Musician1988

Is Johnny Cash a great vocalist? Of course not. He's been called the only man who can go off key talking. Is Johnny Cash a great singer? You bet he is. His delivery is so compelling, so completely honest, that any song he throws his weight behind assumes the authority of truth carefully spoken.

Nashville got to watering down and slickin' up the country music," Cash says, "to pander to the citybillies that were buyin' the urban cowboy craze. For a while there, '81, '82, everybody in New York had a pair of cowboy boots. Then the urban cowboy craze died and cowboy boot sales dropped 70 percent, and the same happened with those country records that Nashville was grindin' out. A lot of producers and record companies made the fatal mistake of continuing to try to record that kind of syrupy country music."

Cash was shoved aside in the gold rush. He believes that Columbia, his label for nearly 30 years, started ignoring his albums in favor of various blow-dried flavors of the month. Maybe, he says, he just stayed in one place too long. So last year Cash left CBS and signed with Poly Gram. His first album was a solid effort called Johnny Cash Is Coming to Town. His third will be an LP of collaborations with friends and family members on the general theme of home. But it's his second PolyGram album that has Cash excited here in Durham, North Carolina in December of 1987. Cash pulls out a cassette and puts on a rough mix of Johnny Cash: Platinum and Gold, newly recorded versions of his greatest hits.

And of course you think it's the classic crass commercial move-recut the old hits for the new label. Then "Get Rhythm" kicks in and, brother, Johnny Cash is singing better than he's sung on a record in years. The band is snapping but it's Cash himself who's bringing fire to the performance. Here's the sound of the man in black rocking out and enjoying himself. Cash grins, proud of what he and his road band have done. He punches up other selections: "Guess Things Happen That Way," "Hey! Porter," "Cry, Cry, Cry" "Tennessee Flat Top Box"-currently a number one country hit for Cash's daughter Rosanne-"Ring of Fire," "I Walk the Line," "Home of the Blues." Many of these songs were hits for Cash before he even signed to Columbia, when he was a star at Sun Records in the mid-'50s.

"I went in with a $35,000 budget for a double album, produced it myself, and we're coming out under budget," he says. "That's the way country music ought to be recorded. If I spent more time or money I'd have done 'em wrong. One evening we did nine songs in six hours. I wanted to perform my own songs with my own particular kind of musical integrity. Without trying to appeal to a mass audience or make a crossover record. And it feels good to me."

Cash came to Sam Philips' Sun Records in 1954 from a youth on an Arkansas farm, a brief post-high school stretch in Michigan's auto factories, and a stint in Germany with the Air Force. When he got to Memphis, Presley was ready to explode. "Elvis was really a nice man, " Cash says. "He was very shy but he loved to perform and he knew that audience. He knew when he walked onstage that he had 'em. Very charismatic. Everybody that was backstage at our concerts- Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, and the guys in the bands, and the hangers-on-got as close to the curtain to watch Elvis as they could. They watched him every minute he-was on. He had that magnetism. He was always really nice to me. The first big show I played was opening for Elvis at the Overton Park shell in Memphis. It was Elvis' show but at the bottom of the ad it said, 'Extra-Johnny Cash sings "Cry, Cry, Cry."' I did that song and 'Hey! Porter' and then Elvis went on. Then he took me on tour to Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas. It was the same everywhere. I'll never forget Amarillo, he had them climbing onto the stage. The security guards had to come and kick them off so Elvis could perform. They were trying to grab his feet and his pants. He had a magnetism he'd turn on with the willing. If he saw a girl he liked he'd give her the eye and she'd be backstage by the time he got off. " Cash laughs. "He had lots of women and they loved him. Elvis was fabulous. "

Cash smiles and looks out the bus window. Elvis came off the road a long time before he died. Cash went out on the road in 1954, and he's been out ever since. He's had periods when he was massively popular and periods when he was close to death, he's known everyone and done things we'll never know. But year in and year out, he's been on a bus, going from town to town, playing matinees, state fairs, concerts and charity broadcasts. He is 55 years old. He's been on this bus a lifetime.

Cash still travels with the Carter Family-his wife June, her sisters Anita and Helen, and lately June's daughter Carlene. Carlene was left behind in a hospital a couple of cities ago- nothing serious, just a little excess with the vodka. But that does cut one voice from the Carters' four-part harmonies. Tonight's show is a benefit in a gym for an eye bank in North Carolina. First the Durham Symphony will perform light classics and Christmas tunes, then they'll accompany Cash on a reading of a dramatic monolog. After intermission Cash and the Carters will give a full country concert. The first part of the show goes smoothly, but during the break June Carter runs down the backstage corridor looking for help: Anita's having a rheumatoid arthritis attack so severe that her throat's closed itself to breathing. An ambulance is called but can't get past the tour buses blocking the back doors. Pretty soon paramedics are rushing through with oxygen and stretchers. Cash appears and surveys the chaos with no great show of anxiety. He says to his wife, "I'll go on first tonight, June, " and a minute later he's greeting the crowd with "Ring of Fire" and the trademark "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash."

