The Last American Hero?
He’s a founding father of rock ‘n’ roll and an icon of country music. Now, at 62, Johnny Cash is the new godfather of grunge nation.
Request, June 1994
His stride is slower now, and his brown hair, which in his younger days he wore long and piled high, rockabilly style, is thinning and flecked with gray around the edges. His sizable frame, once withered by the ravages of amphetamine abuse, is thickening around the middle. And his face, carved deep with the lines of pain and wisdom, is softening at last. Draped in the somber tone that is his trademark as he stands before a microphone, his first words to an audience invariably are these: “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.”
As if there were any doubt.
When Cash enters, the force of his presence seemingly causes a room’s other occupants to vaporize. “He’ll scare you to death, at least he did me. And does me,” says Kris Kristofferson, whose awe of Cash has not diminished in the 30 years he has known the man.
“There is a charisma about him that you can’t put a number or a name on,” seconds Waylon Jennings, one of Cash’s oldest and dearest friends. “Every once in a while, I look at him and think, ‘Man, he’s been my best friend for all these years, and look at who he is and what he’s done.”
So deep is the well of his accomplishment and so broad the range of his experience, that he has become a tabula rasa, a clean slate upon which anyone can project his or her own feelings about country music, rock ‘n’ roll, America, and religion, as well as the contradictions inherent in each of these things. For example, Cash is a deeply religious man, yet his reputation as a rock ‘n’ roll hellion stands second to none. He is a recovering drug addict who was saved by the Bible and the love of a woman, but whose weaknesses occasionally have led him back to rehab; a dyed-in-the-wool patriot, his bitter criticism of the Vietnam War flew in the face of country music’s traditionally hardline conservatism. And then there’s this: His best friends are Waylon Jennings on the one hand, and evangelist Billy Graham on the other. “And what a stretch that is,” Jennings admits.
Perhaps the only thing about Johnny Cash that nearly everyone can agree on is that he is still a force to be reckoned with. “If you count him down-and-out, that’s when he’ll get up and knock you out,” Jennings says. “The only thing to stop Johnny Cash is when he stops breathing.”
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It is in that spirit that Cash has undertaken the reinvention of himself as a folkabilly hepcat not unlike the one who walked into Sam Phillips’ Memphis recording studio nearly 40 years ago. This time Cash is older, wiser, and exhilarated by the freedom of having only himself to impress. American Recordings, his first album for producer Rick Rubin and his label of the same name, is a spare acoustic effort spotlighting Cash alone with his guitar, unadorned by the sort of noxious studio tweakery that was layered on his late-‘80s efforts as a desperate sop to country radio, which ultimately didn’t care anyway. An acutely personal statement, the album features songs by Cash as well as carefully chosen covers by such venerable sources as Kristofferson, Leonard Cohen, Loudon Wainwright III, Tom Waits, Nick Lowe, and even one by heavy-metal bandleader Glenn Danzig.
By signing with American, Cash has freed himself from the Nashville machinery that harbors little affection for its truest heroes. Under Rubin’s tutelage, he instead is being positioned as an elder statesman of the alternative-rock nation, a move that seems as curious as it is dead-on. Aside from the odd cover of an Elvis Costello or Bruce Springsteen tune, Cash has had little to do with rock for years, favoring the country and gospel sounds that have been his bread and butter since he left Sun Records for Columbia in 1958. But consider that in recent times bands such as Social Distortion and Wall of Voodoo have covered his classic “Ring of Fire” and that Springsteen credits Cash’s stark, fatalistic anthems with inspiring his gloomy and noncommercial yet artistically triumphant Nebraska album. In 1988, Michelle Shocked, the Mekons, and Marc Almond, among others, paid tribute to Cash with ‘Til Things Are Brighter, a compilation benefiting AIDS research. Most recently, U2 featured him on “The Wanderer,” the closing track of 1993’s multiplatinum Zooropa. No only did the song bring Cash before his largest audience in ages, it neatly summarized and further mythologized an essential element of his legacy in the space of a single line: “I went out there in search of experience, to taste and touch and to feel as much as a man can before he repents.” Which, Cash admits today, is pretty accurate, even if he didn’t plan it that way.
His performance last December at Hollywood’s notorious Viper Room, where he was introduced by an obviously impressed Johnny Depp, and an appearance at the Austin, Texas, punk club Emo’s during this year’s South by Southwest Music and Media Conference further established Cash in territory previously untrodden by an icon of country music.
“Johnny Cash stands out in any bunch, just by his reality, just by the heart and soul of his music,” Kristofferson says. “It’s like watchin' an old coyote walk through a poodle party.”
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House of Cash, the singer’s museum-and-office complex, sits just off the main road that runs through Hendersonville, Tennessee, 30 miles northeast of Nashville. In operation since 1969 and under the supervision of Cash’s younger sister Reba, it is a modest version of the star-based tourist attractions, such as Dollywood and Twitty City, that have blossomed all over the state. Twitty City, in fact, is right across the street. At House of Cash, fans can wander past a wall full of his gold records and admire a case displaying his seven Grammy awards and his statuette from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. There is also a collection of Carter family memorabilia, a small room full of props from Cash’s 1973 feature film Gospel Road, and an ungainly black Cadillac roughly built to the specifications of his 1976 hit “One Piece at a Time.” Odd curios picked up along the way, including John Wayne’s Colt Peacemaker, Buddy Holly’s motorcycle, and a writing desk that once belonged to Chinese ruler Chaing Kai-Shek, are placed here and there. Photographs of family members, local residents, and a president or two, many taken by Cash himself, line the front hallway.
Upstairs, his office is filled with items of a more personal nature. A vintage poster, a “call to arms for working-class citizens,” which was signed and given to him by Bob Dylan, hangs on one wall near a framed piece of hate mail from the Ku Klux Klan (“You are a traitor to the white people…I hope your daughter gives you a nigger grandchild”). On the opposite wall are Bono’s original handwritten lyrics to “The Wanderer,” then called “Wanderlust.” And beneath them, on an aging yellow-green couch sits Cash himself, dressed in a long-sleeved black shirt and light blue figured pants with drawstrings in the cuffs.
“I have no illusions about where I am in my life and career,” Cash says in his familiar bass baritone, which is ragged and raw from a month-long tour of Australia and his gig at Emo’s the week before. “I’m very happy to be 62 years old. I’m blessed to be 62 years old. But see, this is my third time around, and it’s great just to feel like I’m wanted, you know?”
