acts ranged from Bob Dylan to one of the decade’s most dynamic young bands, Nine Inch Nails, featuring Trent Reznor, a favorite of Rubin’s. But Robin backed off when Woodstock organizers offered Cash only a spot on a secondary stage at the upstate New York affair. This disappointment was largely behind the scenes. To the public, Johnny Cash was back in a big way.

It was difficult for Cash to bounce back and forth between the acclaimed, spirit-raising gigs and the regular old concert trail, where a few young fans would show up, drawn by the new album, but most just wanted the old favorites. The mood of those shows was backward-looking, and Cash’s performances were inconsistent.

Rubin pushed strongly for Cash to invest in his future by devoting more time to shows with the cutting-edge sensibilities of
American Recordings,
but the traditional dates were more lucrative, and June too preferred that approach. There was also resistance from musicians in the Cash camp to anything associated with Rubin because he hadn’t used them on the recordings.

“I could tell from day one that Rick Rubin didn’t like me or the Johnny Cash band,” W. S. Holland says. “I don’t think any diehard Johnny Cash fans would pick those [Rubin albums] over the things he did earlier.” Others in the entourage felt that Rubin must dislike June Carter, because she didn’t appear on the records or onstage at the Viper Room or other club dates.

While Rubin did want his own musicians who would be comfortable moving from country to supercharged rock, he says the situation with June “was not about excluding her, but about playing to his [Cash’s] strength.”

Four weeks after the release of
American Recordings,
Cash was back in Branson, where things were worse than ever. After a bitter public dispute—and subsequent lawsuit—with Wayne Newton, the developers stripped Newton’s name from the theater and announced plans to sell it. Until a buyer was found, the owners would continue presenting shows, including Cash, in the renamed Shenandoah South Theatre. The problem, Lou Robin says, was that the owners didn’t aggressively promote the shows or court the all-important tour bus group business.

By the second engagement, which ran July 26 to August 13, Cash was doing matinee performances in the 2,500-seat theater for as few as 181 customers and evening shows for fewer than 300. The total attendance for the first week was 3,838. It didn’t help that Cash’s health was continuing to decline. He’d spend much of his day in bed, trying to save his strength for the shows.

Still, there were special moments—including a return to Carnegie Hall on September 14, where Rosanne joined him onstage for a duet of “I Still Miss Someone.” It was a moment of healing for both of them, a break from the years of guilt on his part and resentment on hers. “As we sang together,” Rosanne said later, “all the old pain dissolved and the old longing to connect was completely satisfied under the lights and the safety of a few thousand people who loved us, thus achieving something I’d been trying to get since I was six years old. It was truly magic for both of us.”

On that high note, Cash was soon in San Francisco, where he headlined at one of the nation’s most important rock showcases, the Fillmore West. Then it was back to Branson on October 6 for another unbearable ten days. Later in the month Cash taped his second guest appearance on the network TV drama
Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman,
the story of a female doctor in the post–Civil War West; the Cashes would become close friends with Jane Seymour, the show’s star, and her husband, James Keach. While gathering information about Cash’s life for a film he wanted to make, Keach developed a strong point of view regarding his subject. “I think most artists suffer,” he says. “They feel ‘less than’ in some way or another. That’s what their writing is all about; they’re searching. John was a very shy, humble man who was searching for God and himself.”

Cash also performed with Billy Graham at a Crusade in Atlanta and met up with The Highwaymen in Los Angeles to begin work on the group’s third album. Although the second album hadn’t done as well as the first, the group continued to do occasional tours, and they wanted a new album to promote those dates. After a week of recording, Cash headed back to Branson for the last time.

Cash’s final Shenandoah South gig was supposed to have run from November 10 until December 8, except for a few days off, but he walked offstage for the last time Saturday night, November 19. He couldn’t take it anymore. He told Robin to cancel the rest of the engagement. “I have no plans to come back at all,” he said two days later in an interview with a Springfield, Missouri, newspaper.

That Branson show turned out to be Cash’s final concert performance anywhere for the year. He wanted to relax and to think about what was closer to his heart: the songs for his next album. He got added stimulus when
American Recordings
was honored as the best contemporary folk album of the year at the Grammy ceremony on March 1, 1995, especially on a night when his old friend Dylan’s
World Gone Wrong
was voted the best traditional folk album. He liked the company he was keeping again.