Backstage June tends to her stricken sister with f~firm concern until she hears John's voice on the PA introducing her. She shoots through the dark, up the stage stairs, and into the spotlight, whooping and greeting the roaring crowd. In the space of 60 seconds and 50 feet she's put a smile over her anxiety. She and John tear into "Jackson, " a new song called "Where Did We Go Right" and "Wreck of the Old 97." Then Cash walks offstage and June tells the crowd, "Don't panic, old golden throat will be right back. " June talks for a while, killing time and hoping that sister Helen, at least, will be able to join her for the Carter Family segment of the show. "This has been an unusual night," June smiles to the crowd. "It hasn't gone exactly the way we planned it. I don't know how to explain it except to say I have one daughter in the hospital and one sister who's fainted. " The crowd laughs, June looks into the dark backstage and catches sight of Helen's dress. "I see one glittering-this is my sister Helen Carter, the star of the show!" The two remaining Carters harmonize on four lovely Appalachian ballads, stepping on each other's improvised parts here and there, but blending beautifully.

After the show Cash and the Carters sign autographs and climb aboard their bus. Nobody seems to consider tonight a tough performance. Helen Carter, a warm, outgoing woman, laughs about a Gulf coast shrimp festival the Carters played last summer with Leon Russell. Now that was a tough show. The stage collapsed and the promoters fled with the gate receipts. The Carters cut a hole in the fence and drove through it, but the angry audience gave chase. Russell helped avert violence by coming down the road in his bus, brandishing a pistol from the window.

Forget Def Leppard and Motley Crew: Here are musicians who truly live wild lives. And they're so used to it they don't even think it's unusual. The bus or the hotel is home, and if a family member gets left in a hospital along the road, they'll just have to catch up later.

The Country Music Foundation has just released a new version of The Bristol Sessions-the 1927 field recordings that brought country music out of the mountains and onto radios and phonograph records. Most important of the Bristol discoveries were Jimmie Rodgers and the original Carter Family featuring Maybelle Carter, mother of June, Helen and Anita. Now, switching gears from her story about escaping from the mad shrimpers with Leon Russell, Helen mentions that she always likes to say she was at the Bristol sessions- because they were recorded in August of '27 and Helen was born a month later. "So I was there, " she laughs. You want to talk history? Here's a woman who was in the womb at the birth of country-and-western recording, and 61 years later she's still on the bus, playing one-night stands and laughing at the stories. Also on the bus are her sisters, and June's husband John-probably the most famous country singer. As they pull into the parking lot of tonight's hotel, Cash listens to the radio news and tells June that a Frank Sinatra/Liza Minelli concert in New Jersey was canceled tonight because Frank's orchestra's sheet music didn't arrive. "Well, " June says, "they should've just gone out with an autoharp."

June Carter is a gas, as outgoing and funny as her husband is somber. The next day at breakfast (Cash is one musician who likes to travel in the early morning) June says her friend Sandy will be joining us. Sandy turns out to be Sanford Meisner, the legendary acting teacher. The Cashes know everybody. And as June cheerfully compares the masters of the Method ("Lee Strasberg was great but he just ruined people's lives") you realize that this woman's folksy manner can't obscure a sophisticated mind.

The Musician interview rambles over a Sunday morning, from Durham, North Carolina to Richmond, Virginia, where the Cash clan will play a matinee at a downtown theater. During the night June has sent for her daughter Rosie to fly in and fill in for one of the missing Carters. But, as the Cashes pass through the Richmond hotel lobby, June is called to the phone. Rosie missed her plane. Now June is visibly disappointed. She catches up to John at the elevator. "Rosie's not coming," she sighs as the lift ascends. "Her alarm didn't go off. I don't know what we're going to do." Cash looks down at his worried wife and says softly, "Well, honey, we're just going to have to stop counting on the younger folk. They can't keep up this pace." She looks up at him and smiles. Two hours later they're onstage at the old Carpenter Theater, singing "We got married in a fever..." The show always goes on. So does the road.

MUSICIAN: I think the reason your early records hold up so well is that the arrangements were so simple and pure. Many country records in the '50s had fiddles, steel guitars, background vocals. Yours were unusually stark: folk music with a beat.

