Johnny Cash: The Life (7 page)

Cash was crushed, and he continued to pour out his love for Vivian in letters.

With his return home only a few months away now, Cash spent his off-hours fishing and sightseeing in Europe, including a spin through London and Paris that fall. Perea enjoyed traveling with Cash because he knew they would be seeing historical sites, not bar-hopping in search of women.

There was a disarming innocence in the letters Cash wrote to Vivian during that trip—the letters Rosanne had found so illuminating.

From Paris, on October 18, he wrote: “After a long ride, we reached a cold, foggy Paris at 8:30 a.m….We took a taxi through Pigalle and finally stopped at ‘the Arch of Triumph.’ It was really a beautiful thing. About 3 times as big as I thought it would be and a lot prettier. We walked around there, taking pictures, etc., and then we went on to the Eiffel Tower….We couldn’t see it from very far off because of the fog and we didn’t go to the top because we were plenty cold on the ground…and it sure looked a lot colder up there.

“We fooled around the Eiffel Tower awhile taking pictures, then walked down the waterfront. The Eiffel Tower is just a few yards from the Seine River. We sat down on the riverside and watched the people fish for a while. Then we walked down the riverside and came up on the streets and took a subway back to the main part of town. We window shopped for a while, then ate dinner at a swank restaurant. At 1:30 p.m., we returned to the hotel and got some much needed sleep.”

Three days later he wrote Vivian from London: “Today we really saw a lot of London. We ate breakfast at 9 o’clock (lazy), then for a while we walked the streets. We took a bus to Buckingham Palace and got there just in time to see the 11 o’clock guard changing ceremony. After taking pictures and seeing as much of the Palace as possible, we walked on down to the Thames River and walked out on Westminster Bridge just as Big Ben was striking twelve. We had a meal of ‘fish & chips’ near the bridge, then walked up to Picadilly Circus. Times-Square sure hasn’t got much on this place.”

There were still occasional rough spots in John and Vivian’s long-distance relationship, most of them involving religion or alcohol or both. When in January 1954 Vivian confessed that she had become ill after taking a drink at a Christmas party, Cash was furious and threatened to end the relationship: “Now, darling, what do you want to do? Do you want to choose a life of drinking and running around with those drunkards and filthy talking people, or do you want our marriage, our happiness? I want to know now Vivian. It’s either our love, or your social drinks.”

The following day, he continued to press the issue. Whatever Vivian wrote in response, Cash was satisfied—and he started talking again about their life together. Once more the note was signed “Your husband, Your Johnny for life.”

It was when John began to think more and more about the wedding and going home that he resumed going to church, at least occasionally.

He also carved out time on base to work on his music.

In the early months of 1954, Johnny told Vivian about hearing a bunch of new Hank Snow songs and mentioned that he felt his singing was getting better. “I think I’ve improved my voice since I’ve gotten this recorder,” he wrote. “I guess it’s only natural. When I’m not working or sleeping, that’s about all I do, is listen to music or play it.”

But the most important piece of music he heard the whole time he was in Germany he stumbled upon by accident.

Walking through the barracks one day, he heard a strangely seductive piece of pop-blues about a railroad train and a lonely woman’s grief over a lost love. He walked over to Chuck Riley’s bunk to listen more closely to this moody track. The song was “Crescent City Blues,” part of a concept album,
Seven Dreams,
by composer-arranger Gordon Jenkins, who worked with such pop stars as Nat “King” Cole, Frank Sinatra, and the Andrews Sisters.

Riley had just bought the album at the PX, and he remembers Cash asking him to play it again. John was fascinated by the words and the gently haunting tune:

A few days later, Cash came back and borrowed the record from Riley to write down the lyrics or perhaps copy it on his tape recorder. As much as any song he heard in Landsberg, “Crescent City Blues” captured the recurring loneliness Cash felt. Remembering the Folsom Prison film, he almost immediately began trying to incorporate some of the feeling of “Crescent City Blues” into a song about the despair of prison confinement, but it would be months before he would finish it. Riley, a jazz fan, had bought the pop album only on a whim. He couldn’t find any new jazz albums in the bins, and he liked its cover.

This was the second of a remarkable pair of coincidences that would pay enormous dividends. If John’s unit had arrived in Landsberg just two weeks later, he probably would never have seen the Folsom Prison film, and if Riley hadn’t bought the Jenkins album, Cash might never have heard the recording and been inspired to write the song that would prove to be so pivotal for him.