In many ways, he says, working with Rubin reminds him of his days with Phillips at Sun. “Sam used to say, ‘What else you got, what else you got?’ and I’d have to stand there and sing all day. Same way with Rick. Not just at the beginning, but all the way through. I would always come back to a session with a song I hadn’t thought of before, and so would he. We recorded over a hundred songs over the course of a year and eight or 10 trips to California. We painfully weeded them down to the 13 that are on the album. It feels like there’s a concept to it, and it works.”
Cash even pays Rubin the extravagant compliment of comparing him favorably to Phillips. “Rubin’s got a broader vision,” he says. “He’s very objective about who I am, what I am, and what I do. It doesn’t matter to him if I sing a song that is a tried-and-true classic that nobody’s heard in 20 years. If he feels the songs and I don’t fit, he’ll say so. And by the same token, I won’t budge over something I don’t think is right for me to do. Going into this, the only thing that I said I wouldn’t do is anything that would embarrass me.”
His performance at Emo’s, where he played a solo set of songs from his album and a rockabilly finale featuring the Tennessee Three, is the prototype for his current tour, which eschews the traditional “family” production that he continues to do (primarily in Branson, Missouri) for an edgier roadhouse-style show that likely will be featured on the side stage at some stops along this year’s Lollapalooza tour.* Cash say Emo’s reminded him of an earlier time in his career. “It was like the old days for me, like the ‘50s” he says. “The only thing I can compare it to was a club in a town called Gobbler, Missouri, a place called the Bloody Bucket. Carl [Perkins, a rockabilly star in his own right and Cash’s guitarist for years] played there about once a month. I played there a couple of times. But it was like the night was not complete unless there was a knife fight and somebody got cut or killed. And it happened every week. I mean, that didn’t go on at Emo’s, but it was that kind of place. If it rained there, half the people would get wet. But they call it the ‘in’ place now, and it turned out to be that for me. It was one of the best experiences of my career, to sit on that stage with just my guitar and all these people listening to every word.”
That same degree of intimacy is what Cash is striving for on American Recordings. “This is a me-singing-to-you album,” he says. “I don’t know what station is gonna play an album of Johnny Cash and his guitar; maybe there are a few of ‘em. But what I’ve got on this album is the real me. It’s as far from rock ‘n’ roll as Brahms. It’s as far from mainstream country as anything could be. It’s not a record to compete with Travis Tritt or Clint Black. It’s me. It’s what I do. And it’s what I feel I do best.”
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J.R. Cash was born on February 26, 1932 in Kingsland, Arkansas. (The name John wasn’t established until later, and it was Phillips who called him Johnny.) His father, Ray, was an itinerant worker and, Cash says, “the hardest working man I’ve ever known.” In 1935, the family moved to Dyess, an experimental New Deal farming community in the flat, black delta land of northeast Arkansas, which is best suited for raising cotton.
The Cash family – Ray, his wife Carrie, and their children Roy, Louise, Jack, J.R., Reba, Joanne, and Tommy – was poor but proud and extremely close-knit. “We didn’t have a lot,” Cash says. “When I was real small, we didn’t have any money. It was like a coal-mining town where they had scrip you could use at the company store: same way in my hometown. The government issued this subsidy check or loan. They’d make a crop loan for a year, and we had little five-cent coupons, 10-cent, quarter coupons, dollar. That was the only money my dad had until I was five or six years old. Even then, we only had it when the cotton sold, after pickin’ time. But I was never hungry, I was never ragged, I never went without shoes. I didn’t have money for a guitar. Never could buy one. Never could imagine havin’ 10 dollars for a Gene Autry guitar. Thing like a loaf of bread you’d buy at the store, we had that maybe two or three times a year. We worked hard for what we had, but we had enough.”
Many of his songs, such as “Big River,” “Pickin’ Time,” and “Five Feet High and Rising,” draw heavily on his early days, when he carried water for the field hands at age four and at 10 worked in the fields himself. The religious fervor he still carries with him was imparted by the fire-and-brimstone sermons delivered at the local Church of God, where at age 12, Cash pledged himself to Jesus; and by the tragic death in a saw accident of his brother Jack, who wanted to be a preacher.
Perhaps the greatest influence on young J.R., though, was the radio. Bombarded as we are today by scores of cable channels and local radio stations up and down the dial, it’s nearly impossible to imagine what a lifeline a transistor radio was for a small boy in those days. “It was a wonderful world of music that was coming out of the radio,” Cash says. “I’d tune in Mexican border stations, WJJD in Chicago, WSM in Nashville, WWVA in Wheeling, West Virginia. Just a little turn of the dial, and there was XERL in Del Rio, Texas, and they’re playing country music, transcriptions of somebody. Of course, today there’s so many stations, you can’t get ‘em all. The greatest thing to me was to get to hear a transcription where I’d get to hear a country artist talk. I’d just listen to that voice and think how wonderful it was to hear him actually say something.”
Fresh out of high school in 1950, Cash bolted for Michigan, where he worked for a short time at the Fisher auto-body plant in Pontiac. He joined the Air Force and was stationed in Landsberg, Germany. It was there that he bought his first guitar and began writing songs in earnest. Upon his return to the States in 1954, he married Vivian Liberto, a San Antonio native whom he had met while he was in basic training in Texas. They moved to Memphis, where Cash halfheartedly sold appliances door-to-door and attended broadcasting school on the G.I. Bill. Seeing that John was obsessed with music, his older brother Roy, who was a musician in the ‘40s, introduced him to a pair of musical mechanics, guitarist Luther Perkins and bassist Marshall Grant. The trio that formed played mostly gospel numbers for church functions and dressed in black because it was the one color their limited wardrobes shared.
Though Cash was initially rebuffed in his repeated attempts to record gospel for Sun, Phillips finally relented when the singer came in with “Hey Porter,” one of the songs he had written in Germany and published as a poem in the military newspaper Stars and Stripes. It became the B-side of “Cry, Cry, Cry,” his first single, Sun Records #221.