CASH: Yeah. Sam Phillips had a vision. He saw another direction for our music. Of course, I did too. I never liked fiddle and steel guitar on my records. Nashville in 1955 was grinding out all these country records. If you took the voice off, all the tracks sounded the same to me. Fiddle or piano would take the first half, the steel guitar would take the second half or vice versa. All the arrangements were calculated and predictable. Well, it's kind of that way with my music, but it's my music. It's not done to try to sound like somebody else in Nashville or in rock or whatever.

MUSICIAN: Charly Records in England has released some of your early demos and first takes. They show that when you first recorded at Sun you tried different things with your voice: pitching it higher, Hank Williams mannerisms -yet by the time your first single came out you were singing in your natural voice.

CASH: I was influenced by all these people, I didn't have a track record of my own. My formative years were when I was in the Air Force, when I started writing songs. I wrote "Folsom Prison Blues" in the Air Force in 1953. I played with a little group of musicians in my barracks. I was singing Hank Snow and Hank Williams songs with them before I ever tried to do my own songs. I was trying to sing like they were. This carried over to my first sessions. I was still hearing it their way. I guess I kind of found myself in those first months working in the studio at Sun. I discovered, let it flow. Don't ape anybody else. When I finally got around to doing it that way, when it dawned on me that I didn't sound like anybody else naturally, I let it come naturally. Of course, that was the secret of my success. It ain't no secret: Be yourself. I stopped trying to sound like other people after about two sessions.

MUSICIAN: Let's talk about some of the songs. What do you remember about writing "Cry, Cry, Cry"?

CASH: I had recorded "Hey! Porter" with Sam Phillips, which was one side of my first record. I'd also recorded "Wide Open Road" and "Folsom Prison Blues, " which he didn't care all that much for. I saw a note on his desk, a memo to himself: "Send 'Folsom Prison Blues' to Tennessee Ernie Ford?" After I had recorded it, y'know? I challenged him on that. I said, "I saw the note on your desk! I like Tennessee Ernie Ford, he's hot with 'Sixteen Tons,' but I don't want him singing that song. I want to do it myself. " Sam said, "Well, let's see what else you can come up with. Go home and write me an up tempo weeper love song!" I went home and I heard a disc jockey, Eddie Hill, say, "We got some good songs, love songs, sweet songs, happy songs and sad songs that'll make you cry, cry, cry. " I wrote "Cry, Cry, Cry" that night, called Sam the next day and said, "I got it." He said come on in, so I took the two musicians I had, Marshall Grant and Luther Perkins, and went in and recorded it. My first release was "Cry, Cry, Cry" and "Hey! Porter. "

MUSICIAN: Luther Perkins' leads with the Tennessee Two were interesting He was a limited guitarist with a great sense of what he could do. He came up with simple little licks that people still copy. Did players at the time come up to you and say, "Hey, I can play great lead guitar, let me replace that guy"?

CASH: Oh yeah, a lot of people. I didn't want a great guitar player, though. I wanted Luther. [smiles] And as it turns out he was the greatest of all.

MUSICIAN: There's an old story that you stuck a piece of paper under the strings of your guitar.

CASH: That's right. I didn't have a drummer and that was my snare drum. I still use that. On "I Walk the Line" on this tape.

MUSICIAN: Compared to the style in country records of the same era, your voice was very low and your guitar playing really fast. Your voice never tried to keep up with that fast rhythm, it just sort of flowed slowly over it.

CASH: You know who was a great rhythm guitar player? Elvis. You never saw him play much after the first years on Sun, but he was one of the best. He had a good hard driving rhythm on the bass strings in the key of E, a good solid rhythm. I could hear it onstage and I'd know it was Elvis. Maybe that's where I was influenced to play that kind of rhythm, I don't know. I always liked the way he played rhythm guitar.

MUSICIAN: You intended "GetRhythm" for Elvis?

CASH: After Carl Perkins recorded "Blue Suede Shoes, " Elvis asked me to write him a song. When I came home from the Air Force I stopped to get a shoe shine at the Memphis bus station. There was an old black man shinin' my shoes and he was takin' it real slow and easy. I said, "You don't do a lot of poppin' with that rag like most shoe shine men do." He said, "That's the trouble with the world now. There's too much poppin' and not enough shinin'. " I tried to work that line into the song, but it didn't work out. I just told a story about a shoe shine boy. I put it down and Elvis loved it. But it came time for my next single release and Sam said, "Elvis can't have that! I'm gonna release it on you." Elvis had gone to RCA by then. So Sam released it with "Ballad of a Teenage Queen, " which got the most play for a long time.