Cash also had a minor operation in late March to remove a cyst on his chin, and it left a scar. In coming years, rumors would circulate that the scar came from a knife fight, adding to his rugged, he-man image in the early days of his career.

In April he was promoted to staff sergeant and was asked by the Air Force to reenlist. No way. He wanted to go home.

As eager as he was to see Vivian and begin his civilian life, in his final weeks in Germany John began to realize just how much he missed Dyess and his family. “I had such grief about being away from home for almost three years,” he later said. “I missed the fields, I missed the land, the woods, the river, the swimming hole.”

It was that homesickness that led him to write the poem “Hey, Porter” on the train as he began his journey home from Landsberg. The song was also a victory statement of sorts. Just twenty-two, Cash felt he had emerged from the challenges and temptations of Landsberg in relatively good shape. He could now look forward to everything that really mattered to him. He’d be back with Vivian, his family, his faith, and his music. The joy of that moment was what “Hey, Porter” was all about. Johnny Cash was returning to his personal promised land:

“Hey, Porter” was an excellent piece of writing—filled with warmth and disarming nuance, and it would forever serve as a reminder to Cash that he was at his best as a writer when he wrote about something from his own experience—songs about the cotton fields, the flood of 1937, and hard times of every sort. The only thing he regretted was that he’d written it about returning to Tennessee rather than Arkansas. He later joked, “The problem is I just couldn’t think of enough words that rhymed with Arkansas.”

But maybe Tennessee was more appropriate. Arkansas was John R. Cash’s past. Tennessee would be his future. The young man from Dyess was dreaming again.

FOR SOMEONE AS RAW
and independent as Johnny Cash, there wasn’t a better place to try to enter the music business than Memphis in the summer of 1954. On July 4, Cash’s American Airlines flight returned him to Memphis to see his fiancée and family for the first time in three years; and the very next day, Elvis Presley would walk into Sam Phillips’s fledgling Sun Records studio to make the record that arguably would define both the attitude and sound of rock ’n’ roll.

It was easy in the years following that July 5 Elvis session for young people to think that rock ’n’ roll had always been around, like school bells and the World Series. For all practical purposes, however, rock as we came to know it was born that night. Almost by accident, Phillips and three musicians tapped into the volatile social currents of the time and unleashed a force so mighty that it would unite a generation.

In attempting to explain the magic of that summer night, music fans and critics have tended to focus on Presley the charismatic teenage singer who went on to be the music’s biggest star. Yet Phillips played an equally important—if not more important—role. As much a rebel as any long-haired musician who would follow in his footsteps on the rock trail, the thirty-one-year-old Alabama native didn’t invent rock ’n’ roll, but he knew it when he heard it. Unlike some of the big-name Nashville producers, Phillips didn’t believe in forcing a certain style or sound on his artists. Sam’s genius was in encouraging independent artists to be themselves and recognizing when a record had the human quality that would make it resonate with listeners.

When Phillips, a largely unknown radio announcer and engineer, first opened his storefront recording studio near downtown Memphis in 1950, even his best friends thought it was a good thing Sam was keeping his day job at WREC. How could he ever compete with the major labels in New York and Los Angeles that boasted pop stars like Perry Como and Patti Page? But there was something the doubters didn’t know about this ambitious young man: his unshakable faith in the power and appeal of the roots country and blues he had loved growing up in the South. He didn’t plan to compete with the pop sounds; he intended to replace them.

Perhaps the sound that caught Phillips’s ear that night could only have been forged in Memphis. The city is less than three hours by car from the country music recording center of Nashville, but they are so different that it’s hard to believe you haven’t crossed a state boundary when driving between them on Interstate 40. There’s even an old saying: Nashville may be the capital of Tennessee, but Memphis is the capital of Mississippi. The city’s Beale Street had already been a showplace for black music for half a century. “I had grown up in the South, and I felt a definite kinship between the white Southern country artists and the black Southern blues or spiritual artists,” Phillips said years later. “Our ties were too close for the two not to overlap. It was a natural thing. It’s just that the record business in those days looked at the music as totally separate. They didn’t realize that it was a natural exchange and that the public would eventually accept it.”

To that end, Phillips opened his storefront recording studio at 706 Union Avenue, hoping to record the city’s deep pool of gifted black musicians. He started by making singles with local blues and R&B artists, including B. B. King and Howlin’ Wolf, on assignment from indie record companies such as Chess in Chicago and Modern in Los Angeles. After one of those singles, a lively novelty song titled “Rocket 88” that he made with Ike Turner and Jackie Brenston, became a number-one R&B hit for Chess, Phillips started his own Sun Records. With just one employee, a receptionist-secretary who handled most of the books, Phillips worked like a man possessed. Besides recording the artists, he drove hundreds of miles a week in his 1947 DeSoto, hoping to persuade DJs in the region to play the recordings on the radio and talk record shops into stocking them.