“To have that record played on WMPS [Memphis] that first day, that was it for me,” Cash recalls. “I was singin’ on the radio, and that was as far as I ever wanted to go in life. I thought, ‘So what am I gonna do now?’ And then the disc jockey turned the record over and dropped it and broke it. And I thought, ‘Well, the first side got played on the radio, that’s all I ever wanted.’ I went back to Sam Phillips and said, ‘He broke my record, I guess that’s it.’ He said, ‘What do you mean, that’s it?’ I said, ‘Well, then nobody’ll ever hear me anymore.’ And he pulled out a drawer with a box full of records and he said, ‘Here, take a new one.’
Many more hits would follow. Cash’s Sun successes included “Folsom Prison Blues,” which he wrote after seeing the film Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison; the terminally stoic “Guess Things Happen That Way”; the calculated crossover move “Ballad of a Teenage Queen,” with its uncharacteristically (for Cash) syrupy background chorus; his signature song, the guarded “I Walk the Line,” and more than a dozen others, nearly all of them built upon some variation of the trio’s trademark boom-chicka-boom rhythm.
In 1958, he signed a lucrative contract with Columbia, where he remained for 28 years, creating numerous hits, but also broadening the scope of his music. He recorded songs from the then-current folk boom such as Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me Babe,” and delved deeper into the white gospel music of his youth. Much to the chagrin of radio programmers, Cash made hits of songs that had a social conscience, such as “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” which tells the story of a Native American war veteran who dies destitute and alone. And he also recorded concept albums about trains and working men, as well as such enduring classics as the haunting “The Long Black Veil,” the blistering “Ring of Fire,” which was cowritten by June Carter, and the monumental “The Legend of John Henry’s Hammer,” on which Cash beat his hands bloody slamming two steel bars together for sound effects.
With commercial success came endless touring, including up to 300 dates per year. To beat the constant fatigue, Cash began popping amphetamines, as well as drinking beer and downing barbiturates to help him sleep at night. It wasn’t long before he was in the throes of an addiction that found him swallowing dozens of pills a day. “I took drugs because it made me feel good,” Cash says flatly. “And they worked really good then. It didn’t take long, though, even when I was young, for them to start takin’ me. I was dyin’ then, in the early-to-mid ‘60s. I was dyin’.”
Cash’s self-destructive ways left plenty of victims besides himself in their wake. He canceled concerts, bankrupting some of the small-time promoters who had stretched their lines of credit to book him. Friendships both professional and personal were broken by his irresponsibility. He crashed almost every car he owned, and crazed by the manic energy of his addiction, once drove a tractor off a cliff and into a lake, escaping death only because he was thrown off on the way down. His marriage to Vivian ended, separating him from his daughters Rosanne, Kathleen, Cindy, and Tara, to whom he been a loving but hopelessly erratic father.
Cash moved into an apartment in Madison, Tennessee, with fledgling solo performer Jennings, though the two were busy enough with their careers and extracurricular activities that they were rarely home at the same time. Yet their lives did run parallel in at least one fashion. “John and I both were on drugs in those days when we first met,” Jennings says. “But from that day to this day, we have yet to give each other one pill. We just never did share drugs. We lied to each other about ‘em a lot. But the whole thing was, we never discussed it. I was worried about him, and I’m sure he was worried about me, ‘cause you know, I knew I could handle it but he couldn’t. And that was the way he was thinking, too. We knew we were doin’ wrong, basically, but it has to be something bigger than your habit that gets you out of it.”
What finally got Cash out of it was a literally sobering experience following a night in which his perniciousness put him behind bars, the last of seven nights he had spent in jail over the years. “There was a sheriff named Ralph Jones,” he says. “He left me out of jail one morning in La Fayette, Georgia, and gave me my pills back that he had taken from me the night before. He said, ‘God has given you free will. Here’s your pills. Go ahead and kill yourself. That’s what you were doing when you came in here.’ But this is what got me: He said, ‘I told my wife when I got home that I had Johnny Cash in my jail, and she cried all night. She’s such a fan of yours and loves you so much.’ He said, ‘I don’t want to see you no more.’
“I went right straight back to Nashville and called June, and she contacted Dr. Nat Winston, who was the former head of the Tennessee Department for Mental Health. He came out to my house every day for 30 days. There weren't any treatment centers around back then. I climbed the walls and beat the devil there for a while. And I came out clean and straight.”
Cash credits June Carter, who, as a member of the Carter family, had been a part of his road show since the early ‘60s, with turning his life around. Carter helped him reignite his spirituality, and she helped him ride out the worst days of his addiction. “I was madly in love with her,” Cash says. “We got along great when I didn’t have my mood altered. And when I did, my head was somewhere else. Everywhere else. But she knew that. She saw through it. And she felt like I was worth savin’ so she fought me to save me.” He proposed onstage in London, Ontario, and they were married in 1968.
In 1969, Cash sold more records than any other artist. He scored gold records for his landmark albums Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison and Johnny Cash at San Quentin, and won a host of Country Music Awards, including Entertainer of the Year, Male Vocalist of the year, Best Album (San Quentin), and Best Single (“A Boy Named Sue”). His ABC television program, The Johnny Cash Show, which ran through 1971, was not only a popular mix of rural and urban sensibilities, it brought to the small screen such then-seldom-seen guests as Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and Derek and the Dominoes.
But soon, the wave passed. Cash still delivered worthwhile albums and a number of terrific singles, including Kristofferson’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” the self-defining original “Man in Black,” and a nod to then-son-in-law Lowe, “Without Love.” But he no longer ruled the charts as he once did. Yet he remained an established concert draw around the world and parlayed his popularity into a number of television and film roles, which culminated in his producing and starring in Gospel Road, a film about Christianity that Cash calls the proudest achievement of his career. As his contract with Columbia wound down, he switched to Mercury in 1986, but without much luck sales-wise. The work was occasionally superb, notably Water From the Wells of Home, but support dwindled as the label’s interest switched to younger artists in the country boom.
“All [Nashville] wants is new, new, new,” Cash’s stepdaughter Carlene Carter says. “They basically turned their back on a lot of these performers. Apart from the way they’ve treated George Jones, I think they’ve been pretty ungracious, particularly to John. He built that town in a lot of ways. He definitely opened doors for a lot of these kids that are big stars now. And to be treated the way he was, I think it’s fine for him to have the taste in his mouth that he does, which is pretty bitter.”