MUSICIAN: Toward the end of your tenure at Sun the records got a very different sound, some had Charlie Rich on piano, legend says some had Jerry Lee Lewis. Sun was trying to get as many records out of you as they could before you went to Columbia, why didn't they cut more records that sounded like Johnny Cash, instead of going for a different feel?

CASH: Well, I probably recorded a few things I didn't want to record because I got an order from Sam Phillips when he found out I was going to Columbia in July of '58. I got a letter in April that I would go into the studio on such and such a day and record a certain number of songs. That really rankled me, I refused to do it for a long time. Then Jack Clement called me and said, "My job is on the line. I'm supposed to produce you. I think you have to do it, you owe Sam some sessions." I said, "I'm not going to sing anything I don't like. " He said, "Well, will you come in? We'll go over songs and find ones you like."

So I liked the songs, but what I hated was that they overdubbed the vocal group on some of them. I hated that sound! Except for "Teenage Queen," which needed the singers, it called for it. After I recorded "I Guess Things Happen That Way" they overdubbed that "ba dum ba doom," overdubbed all that junk on it. That ruined it for me. I never saw the singing group. They overdubbed it after I thought the song was finished. I hated some of those productions that came out of there. But I tried to do what I had to do for Sam Phillips before I left him. I put down a few things that were all right, like "The Ways of a Woman in Love. " Charlie Rich played on some of those, "It's Just About Time" was one. I don't think Jerry Lee ever played piano for me on record. Even back then Jerry Lee was nobody's sideman, you know? Nobody's.

MUSICIAN: What inspired "Home of the Blues"?

CASH: I wrote "Home of the Blues," by the way, before "Heartbreak Hotel. " Home of the Blues is the name of a record shop on Beale Street. I used to go there every time I was in town and buy records. They had a great collection of American folk and blues, Southern blues, black gospel, black blues, street songs. My favorite music-and I still play it, I played it last week-is people like Pink Anderson, Robert Johnson, the king of the delta blues singers, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Papa John Creach, Sister Rosetta Tharpe! I love her! I've recorded some of her songs. Mahalia Jackson. Black blues singers. I like black gospel quartets like the Golden Gate Quartet. Those are my influences in music, those are the ones I really loved. Because I'm a white man I don't have the feel black musicians have for the music, but sometimes they come right down my street with it, and I'm comfortable doin' it.

Some of those field recordings that Alan Lomax did! Blues in the Mississippi Night is my all-time favorite album. It was done on a wire recorder in the honky-tonks and the alleys of those little towns in Mississippi. That's where I got the idea for "Goin' to Memphis" and that's where I found the song "Another Man Done Gone. " I got the idea for "Big River" from those recordings. That's my roots. Black people in Mississippi and South Carolina sing real Southern blues, you know? Alan Lomax went into Angola Prison in the '40s and recorded the black blues singers. There's a wealth of material there. Some of it I can do, some I can't.

MUSICIAN: You told your guitarist Jim Soldi to play like Robert Johnson on the new version of "Get Rhythm. "

CASH: Yeah, the Carter Family were playing at the Mean Fiddler in London. I walked in and Nick Lowe and Elvis Costello were there. I got up and did "The Big Light" with Elvis Costello and then Nick asked me to do "Get Rhythm. " He had a beat on that thing that I never had thought about. In all the sessions for this new album I kept tryin' to get that sound that Nick had. We finally hooked it. Jim Soldi figured out Nick's rhythm, then I said, "Play a little Robert Johnson delta blues slide guitar on that. " He got this bottleneck thing. My producer Don Law also produced Robert Johnson. He told me a story about that. He said that Robert Johnson had finished his sessions in a hotel room in Dallas. That week Don Law had recorded the Chuck Wagon Gang, Gene Autry and Robert Johnson. After Robert Johnson's sessions were over one night he came to the room and woke Don Law up and asked him for some money to go downstairs-for liquor or a woman or whatever. That was the night he was killed. I don't know all that much about him. I've worn his album out and talked to Don Law about him a little bit before Don Law died.

MUSICIAN: You mentioned "The Big Light. " I got a kick out of your recording that, because the original sounded like Costello trying to write a Johnny Cash song.

CASH: You know, I thought so too, but he didn't intend it that way. He didn't write it for me. It sounded like something I wish I'd written. I knew Elvis, he'd been out to my house when he played Nashville and I've seen him a couple of times and we got along just great. I saw him at Nick Lowe is house in 1979 when I did Nick's song 'Without Love" in Nick's basement. Elvis was there and Dave Edmunds and Martin Belmont. I always got along great with Elvis. That was really happening at the Mean Fiddler! Man, we had a time.