Phillips’s early recordings with white artists tended toward straight country, and he may have had the same thing in mind for Presley. He had been impressed when the teenager stopped by Sun Studios in 1953 to make a record for his mother, a sideline business that helped Phillips pay the bills. Phillips wasn’t knocked out by Presley’s tentative vocal on an old pop tune called “My Happiness,” but there was something about the singer’s tone that stuck with him.

When he went into the studio with Elvis on July 5, Sam put him together with two musicians who had worked on some of Phillips’s earlier recordings, guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black. To help the youngster relax, Phillips suggested he just sing some of his favorite tunes. When Elvis responded with lots of pop stuff, including a slow, hesitant version of “Harbor Lights,” a Top 10 hit for Bing Crosby four years before, Phillips’s heart sank. The night looked like a lost cause. Eventually, he turned off the tape recorder and told the guys to take a break.

He was startled moments later when Presley began strumming playfully on his acoustic guitar and singing “That’s All Right,” a blues tune by Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup. Phillips quickly turned the tape machine back on and encouraged the musicians to play the tune a few times.

The moment was as close to a “big bang” as can be found in pop music. There’s a raw sex appeal and authority in Presley’s vocal, and Moore’s memorable guitar break, influenced by the thumb and finger style of country guitarists Chet Atkins and Merle Travis, adds energy and color. With the release of that record, the guitar took its place as the essential rock ’n’ roll instrument. Legions of players, including Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, and John Lennon, have spoken with awe about the impact of hearing Elvis’s voice and Scotty’s guitar on those early Sun singles.

The record caused such a stir in the South that young singers from all around the region, including Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi, began lining up outside Phillips’s door, each wanting to be the next Elvis.

John R. Cash would eventually take his place in that line. But, from a career perspective, the choice of Memphis as his new home was pure luck.

As Cash’s plane began its descent over Memphis, he didn’t know anything about Sam Phillips, Elvis Presley, or Sun Records. He had decided to move to Memphis because his older brother, Roy, lived there and had promised to help him find a job. The Air Force—and years of his father’s taunts—had taught Cash to be a practical man.

Even though most of his family would also be waiting at the Memphis airport to greet him, Johnny only had eyes for one person. He and Vivian were too excited for words as he took her in his arms and gave her a kiss that went on long enough that his family broke into nervous laughter. Even the normally taciturn Ray chipped in. “Vivian,” he joked, “you’re going to eat him up.”

The joviality finally caused the pair to break their embrace and John to turn his attention to the rest of his family. With Vivian at his side, he shook hands with or hugged Carrie and Ray, his brothers Roy and Tommy, his sisters Reba, Louise, and Joanne, plus some nieces and nephews. Even though they could see how much the now six-foot-two, 165-pound Cash had grown, they were surprised by his added muscles when he held them close.

The whole group headed for Dyess, where Carrie and Ray had sold the farmhouse and bought a new place near the town center, but John still felt at home, and he couldn’t wait to give Vivian a tour of the school, the fishing hole, and other favorite haunts of his youth.

He was disappointed during the visit home that he couldn’t introduce Vivian to all of his high school friends, but most had already joined the exodus out of town. He left photos of her with the parents of some of them to make sure they could see how lovely she was. There was another major disappointment, too: Vivian had promised her father that she wouldn’t have sex with John before their marriage, and she didn’t relent.

After a few days, John was restless. He wanted to head to San Antonio to ask Vivian’s father formally for her hand in marriage. Vivian was touched by the sweet, old-fashioned gesture; she knew it would mean a lot to her parents. Borrowing Ray and Carrie’s car, he and Vivian drove to San Antonio, where, for old times’ sake, they returned the first evening to the River Walk and found the bench where John had carved their initials.

Despite his original skepticism, Tom Liberto was charmed by his future son-in-law. It still troubled him that the couple had spent less than thirty days in each other’s company. But Vivian was twenty-one, and he was impressed by John’s willingness to be married in the Catholic Church and his pledge to raise the children in the faith. This, he felt, was indeed a model young man, and he finally gave his consent.