Cash, however, is gracious to a fault. “I’m not bitter,” he insists. “It’s just that I wasn’t a priority anymore.” [Producer] Jack Clement was doing the very best he could do with what the record company gave him to work with, and Mercury did the best they could do for the budget allocated. It’s just that I was spinnin’ my wheels makin’ records in Nashville.
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No doubt that suits Rubin just fine. Cash may be prescient in his assessment that there aren’t many commercial radio stations that will play American Recordings, but if the duo’s purpose was to construct an archetypal Cash album, they’ve succeeded. There are train songs (“Let the Train Whistle Blow” and “Down by the Train”), traditional numbers that Cash puts his stamp on (“Tennessee Stud” and “Oh Bury Me Not”), songs of salvation (“Like a Soldier” and “Redemption”), outlaw songs (“Delia’s Gone” and “Thirteen), and even one wiseass ditty that takes on genuine pathos in Cash’s treatment (“The Man Who Couldn’t Cry”).
The song certain to gain some degree of notoriety is “Delia’s Gone,” a traditional blues with new lyrics written by Cash. His seemingly cavalier attitude about a woman’s murder – “Delia, oh Delia/Delia all my life/If I hadn’t shot poor Delia/I’d have her for my wife” – is sure to be, at the very least, the subject of a panel discussion at the next New Music Seminar. But Cash remains unmoved. “I wrote ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ 40 years ago,” he says. “Forty. And I still hear, every once in a while, a comment about, ‘How could a man like Johnny Cash say, “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die?”’ No line is more violent than that. So with ‘Delia’s Gone,’ I took an old folk song and I wrote my own lyrics to it. The song is about killin’ a woman’, shootin’ her twice ‘cause he couldn’t stand to see her suffer after the first shot, ‘cause she didn’t die. A lot of people will jump on anything to try and bring an artist down. Everybody knows I didn’t shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die, but a lot of people like to hear that. It’s a fun thing with me.”
“That’s who he is, that’s what he is,” Jennings says of Cash’s outlaw image. “But he ain’t never shot nobody. He did burn up a damn forest one time, but he ain’t shot nobody. Some people are probably gonna raise hell about that song, but you know what? It’s the hardest thing in the world for people like me and John to really give a shit.”
Besides, Cash points out, it’s the balance of the album that counts, not the individual songs. “If you look at this album, it pretty well covers the scope of emotions and attitudes, from a really down heartbreak song like ‘Bird on a Wire’ to a bloody Vietnam war song like “Drive On,” and from ‘Delia’s Gone’ to redemption.
“I don’t know about you or anybody else, but there’s a good and a bad side to me, and every day it’s a battle to keep the good side winnin’. But I can’t close the door on the past or make believe it doesn’t exist because then I become complacent and I’ll be vulnerable to every temptation that comes along. I think it’s good, even if it’s just a song for fun, to address all of these attitudes and ideas and messages in the songs. It is for me. It’s good therapy for me to explore the dark side, but then there are songs like Tom Waits’ ‘Down by the Train’ that is a redemption song.”
Two songs that strike at the heart of what Cash’s career, and indeed his life, may be all about – a man who is all too aware of his failings yet is perpetually struggling against them – are Lowe’s “The Beast in Me” and Kristofferson’s “Why Me Lord.”
“It’s a prayer,” Cash says of the former song. “God help the best in me. It’s admitting that sometimes I go crazy. It’s admitting that sometimes I’m out of control. It’s admitting that sometimes I’ve been so screwed up that I didn’t know if it was New York or New Year. But then, the last line is, ‘God help the beast in me.’ Prayin’ for the white dog to win.
“‘Why Me Lord’ is a prayer of supplication that is one of those rare feelings that I have. It’s a song of praise and prayer and a kind of redemption. It’s like approaching God with a sense of awe, which I do. You know, why me? What have I ever done that was worth lovin’ you?”
For his part, Kristofferson is almost embarrassed to talk about the song, even though he still ends each of his concerts with it. “it was one of those songs where I was just holding the pen,” he says. “It followed a profound religious experience in a church, John’s church, actually, which is not exactly common behavior for me. The song was just a personal expression, and it struck a chord with a lot of people. But it’s also led people to want to talk to me about a lot of organized religion, which I don’t have much to do with. But I try to lead a spiritual life, and that’s what the song is about.”
Perhaps the least likely inclusion on the album is Danzig’s “Thirteen.” Known as much for his occult leanings as his brand of heavy-metal crunch, Danzig met Cash on a purely musical playing field. They did not discuss theology.
“I didn’t know who he was,” Cash says. “Rick introduced me, and he was sittin’ there with a guitar in his hands, and he said, ‘I wrote you a song.’ So I said, ‘Let’s hear it.’ By the second time through, I was playing along with him. I recorded it that night, and that’s the take that’s on the album. It’s one of those songs that was perfect, I thought. I’ve seen Danzig’s videos, but I don’t know much about him. I talked to Glenn last week. Nice man.”
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As rich as his past is, Cash is constantly scanning the horizon for what’s coming next. Already he is anxious to hit the road. “I can’t sit at home too long,” he says. “That’s the work ethic I grew up with. After three or four days at home, I get itchy feet and think, ‘I’ve got to go work somewhere.’”
To that end, several days in August and September have been penciled in on his calendar for Lollapalooza. He’s typically unfazed by the possibility of meeting grunge nation head-on, but Carlene Carter’s not so sure. “I have no idea how they’re going to accept him,” she says. “I think they’re gonna think he’s cool. But on the other hand, it could be totally a mistake and be horribly embarrassing. My daughter said to me, ‘Mom, I’ve been to Lollapalooza. It’s thrash music. I just can’t see Grandpa up there.”
John Carter Cash, the singer’s 24-year-old son, who is pursuing his own career in music, is more optimistic and more succinct: “Lollapalooza is about being on the cutting edge, and that’s exactly what Johnny Cash is, on the cutting edge. People will be able to see that he’s an honest artist and an honest person, and I think they’ll respond to that.”
And why not? Cash continues to accept all challenges, at least the ones he thinks won’t embarrass him. His next album, he says, will “get a little heavier on the beat, rockabilly it up a little. I don’t think I’ll be recording with Slayer, though.” His eyes glint and he sneaks a smile. “You never know, though. I just might.”
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* Obviously, the Lollapalooza thing fell through. Such are the hazards of writing for a magazine with a three-month lead time.