MUSICIAN: Another case where you recorded songs that had been influenced by your songs was on your Johnny 99 album, where you did two from Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska.

CASH: I wish I'd written those two songs. Why didn't I write "Johnny 99" and "Highway Patrolman"? Springsteen's great.

MUSICIAN: You made a nice change on the last line: "Shave off my hair and BURN Johnny 99. "

CASH: [laughs] I was taking a big liberty, changing a Bruce Springsteen Iyric-but he wasn't there so I went ahead and did it. I had to fight to get to do "Johnny 99. " The record company people kept saying, "You don't want to do a Springsteen song! " I said, Yeah, I do." I even went to New York and talked to the president of the company about it. He said, "I don't want to hear you do Springsteen, I want to hear you do Johnny Cash. " I said, "But I gotta do these two songs, they feel so right for me. " That album was produced in California by Brian Ahern. I didn't have all that much control over the material on that album. He played producer with me, you know?

MUSICIAN: That album felt like a tug of war. You've made some sharp shifts in approach in the '80s. Rockabilly Blues was a terrific album, produced by your pianist, Earl Poole Ball. But you followed it with The Baron, which was pretty corny.

Cash: Well, with Rockabilly Blues I was looking to my roots, only briefly. I didn't want one of those super producers who slicks everything up. I wanted it a little grittier, back to the basics, and Earl had a feel for that. Earl plays piano for me and I call him a delta boogie rhythm player. He's got a feel for rockabilly. He did a good job on it, I thought. Now, The Baron was a Billy Sherrill production. It's not my favorite song, although it's a good song. I don't even know what else was on that album.

MUSICIAN: "Hey, Hey Train" was okay but after Rockabilly Blues the whole album felt like a step back.

CASH: Yeah, it was. I was probably thinking more about television and the movies and crap like that at the time I recorded that. We all go through that. Sometimes you go in a direction that your producer convinces you you need at the time, you know? And I listened to too many of those people. I know what I want when I get in the studio and I let too many people tell me otherwise.

MUSICIAN: Your TV show was a welcome relief from all the culturall political geographical divisions of 196911970. When you and Dylan sat there together it was suddenly obvious that the counterculture's rock idol and the patriotic king of country had a lot more in common than their audiences might have expected.

CASH: I remember having a meeting with the producer and network officials before I started. I said, "If I'm going to do a network television show, sing my music, you're going to have to let me have guests that I have a feeling for. Because it comes from the heart, you know." They said who do you want on? I tested them. I said, "Pete Seeger. Pete Seeger's a banjo player and a folk song singer and a good man. I've been to the house he built and played music with Pete. I understand he was blacklisted one time as a communist or something, but I only know him as a banjo player, a really good folk singer and a really fine man that cares for people. " They said, "Okay, have Pete Seeger. " Then I said, "Bob Dylan. " I had the Who on there one time, and Kenny Rogers & the First Edition. Neil Diamond and Louis Armstrong. Mahalia Jackson and Linda Ronstadt. Mama Cass Elliot and Ramblin' Jack Elliott. I really sincerely enjoy those people. I spent the day with James Taylor after we taped, out in the boat fishing and singing. You could hear us all over the lake. Wonderful people.

I think Bob Dylan was scared or even a little embarrassed. He's a very shy person. I can really appreciate that. When he went out to rehearse they had an old shack hanging from wires behind him to try to give it a backwoods look. He came offstage upset. He said, "I'm gonna be the laughingstock of the business! My fans are gonna laugh in my face over that thing!" I said, "What would you like?" He said, "Have 'em get that out of the way. Just put me out there by myself. " I said, all right, you got it. Then the reporters in Nashville converged. Bob asked me to keep them away. He was staying at my house with Sara and the kids. This one reporter, Red O'Donnell with the Nashville Banner, wouldn't give up. He kept coming to me saying, "Why can't I talk to Bob Dylan? Why can't I? Ask him again if he won't talk to me. " So I went back to the dressing room and said, "Bob, this Red O'Donnell won't give up. Any way you want to communicate with him at all?" He said, "Have him write out three questions he wants to ask me and I'11 answer them on paper." He did that and then the reporter wrote a long article that Bob didn't appreciate.