The truth, however, is that the Grammy was less important to him than seeing his son’s friends all of a sudden growing more interested in him. That was a big deal. Says Rubin, “that’s what really excited him. He felt like an artist again.”

There was never a doubt that Cash and Rubin would do a follow-up album, but they did need to deal with the question of format. With the success of the debut CD, the conventional choice would have been to come back quickly with another collection in the same solo acoustic style. Cash certainly had a world of fruitful material to draw from. One thing that impressed Rubin and Petty was Cash’s extraordinary knowledge of songs in various genres, from country and blues to gospel and folk. It reminded Petty of the equally astounding musical knowledge of another legendary music figure he worked with extensively in the late 1980s: Bob Dylan.

“They both know hundreds of songs,” Petty says. “If you’re sitting around picking or playing music for fun, they will go through tunes as far back as sea chanteys and Scottish folk songs and hymns and deep into the blues. It just boggled my mind how many songs each of them could play at will. I can only imagine what it was like when they got together. Bob and I had many talks about how much he looked up to Johnny, how he felt he was the genuine article. That might have been where I really got into John’s Sun stuff. Bob just loved it. The same with Johnny. He adored Bob. It really was like they were brothers or something.”

Rubin, however, didn’t want another acoustic album. He envisioned John working with a band this time, and Cash was all for it. He even had a band in mind: “How about Tom’s band?” Rubin called Petty, but he didn’t want just Tom’s band, the Heartbreakers. He also wanted Tom, not only for his musicianship, but for his spirit; he knew how much Cash liked him.

“Rick calls me at home and said he’s going to make an electric record with Johnny and that Johnny wants to use my band,” Petty says. “Rick also wanted me to play bass because Howie [Heartbreaker bassist Howie Epstein, who had been going with June’s daughter Carlene for years] was not in great condition. I said, ‘When do we start?’”

When work on the second album began in Los Angeles, Rubin noticed two major changes in Cash. “The great thing was John’s confidence was back,” Rubin says. “He was full of ideas. But I also noticed he was beginning to have some serious health issues. I had seen an occasional hint of it before, but it was far more apparent on the second album. There were times when he just had to stop recording and take a rest. I could see something was wrong.” One mounting problem, especially troublesome for a singer, was asthma.

“John’s health problems did accelerate, and [it] probably seemed to Rick that it all happened at once, but the damaged facial nerve was excruciating from 1995 on, and the pain was constant,” says Mark Stielper. “He could barely exist, which just makes the work he produced so much more compelling,”

Marty Stuart was also struck by Cash’s fragile state. Ever since his move into a solo career and subsequent divorce from Cindy in 1988, Stuart hadn’t seen much of Cash, but the rapport was still strong when they met, quite by surprise, on a flight to Los Angeles. By the time the plane landed, Cash had enlisted Stuart to play on the Rubin sessions. Stuart loved the first album—“It was pretty brilliant…the whole idea of a boy and his guitar sitting there, the right choice of songs”—but he wasn’t totally surprised by the album’s quality. He always believed that Cash could someday reclaim his early greatness.

“The guy I saw in the Rubin sessions was a guy who was given a second chance, or maybe the third chance in his career, and he recognized the moment and took advantage of it,” he says. “His artistry was firing again. But I also saw old age and sickness finding its mark and putting a cloud over the proceedings, and it broke my heart. Some days were better than others at the session. I know he was using the pills again, but I would have taken whatever I needed, too, to reduce the pain. He was pretty good most of the time at covering it up, but there were times when he just couldn’t go any more, and he’d say, ‘I’ll deal with this tomorrow.’”

Even after they agreed on the concept for the second album, Cash figured he and Rubin would revisit some of the many songs they had left over from the earlier sessions, but Rubin wanted to start fresh.

“Johnny liked the first album when we finished it, but I don’t think he was convinced that anyone else would care,” Rubin says. “But the reaction to him—again from young people, especially—brought a new excitement as we went into the second record, and I wanted to use that excitement to come up with new ideas. I figured the material left over from the first album would eventually find its way into an album, but not yet.

“My goal was still to get him to be the best artist he could be again, to make him believe that we were going to make the best album he had ever made. That was a mind-blowing idea to him because he really believed his Sun Records and the early Columbia albums were his best work, that nothing came close to that. I kept saying, ‘Okay, but let’s do something better than that. That was a hard hurdle to get over. It took time, but I think he eventually did start believing in it.”