He’s a founding father of rock ‘n’ roll and an icon of country music. Now, at 62, Johnny Cash is the new godfather of grunge nation.
Request, June 1994
His stride is slower now, and his brown hair, which in his younger days he wore long and piled high, rockabilly style, is thinning and flecked with gray around the edges. His sizable frame, once withered by the ravages of amphetamine abuse, is thickening around the middle. And his face, carved deep with the lines of pain and wisdom, is softening at last. Draped in the somber tone that is his trademark as he stands before a microphone, his first words to an audience invariably are these: “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.”
As if there were any doubt.
When Cash enters, the force of his presence seemingly causes a room’s other occupants to vaporize. “He’ll scare you to death, at least he did me. And does me,” says Kris Kristofferson, whose awe of Cash has not diminished in the 30 years he has known the man.
“There is a charisma about him that you can’t put a number or a name on,” seconds Waylon Jennings, one of Cash’s oldest and dearest friends. “Every once in a while, I look at him and think, ‘Man, he’s been my best friend for all these years, and look at who he is and what he’s done.”
So deep is the well of his accomplishment and so broad the range of his experience, that he has become a tabula rasa, a clean slate upon which anyone can project his or her own feelings about country music, rock ‘n’ roll, America, and religion, as well as the contradictions inherent in each of these things. For example, Cash is a deeply religious man, yet his reputation as a rock ‘n’ roll hellion stands second to none. He is a recovering drug addict who was saved by the Bible and the love of a woman, but whose weaknesses occasionally have led him back to rehab; a dyed-in-the-wool patriot, his bitter criticism of the Vietnam War flew in the face of country music’s traditionally hardline conservatism. And then there’s this: His best friends are Waylon Jennings on the one hand, and evangelist Billy Graham on the other. “And what a stretch that is,” Jennings admits.
Perhaps the only thing about Johnny Cash that nearly everyone can agree on is that he is still a force to be reckoned with. “If you count him down-and-out, that’s when he’ll get up and knock you out,” Jennings says. “The only thing to stop Johnny Cash is when he stops breathing.”
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It is in that spirit that Cash has undertaken the reinvention of himself as a folkabilly hepcat not unlike the one who walked into Sam Phillips’ Memphis recording studio nearly 40 years ago. This time Cash is older, wiser, and exhilarated by the freedom of having only himself to impress. American Recordings, his first album for producer Rick Rubin and his label of the same name, is a spare acoustic effort spotlighting Cash alone with his guitar, unadorned by the sort of noxious studio tweakery that was layered on his late-‘80s efforts as a desperate sop to country radio, which ultimately didn’t care anyway. An acutely personal statement, the album features songs by Cash as well as carefully chosen covers by such venerable sources as Kristofferson, Leonard Cohen, Loudon Wainwright III, Tom Waits, Nick Lowe, and even one by heavy-metal bandleader Glenn Danzig.
By signing with American, Cash has freed himself from the Nashville machinery that harbors little affection for its truest heroes. Under Rubin’s tutelage, he instead is being positioned as an elder statesman of the alternative-rock nation, a move that seems as curious as it is dead-on. Aside from the odd cover of an Elvis Costello or Bruce Springsteen tune, Cash has had little to do with rock for years, favoring the country and gospel sounds that have been his bread and butter since he left Sun Records for Columbia in 1958. But consider that in recent times bands such as Social Distortion and Wall of Voodoo have covered his classic “Ring of Fire” and that Springsteen credits Cash’s stark, fatalistic anthems with inspiring his gloomy and noncommercial yet artistically triumphant Nebraska album. In 1988, Michelle Shocked, the Mekons, and Marc Almond, among others, paid tribute to Cash with ‘Til Things Are Brighter, a compilation benefiting AIDS research. Most recently, U2 featured him on “The Wanderer,” the closing track of 1993’s multiplatinum Zooropa. No only did the song bring Cash before his largest audience in ages, it neatly summarized and further mythologized an essential element of his legacy in the space of a single line: “I went out there in search of experience, to taste and touch and to feel as much as a man can before he repents.” Which, Cash admits today, is pretty accurate, even if he didn’t plan it that way.
His performance last December at Hollywood’s notorious Viper Room, where he was introduced by an obviously impressed Johnny Depp, and an appearance at the Austin, Texas, punk club Emo’s during this year’s South by Southwest Music and Media Conference further established Cash in territory previously untrodden by an icon of country music.
“Johnny Cash stands out in any bunch, just by his reality, just by the heart and soul of his music,” Kristofferson says. “It’s like watchin' an old coyote walk through a poodle party.”
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House of Cash, the singer’s museum-and-office complex, sits just off the main road that runs through Hendersonville, Tennessee, 30 miles northeast of Nashville. In operation since 1969 and under the supervision of Cash’s younger sister Reba, it is a modest version of the star-based tourist attractions, such as Dollywood and Twitty City, that have blossomed all over the state. Twitty City, in fact, is right across the street. At House of Cash, fans can wander past a wall full of his gold records and admire a case displaying his seven Grammy awards and his statuette from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. There is also a collection of Carter family memorabilia, a small room full of props from Cash’s 1973 feature film Gospel Road, and an ungainly black Cadillac roughly built to the specifications of his 1976 hit “One Piece at a Time.” Odd curios picked up along the way, including John Wayne’s Colt Peacemaker, Buddy Holly’s motorcycle, and a writing desk that once belonged to Chinese ruler Chaing Kai-Shek, are placed here and there. Photographs of family members, local residents, and a president or two, many taken by Cash himself, line the front hallway.
Upstairs, his office is filled with items of a more personal nature. A vintage poster, a “call to arms for working-class citizens,” which was signed and given to him by Bob Dylan, hangs on one wall near a framed piece of hate mail from the Ku Klux Klan (“You are a traitor to the white people…I hope your daughter gives you a nigger grandchild”). On the opposite wall are Bono’s original handwritten lyrics to “The Wanderer,” then called “Wanderlust.” And beneath them, on an aging yellow-green couch sits Cash himself, dressed in a long-sleeved black shirt and light blue figured pants with drawstrings in the cuffs.
“I have no illusions about where I am in my life and career,” Cash says in his familiar bass baritone, which is ragged and raw from a month-long tour of Australia and his gig at Emo’s the week before. “I’m very happy to be 62 years old. I’m blessed to be 62 years old. But see, this is my third time around, and it’s great just to feel like I’m wanted, you know?”