Another unpleasant experience for Bob and me both was when the tape of the sessions he and I did together got out and was bootlegged all over Europe. We did 16 or 17 songs, but we were just in there having fun. It was like what they call the Million Dollar Quartet, when I was singing with Elvis and Carl and Jerry Lee. The songs had no starting place and no stopping, we'd get into them and everybody would join in. Bob and I did "Careless Love, " whatever we might know the words to. I have my one copy of that session locked in my vault at home. I've never let it out of my house. And Bob had a copy that he never let out. I don't know who let it out at Columbia, but it's all over Europe. There's a song or two that is good enough to put out, but there's not an album there. Bob never wanted it released and I don't either. Musically, it's really inferior, it's not up to par for either one of us. I think he was embarrassed over that and I don't blame him. I regret it. I love Bob Dylan, I really do. I love his early work, I love the first time he plugged in electrically, I love his Christian albums, I love his other albums.

MUSICIAN: You and he had an extensive correspondence?

CASH: We had more of a correspondence before we met. We wrote each other a lot of letters. I never have shown those letters to anybody, not even June. Bob Dylan's a very private person and he would really be embarrassed if I did. I have probably a dozen or more locked in my vault. I will eventually destroy them. There's no big secrets in them, but it's a period of Bob's life right after he first started. He had his first album out when I discovered him. I was working joints in downtown Las Vegas, the Nugget and places like that, and I was staying up all night playing Bob Dylan after I got through. So I wrote him a letter care of John Hammond at Columbia and I got a letter right back from Bob in New York. I fired one right back and then he wrote me one from California, then one from Hibbing, one from Woodstock. It was just rambling thoughts, you know? What he was feeling about things, and looking forward to meeting me. I was the same. I was writing him letters on airplanes and mailing them in those vomit bags. The 1964 Newport Folk Festival was where we met, he and I and June and Joan Baez. We hung out together that whole time up there and had a great time.

I haven't seen Bob but once or twice in the last five or six years. I got a telegram from him about nine months ago, when I was sick. "Dear John, I hope you're feeling better. Love, Bob." I really appreciated hearing from him after all that time.

MUSICIAN: Don't destroy the correspondence. Seal it for 70 years like presidential papers, bury it in a time capsule. But don't destroy it. The early '60s letters of Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash will be valuable to American musicologists in a hundred years.

CASH: I would never do that unless Bob said it was all right. I would never let those letters out of my vault. Nobody but me even knows where they are in the vault, and nobody's got the combination.

MUSICIAN: I was at Kristofferson's show at the Bottom Line last spring when he brought you up to duet on "Masters of War. "

CASH: We've talked about recording that together, 'cause Kris is really into the Central America problems.

MUSICIAN: Let me put you on the spot. Kristofferson's got some very~y strong anti-Reagan songs about Central America: "You believe injustice, you believe in freedom, but not in Nicaragua." I've seen him do those songs when I thought the audience was going to kill him. That night in New York he did those songs, then he brought you out, the crowd went wild, and then the two of you did Dylan's anti-war song. As you went back to your seat he shouted, "We've got Johnny Cash on our side against the contras! Watch out, Reagan!"

CASH: That's fair. I'm totally against funding the contras' war in Nicaragua. I'm against any war, but that war is so terrible. We're not talking< about just soldiers dying. The Contras-and the Sandinistas-are killing men, women and children, priests and nuns. It's awful. Kris has got household help who are Nicaraguan. He's very close to them, he's been down there twice and seen President Ortega. Kris is a man of peace and a man of love. You ever hear his song "Love Is the Way"? That's the Kris I know. I'm not a marcher or a picket-sign waver, but you asked me if I'm against the funding of the contras. Yes I am, totally against it. And these politicians standing up saying, "We don't want a communist country in the western hemisphere." That's a bunch of crap. People are going to go with anybody who'll feed 'em. When there are hungry people and you wave a biscuit in front of their nose, they'll follow you. They don't care what your political leanings are. And those people are hungry. The country's been devastated. I won't be a party to anything that advocates continuance of that fight. The contras are so disorganized and Ortega has a pretty strong government. It's a hopeless fight, a no-win situation.

MUSICIAN: Your discovery~y of Kristofferson is a legend; he was a janitor at the CBS studio in Nashville where you were recording