While Vivian worked on the wedding plans, John returned to Dyess to drop off his folks’ car and then caught the bus to Memphis. Roy picked him up at the station and took him to the large DeSoto-Plymouth dealership where he worked as a mechanic. Roy wanted him to meet Marshall Grant and Luther Perkins, a couple of fellow mechanics who often played old country and gospel songs on their guitars during lunch breaks. Maybe, Roy figured, they could start a band together.

Marshall, who had moved to Memphis from his native North Carolina, was immediately struck by Cash’s charisma. “He didn’t even have his Air Force suit on,” Grant said. “He was in regular clothes, but something drew you to him. By the time Roy introduced us, it felt like the hair on the back of my head was sticking straight out. It startled me a little bit. But it also gave me the sense that I wanted to get to know this guy. He looked like a star.

“When Roy introduced us, John said, ‘I hear you pick a little bit,’ and I said, ‘Very little,’ and he chuckled, ‘Well, that’s me, too.’” Grant took Cash over to meet Perkins, a poker-faced Mississippi native who was working on a broken car radio, and John said the same thing to Luther, “I hear you pick a little.” They agreed to get together to play some music after John returned from San Antonio.

Next, Roy took his brother to the Memphis Police Department, where Roy had a friend on the force. There was no position open, but the friend recommended that he talk to George Bates at the Home Equipment Company. It was a popular appliance store in town, and Bates was known to go out of his way to help out ex-servicemen.

Roy drove Cash to Home Equipment at 2529 Summer Avenue, where they introduced themselves to George Bates. When Bates asked John if he thought he could be a good salesman, John told him the truth. He said he really wanted to be a singer, but he had just returned from Germany and was going to be married in a few weeks, so he needed a job. Undaunted, Bates replied, “Well, we’ll give you a job and see if you can [sell]. I really like your self-confidence. That’s one thing a salesman has to have.”

Relieved, John shook Bates’s hand and set out with Roy to find an apartment. The best he could afford was a small second-floor place at 1624 Eastmoreland Avenue. John wasn’t happy with it, later calling the apartment “hot and horrible.” The newlyweds wouldn’t even have their own kitchen; they had to share one on the third floor with other tenants. But it was cheap at $55 a month, and it was a start. The next thing Cash needed was a car, and Roy helped him get a good deal on a new green Plymouth, using money John had saved from Germany for a down payment.

With all the practical things taken care of, John decided to explore a job at a radio station—a way, he figured, to help him eventually get a chance to sing on the air. One of the guys in Germany had been an announcer on station WMCA in Corinth, Mississippi, about a hundred miles from Memphis, and he told John to look up the station’s manager, John Bell; maybe he could get hired as an announcer.

Bell wasn’t impressed by Cash. He told him to enroll in a radio school, where he could get some training. John heeded Bell’s advice and enrolled in Keegan’s School of Broadcasting on Madison Avenue, using his GI Bill benefits to cover costs. He took announcing classes, which he’d attend two mornings a week before work.

On the drive back to San Antonio, John listened to the radio, searching for something by his heroes, and sure enough, there was a huge new Hank Snow hit, “I Don’t Hurt Anymore,” that was just starting a twenty-week reign at number one on the country charts. He sang along with the radio, and he thought about school and how it was going to lead to his own radio show someday. He couldn’t wait to tell Vivian.

After their long-distance courtship, John and Vivian were finally able to say “I do” before Vivian’s uncle, Father Vincent Liberto, in a ceremony held at St. Ann’s Catholic Church on Sunday, August 7, 1954. After a reception at the St. Anthony Hotel, the Cashes headed for Palestine, Texas, where they spent their wedding night. It was at just about the halfway point of the 440 miles to Memphis. They had five days before John started work.

It was during their first week in Memphis that John first heard Elvis Presley’s “That’s All Right” on the radio. Like many, he didn’t know at first if it was a country record or a blues record. But he liked it a lot, and he took notice when the DJ kept saying it was the hottest record in town. One other thing caught John’s ear on that first hearing: this exciting new record wasn’t on RCA or Decca or one of the other big Nashville labels. As the DJ put it, “That’s All Right” was on Memphis’s
own
Sun Records.

Sun Records?

The country boy in Cash instinctively liked the name. It took him back to the start of the day in the cotton fields—which was the exact same image Sam Phillips had in mind when he thought of the name in the first place. Cash would have bought the record, but his budget was too tight. He had to settle for listening to it on the radio. He thought about going to Sun Records, but he didn’t kid himself; he wasn’t good enough yet to make a record. He didn’t even have a band. That reminded him of the two guys Roy had introduced him to a couple of weeks before. He headed back to Automobile Sales at 309 Union Avenue, a major commercial street in midtown Memphis.