In many ways, he says, working with Rubin reminds him of his days with Phillips at Sun. “Sam used to say, ‘What else you got, what else you got?’ and I’d have to stand there and sing all day. Same way with Rick. Not just at the beginning, but all the way through. I would always come back to a session with a song I hadn’t thought of before, and so would he. We recorded over a hundred songs over the course of a year and eight or 10 trips to California. We painfully weeded them down to the 13 that are on the album. It feels like there’s a concept to it, and it works.”
Cash even pays Rubin the extravagant compliment of comparing him favorably to Phillips. “Rubin’s got a broader vision,” he says. “He’s very objective about who I am, what I am, and what I do. It doesn’t matter to him if I sing a song that is a tried-and-true classic that nobody’s heard in 20 years. If he feels the songs and I don’t fit, he’ll say so. And by the same token, I won’t budge over something I don’t think is right for me to do. Going into this, the only thing that I said I wouldn’t do is anything that would embarrass me.”
His performance at Emo’s, where he played a solo set of songs from his album and a rockabilly finale featuring the Tennessee Three, is the prototype for his current tour, which eschews the traditional “family” production that he continues to do (primarily in Branson, Missouri) for an edgier roadhouse-style show that likely will be featured on the side stage at some stops along this year’s Lollapalooza tour.* Cash say Emo’s reminded him of an earlier time in his career. “It was like the old days for me, like the ‘50s” he says. “The only thing I can compare it to was a club in a town called Gobbler, Missouri, a place called the Bloody Bucket. Carl [Perkins, a rockabilly star in his own right and Cash’s guitarist for years] played there about once a month. I played there a couple of times. But it was like the night was not complete unless there was a knife fight and somebody got cut or killed. And it happened every week. I mean, that didn’t go on at Emo’s, but it was that kind of place. If it rained there, half the people would get wet. But they call it the ‘in’ place now, and it turned out to be that for me. It was one of the best experiences of my career, to sit on that stage with just my guitar and all these people listening to every word.”
That same degree of intimacy is what Cash is striving for on American Recordings. “This is a me-singing-to-you album,” he says. “I don’t know what station is gonna play an album of Johnny Cash and his guitar; maybe there are a few of ‘em. But what I’ve got on this album is the real me. It’s as far from rock ‘n’ roll as Brahms. It’s as far from mainstream country as anything could be. It’s not a record to compete with Travis Tritt or Clint Black. It’s me. It’s what I do. And it’s what I feel I do best.”
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J.R. Cash was born on February 26, 1932 in Kingsland, Arkansas. (The name John wasn’t established until later, and it was Phillips who called him Johnny.) His father, Ray, was an itinerant worker and, Cash says, “the hardest working man I’ve ever known.” In 1935, the family moved to Dyess, an experimental New Deal farming community in the flat, black delta land of northeast Arkansas, which is best suited for raising cotton.
The Cash family – Ray, his wife Carrie, and their children Roy, Louise, Jack, J.R., Reba, Joanne, and Tommy – was poor but proud and extremely close-knit. “We didn’t have a lot,” Cash says. “When I was real small, we didn’t have any money. It was like a coal-mining town where they had scrip you could use at the company store: same way in my hometown. The government issued this subsidy check or loan. They’d make a crop loan for a year, and we had little five-cent coupons, 10-cent, quarter coupons, dollar. That was the only money my dad had until I was five or six years old. Even then, we only had it when the cotton sold, after pickin’ time. But I was never hungry, I was never ragged, I never went without shoes. I didn’t have money for a guitar. Never could buy one. Never could imagine havin’ 10 dollars for a Gene Autry guitar. Thing like a loaf of bread you’d buy at the store, we had that maybe two or three times a year. We worked hard for what we had, but we had enough.”
Many of his songs, such as “Big River,” “Pickin’ Time,” and “Five Feet High and Rising,” draw heavily on his early days, when he carried water for the field hands at age four and at 10 worked in the fields himself. The religious fervor he still carries with him was imparted by the fire-and-brimstone sermons delivered at the local Church of God, where at age 12, Cash pledged himself to Jesus; and by the tragic death in a saw accident of his brother Jack, who wanted to be a preacher.
Perhaps the greatest influence on young J.R., though, was the radio. Bombarded as we are today by scores of cable channels and local radio stations up and down the dial, it’s nearly impossible to imagine what a lifeline a transistor radio was for a small boy in those days. “It was a wonderful world of music that was coming out of the radio,” Cash says. “I’d tune in Mexican border stations, WJJD in Chicago, WSM in Nashville, WWVA in Wheeling, West Virginia. Just a little turn of the dial, and there was XERL in Del Rio, Texas, and they’re playing country music, transcriptions of somebody. Of course, today there’s so many stations, you can’t get ‘em all. The greatest thing to me was to get to hear a transcription where I’d get to hear a country artist talk. I’d just listen to that voice and think how wonderful it was to hear him actually say something.”
Fresh out of high school in 1950, Cash bolted for Michigan, where he worked for a short time at the Fisher auto-body plant in Pontiac. He joined the Air Force and was stationed in Landsberg, Germany. It was there that he bought his first guitar and began writing songs in earnest. Upon his return to the States in 1954, he married Vivian Liberto, a San Antonio native whom he had met while he was in basic training in Texas. They moved to Memphis, where Cash halfheartedly sold appliances door-to-door and attended broadcasting school on the G.I. Bill. Seeing that John was obsessed with music, his older brother Roy, who was a musician in the ‘40s, introduced him to a pair of musical mechanics, guitarist Luther Perkins and bassist Marshall Grant. The trio that formed played mostly gospel numbers for church functions and dressed in black because it was the one color their limited wardrobes shared.
Though Cash was initially rebuffed in his repeated attempts to record gospel for Sun, Phillips finally relented when the singer came in with “Hey Porter,” one of the songs he had written in Germany and published as a poem in the military newspaper Stars and Stripes. It became the B-side of “Cry, Cry, Cry,” his first single, Sun Records #221.