CASH: I was always impressed with Kris's writing. I kept seeing him cleaning up in the studio, hanging as close as he could. They told him if he pitched his songs to me while I was recording they would fire him. And he needed the money. So he slipped 'em to June and she put 'em in her purse and after I got home she handed me the tape. I played them and I loved his writing. Then one Sunday he landed in my yard in a helicopter and brought me "Sunday Morning Coming Down. " That's true. He fell out of that helicopter with a beer in one hand and a tape in the other and said, "By God, I'm gonna get a song to you one way or another." I said, "Well, you just did, let's go in and hear it." It was "Sunday Morning Coming Down," "Me and Bobby McGee," "To Beat the Devil" and "The Best of All Possible Worlds" on that tape. The night I did "Sunday Morning Coming Down" on network somebody called him and said I was singing his song and had mentioned his name. The next week he was at my house. June had some kind of dinner party or something, and Kris was dragging a big trash can full of ice for the cold drinks from out of the garage, helping June get ready. I said, "I'm playing the Newport Folk Festival next week. If you can get up there I'll put you on and you can sing 'Sunday Morning Comin' Down' and 'Me and Bobby McGee' for 'em." He said, "You're kiddin'!" I said, "No, can you make it to Newport?" He said, "Oh yeah, no problem." I found out when I got there he hitchhiked to Newport. He was so nervous that June said when I introduced him, when he heard his name over the loudspeaker, it stunned him and he just stood there. June got behind him and put her high heel right on his butt and pushed him out onstage. Next day on the New York Times front page: "Kris Kristofferson Steals the Show at Newport." He was on his way.

MUSICIAN: You've certainly known the range of public figures. It's a remarkable thing to have played with Bob Dylan and played for Richard Nixon, to know Billy Graham and Mick Jagger.

CASH: Yeah, people can't resolve that. My two best friends are Billy Graham and Waylon Jennings. Billy Graham's a good man, a good friend, and he's real. He wears $79 JC Penney suits and he'll show you the tag in a hot minute. I have seen his salary from his evangelistic association. At the time he showed it to me he was making $43, 000 a year. He drives a 1979 Chrysler station wagon. He is what he appears to be and I won't say that for any of the other TV preachers. He's not one of those TV preachers, he's Billy Graham, he's above all that. He has nothing to do with those people.

MUSICIAN: After Watergate, it seems he said maybe there's been too much flirtation with power and he stepped back.

CASH: I'll tell you what happened. We were together at my house in Jamaica when Watergate had full blown. Richard Nixon had called him every Sunday afternoon during his administration for counseling. When Nixon came back from China, Billy said something happened to him. I can't betray Billy Graham and quote directly, but something did happen to Nixon. And for a long time he wouldn't talk to Billy. So Billy gave up on that for a while. We were together in Jamaica the next year, not long after Nixon left office. Richard and Pat Nixon were at their place in California. Billy said, "Let's call Richard Nixon and wish him merry Christmas! Let's see if we can get through!"

I said, "You do it, I don't want to. He don't want to hear from me." He said, "Oh, he'd love to hear from you." He called up and got him right away. He said, "I want to wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new year. " Nixon was really nice to him. I was just sitting there saying, "I hope he don't put me on the phone. " I kept going, "No, don't, don't." He said, "Johnny Cash wants to wish you a merry Christmas!" [laughter] I said "Merry Christmas, Mr. President, how are you?" "Oh fine, nice, merry Christmas to you. " He put his wife Pat on. I wished her a merry Christmas. I was a little nervous in that conversation, man. But Billy felt good that he had talked to him. It doesn't matter to Billy Graham what a man has done, it doesn't matter how rotten and low he's been. If he asks people to help him, if he asks for people to forgive him, Billy Graham will. He has me. Billy's been my friend through thick and thin, man. I've sat on the beach the whole afternoon with Billy Graham talking about life and women and sex and drugs. He likes to talk to people in my world to know what's really going on. He's really concerned about the country and the people. Billy's one man who sees music for what it is-it's a way to express ourselves, and whether you do it in rock 'n' roll or country or gospel or whatever, you do it.

Waylon's like a brother to me. I went through Betty Ford Center to get off amphetamines and morphine that I got hooked on in the hospital after I broke some ribs in 1979. I was already hooked on Percodan-which is synthetic morphine- when I went in the hospital. When I came out of Betty Ford Center after 43 days in there, I went to L.A. for two days to see Waylon. Waylon was his old self, he was doin' cocaine and was really wired up, really in bad shape. I said to him, "I just want you to see my bright brown eyes to show you what can happen. If you ever want help, I know now what to tell you to do. " He'd been on cocaine 20 years, and he wouldn't mind me sayin' so. His habit cost him close to half a million dollars the last year he was doin' cocaine. He called me next morning and he said, "I'm going to quit, I'm going to do it myself]f." I said, "Boy, you have got a tough order. After 20 years on cocaine and amphetamines to quit like that? Will you promise you'll call me every day if I can't reach you?" And he did. He went to a ranch in Arizona, quit cold turkey, had his wife Jesse flush about $20,000 worth of cocaine in the bus toilet. Now he won't even take a Tylenol. He's the straightest man in the music business and one of the sharpest. He and I have been like an anchor for each other. [pauses and lowers voice] I get shaky out here. I want to take amphetamines right now! Right now I want one. But I talk to somebody every day that will inspire me and make me know I ought not to, if it's nobody but my wife June, who is super straight. All I have to say to her is, "I'm havin' a rough time, " and she knows what I mean. She'll put her arm around me. That's about all it takes sometimes, you know. I do that with Waylon. Keep him on the phone, talk him off.