“To have that record played on WMPS [Memphis] that first day, that was it for me,” Cash recalls. “I was singin’ on the radio, and that was as far as I ever wanted to go in life. I thought, ‘So what am I gonna do now?’ And then the disc jockey turned the record over and dropped it and broke it. And I thought, ‘Well, the first side got played on the radio, that’s all I ever wanted.’ I went back to Sam Phillips and said, ‘He broke my record, I guess that’s it.’ He said, ‘What do you mean, that’s it?’ I said, ‘Well, then nobody’ll ever hear me anymore.’ And he pulled out a drawer with a box full of records and he said, ‘Here, take a new one.’
Many more hits would follow. Cash’s Sun successes included “Folsom Prison Blues,” which he wrote after seeing the film Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison; the terminally stoic “Guess Things Happen That Way”; the calculated crossover move “Ballad of a Teenage Queen,” with its uncharacteristically (for Cash) syrupy background chorus; his signature song, the guarded “I Walk the Line,” and more than a dozen others, nearly all of them built upon some variation of the trio’s trademark boom-chicka-boom rhythm.
In 1958, he signed a lucrative contract with Columbia, where he remained for 28 years, creating numerous hits, but also broadening the scope of his music. He recorded songs from the then-current folk boom such as Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me Babe,” and delved deeper into the white gospel music of his youth. Much to the chagrin of radio programmers, Cash made hits of songs that had a social conscience, such as “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” which tells the story of a Native American war veteran who dies destitute and alone. And he also recorded concept albums about trains and working men, as well as such enduring classics as the haunting “The Long Black Veil,” the blistering “Ring of Fire,” which was cowritten by June Carter, and the monumental “The Legend of John Henry’s Hammer,” on which Cash beat his hands bloody slamming two steel bars together for sound effects.
With commercial success came endless touring, including up to 300 dates per year. To beat the constant fatigue, Cash began popping amphetamines, as well as drinking beer and downing barbiturates to help him sleep at night. It wasn’t long before he was in the throes of an addiction that found him swallowing dozens of pills a day. “I took drugs because it made me feel good,” Cash says flatly. “And they worked really good then. It didn’t take long, though, even when I was young, for them to start takin’ me. I was dyin’ then, in the early-to-mid ‘60s. I was dyin’.”
Cash’s self-destructive ways left plenty of victims besides himself in their wake. He canceled concerts, bankrupting some of the small-time promoters who had stretched their lines of credit to book him. Friendships both professional and personal were broken by his irresponsibility. He crashed almost every car he owned, and crazed by the manic energy of his addiction, once drove a tractor off a cliff and into a lake, escaping death only because he was thrown off on the way down. His marriage to Vivian ended, separating him from his daughters Rosanne, Kathleen, Cindy, and Tara, to whom he been a loving but hopelessly erratic father.
Cash moved into an apartment in Madison, Tennessee, with fledgling solo performer Jennings, though the two were busy enough with their careers and extracurricular activities that they were rarely home at the same time. Yet their lives did run parallel in at least one fashion. “John and I both were on drugs in those days when we first met,” Jennings says. “But from that day to this day, we have yet to give each other one pill. We just never did share drugs. We lied to each other about ‘em a lot. But the whole thing was, we never discussed it. I was worried about him, and I’m sure he was worried about me, ‘cause you know, I knew I could handle it but he couldn’t. And that was the way he was thinking, too. We knew we were doin’ wrong, basically, but it has to be something bigger than your habit that gets you out of it.”
What finally got Cash out of it was a literally sobering experience following a night in which his perniciousness put him behind bars, the last of seven nights he had spent in jail over the years. “There was a sheriff named Ralph Jones,” he says. “He left me out of jail one morning in La Fayette, Georgia, and gave me my pills back that he had taken from me the night before. He said, ‘God has given you free will. Here’s your pills. Go ahead and kill yourself. That’s what you were doing when you came in here.’ But this is what got me: He said, ‘I told my wife when I got home that I had Johnny Cash in my jail, and she cried all night. She’s such a fan of yours and loves you so much.’ He said, ‘I don’t want to see you no more.’
“I went right straight back to Nashville and called June, and she contacted Dr. Nat Winston, who was the former head of the Tennessee Department for Mental Health. He came out to my house every day for 30 days. There weren't any treatment centers around back then. I climbed the walls and beat the devil there for a while. And I came out clean and straight.”
Cash credits June Carter, who, as a member of the Carter family, had been a part of his road show since the early ‘60s, with turning his life around. Carter helped him reignite his spirituality, and she helped him ride out the worst days of his addiction. “I was madly in love with her,” Cash says. “We got along great when I didn’t have my mood altered. And when I did, my head was somewhere else. Everywhere else. But she knew that. She saw through it. And she felt like I was worth savin’ so she fought me to save me.” He proposed onstage in London, Ontario, and they were married in 1968.
In 1969, Cash sold more records than any other artist. He scored gold records for his landmark albums Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison and Johnny Cash at San Quentin, and won a host of Country Music Awards, including Entertainer of the Year, Male Vocalist of the year, Best Album (San Quentin), and Best Single (“A Boy Named Sue”). His ABC television program, The Johnny Cash Show, which ran through 1971, was not only a popular mix of rural and urban sensibilities, it brought to the small screen such then-seldom-seen guests as Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and Derek and the Dominoes.
But soon, the wave passed. Cash still delivered worthwhile albums and a number of terrific singles, including Kristofferson’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” the self-defining original “Man in Black,” and a nod to then-son-in-law Lowe, “Without Love.” But he no longer ruled the charts as he once did. Yet he remained an established concert draw around the world and parlayed his popularity into a number of television and film roles, which culminated in his producing and starring in Gospel Road, a film about Christianity that Cash calls the proudest achievement of his career. As his contract with Columbia wound down, he switched to Mercury in 1986, but without much luck sales-wise. The work was occasionally superb, notably Water From the Wells of Home, but support dwindled as the label’s interest switched to younger artists in the country boom.
“All [Nashville] wants is new, new, new,” Cash’s stepdaughter Carlene Carter says. “They basically turned their back on a lot of these performers. Apart from the way they’ve treated George Jones, I think they’ve been pretty ungracious, particularly to John. He built that town in a lot of ways. He definitely opened doors for a lot of these kids that are big stars now. And to be treated the way he was, I think it’s fine for him to have the taste in his mouth that he does, which is pretty bitter.”
Cash, however, is gracious to a fault. “I’m not bitter,” he insists. “It’s just that I wasn’t a priority anymore.” [Producer] Jack Clement was doing the very best he could do with what the record company gave him to work with, and Mercury did the best they could do for the budget allocated. It’s just that I was spinnin’ my wheels makin’ records in Nashville.
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No doubt that suits Rubin just fine. Cash may be prescient in his assessment that there aren’t many commercial radio stations that will play American Recordings, but if the duo’s purpose was to construct an archetypal Cash album, they’ve succeeded. There are train songs (“Let the Train Whistle Blow” and “Down by the Train”), traditional numbers that Cash puts his stamp on (“Tennessee Stud” and “Oh Bury Me Not”), songs of salvation (“Like a Soldier” and “Redemption”), outlaw songs (“Delia’s Gone” and “Thirteen), and even one wiseass ditty that takes on genuine pathos in Cash’s treatment (“The Man Who Couldn’t Cry”).
The song certain to gain some degree of notoriety is “Delia’s Gone,” a traditional blues with new lyrics written by Cash. His seemingly cavalier attitude about a woman’s murder – “Delia, oh Delia/Delia all my life/If I hadn’t shot poor Delia/I’d have her for my wife” – is sure to be, at the very least, the subject of a panel discussion at the next New Music Seminar. But Cash remains unmoved. “I wrote ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ 40 years ago,” he says. “Forty. And I still hear, every once in a while, a comment about, ‘How could a man like Johnny Cash say, “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die?”’ No line is more violent than that. So with ‘Delia’s Gone,’ I took an old folk song and I wrote my own lyrics to it. The song is about killin’ a woman’, shootin’ her twice ‘cause he couldn’t stand to see her suffer after the first shot, ‘cause she didn’t die. A lot of people will jump on anything to try and bring an artist down. Everybody knows I didn’t shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die, but a lot of people like to hear that. It’s a fun thing with me.”
“That’s who he is, that’s what he is,” Jennings says of Cash’s outlaw image. “But he ain’t never shot nobody. He did burn up a damn forest one time, but he ain’t shot nobody. Some people are probably gonna raise hell about that song, but you know what? It’s the hardest thing in the world for people like me and John to really give a shit.”
Besides, Cash points out, it’s the balance of the album that counts, not the individual songs. “If you look at this album, it pretty well covers the scope of emotions and attitudes, from a really down heartbreak song like ‘Bird on a Wire’ to a bloody Vietnam war song like “Drive On,” and from ‘Delia’s Gone’ to redemption.
“I don’t know about you or anybody else, but there’s a good and a bad side to me, and every day it’s a battle to keep the good side winnin’. But I can’t close the door on the past or make believe it doesn’t exist because then I become complacent and I’ll be vulnerable to every temptation that comes along. I think it’s good, even if it’s just a song for fun, to address all of these attitudes and ideas and messages in the songs. It is for me. It’s good therapy for me to explore the dark side, but then there are songs like Tom Waits’ ‘Down by the Train’ that is a redemption song.”
Two songs that strike at the heart of what Cash’s career, and indeed his life, may be all about – a man who is all too aware of his failings yet is perpetually struggling against them – are Lowe’s “The Beast in Me” and Kristofferson’s “Why Me Lord.”
“It’s a prayer,” Cash says of the former song. “God help the best in me. It’s admitting that sometimes I go crazy. It’s admitting that sometimes I’m out of control. It’s admitting that sometimes I’ve been so screwed up that I didn’t know if it was New York or New Year. But then, the last line is, ‘God help the beast in me.’ Prayin’ for the white dog to win.
“‘Why Me Lord’ is a prayer of supplication that is one of those rare feelings that I have. It’s a song of praise and prayer and a kind of redemption. It’s like approaching God with a sense of awe, which I do. You know, why me? What have I ever done that was worth lovin’ you?”
For his part, Kristofferson is almost embarrassed to talk about the song, even though he still ends each of his concerts with it. “it was one of those songs where I was just holding the pen,” he says. “It followed a profound religious experience in a church, John’s church, actually, which is not exactly common behavior for me. The song was just a personal expression, and it struck a chord with a lot of people. But it’s also led people to want to talk to me about a lot of organized religion, which I don’t have much to do with. But I try to lead a spiritual life, and that’s what the song is about.”
Perhaps the least likely inclusion on the album is Danzig’s “Thirteen.” Known as much for his occult leanings as his brand of heavy-metal crunch, Danzig met Cash on a purely musical playing field. They did not discuss theology.
“I didn’t know who he was,” Cash says. “Rick introduced me, and he was sittin’ there with a guitar in his hands, and he said, ‘I wrote you a song.’ So I said, ‘Let’s hear it.’ By the second time through, I was playing along with him. I recorded it that night, and that’s the take that’s on the album. It’s one of those songs that was perfect, I thought. I’ve seen Danzig’s videos, but I don’t know much about him. I talked to Glenn last week. Nice man.”
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As rich as his past is, Cash is constantly scanning the horizon for what’s coming next. Already he is anxious to hit the road. “I can’t sit at home too long,” he says. “That’s the work ethic I grew up with. After three or four days at home, I get itchy feet and think, ‘I’ve got to go work somewhere.’”
To that end, several days in August and September have been penciled in on his calendar for Lollapalooza. He’s typically unfazed by the possibility of meeting grunge nation head-on, but Carlene Carter’s not so sure. “I have no idea how they’re going to accept him,” she says. “I think they’re gonna think he’s cool. But on the other hand, it could be totally a mistake and be horribly embarrassing. My daughter said to me, ‘Mom, I’ve been to Lollapalooza. It’s thrash music. I just can’t see Grandpa up there.”
John Carter Cash, the singer’s 24-year-old son, who is pursuing his own career in music, is more optimistic and more succinct: “Lollapalooza is about being on the cutting edge, and that’s exactly what Johnny Cash is, on the cutting edge. People will be able to see that he’s an honest artist and an honest person, and I think they’ll respond to that.”
And why not? Cash continues to accept all challenges, at least the ones he thinks won’t embarrass him. His next album, he says, will “get a little heavier on the beat, rockabilly it up a little. I don’t think I’ll be recording with Slayer, though.” His eyes glint and he sneaks a smile. “You never know, though. I just might.”
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* Obviously, the Lollapalooza thing fell through. Such are the hazards of writing for a magazine with a three-month lead time.