When we're in Nashville we'll go to dinner, go to a movie, go to the circus. When Dan Rather anchored the news from Nashville we went down to the studio and watched. When we get craving, which happens just about every day, we figure out something to do to occupy our minds. So that's the kind of friend Waylon is to me. We go back over 20 years. He and I boarded together when he first came to Nashville. We were both doin' drugs and hidin' it from each other and Iyin' to each other about it.

MUSICIAN: You had a drug problem in the '60s, got off it and stayed off a real long time. When you slipped back into it, did you feel, "I beat it once, I can control it?"

CASH: No, it slipped up on me. Before I realized it, I was back on. After I had been off drugs for 11 years, I went to a doctor who gave me Demerol. Then I got the prescription refilled. Then I started taking Percodan. Then I remembered how much I liked speed, amphetamines. Then sleeping pills, placydil, anything to bring me down at night to get my rest. I'd take me an upper to get me goin'. Vicious cycle. On the tour of Europe in October of '83 I was really heavily into Percodan, amphetamines and sleeping pills. We played 14 cities, and when I came back to Nashville I remembered four of them. I was bleeding internally. They put me in the hospital, operated, took out about half of what they could see of everything. My gall bladder, my spleen, half my stomach was full of holes from Percodan. The more it'd hurt the more I'd take, the more I took the more it burned. But I had total recovery. I went from Eisenhower Medical Center to Betty Ford Center. It just slipped back up on me, y'know? Drugs are so deceptive. It's like a demon that says, "Hey, I'm so pretty, look at me, I'11 make you feel better! Take me." And I do. It's a battle. I've talked to those pills. There'd be six of 'em and I'd say, "I'm just gonna take one of you today, " and I- could almost hear them saying, "No, you're gonna take all of us. " 'Cause when you're on that stuff one is too many and a thousand is not enough.

MUSICIAN: That sounds like that wild rap you did on The Rambler, where you're stumbling up the stairs drunk, not sure if you've seen a hallucination of "the lady" or the real thing. That was a startling moment on that album.

CASH: I'm glad you found that. I think you're the first person that ever commented on that album to me. It was one of my favorites, but it didn't sell anything. Some of my biggest successes have been concept albums, like Ride This Train and Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indians. The Rambler was a concept I really felt good about at the time, but the record company was just totally negative about it. I don't think they pressed enough to even distribute it.

MUSICIAN: Many of the original rockers, from Little Richard to Jerry Lee Lewis, were torn up about playing the devil's music. Did you ever feel your music was sinful?

CASH: No. No. Even back when they wouldn't shoot Elvis below the waist, I thought that was the silliest thing I ever saw. The preachers were saying, "It's devil's music! It's leading our kids astray!" Well, I've been to a lot of rock concerts with my son John Carter. I went to see Twisted Sister and Iron Maiden I saw Metallica and Ozzy, AC/DC-and what I saw was a lot of kids letting off a lot of steam having a good time. And I had a good time, too. They talk about all the dope and the drugs and drinking and sex and all that. Sure, it went on. But the two hours I was at the concert I just shared a good time and saw a great show. Iron Maiden and Twisted Sister had great sound and lights. I loved it. I think Metallica was my favorite group I saw. Dee Snider's a good man, I've talked to him a lot.

I never have had any trouble reconciling God and the devil, good and evil in the music business. All music comes from God, that's the source of it all. To reach different people, we do it different ways. It would be a bad world without music, man! [laughs] Terrible.

MUSICIAN: Your novelty songs have come along pretty regularly. "Boy Named Sue, " "One Piece at a Time. " But I never understood "Chicken in Black. "

CASH: Me neither. That was awful. That was one of those things that I let a producer talk me into. The same producer who did The Baron. I hated it from the first day and I refuse to admit that I even know the words to it anymore. It was an embarrassment, you know? Every once in a while I'll do something that embarrasses me, like anybody. It's good to let the people know you have a sense of humor. Things like "Dirty Old Egg Suckin'Dog" and "Flushed from the Bathroom of Your Heart" are fun songs.

The week before I went to play San Quentin we had a party at my house, a guitar pull. One right after the other, Bob Dylan sang "Lay, Lady, Lay, " Graham Nash sang "Marrakesh Express, "Joni Mitchell sang "Both Sides Now, " Kris sang "Me and Bobby McGee, " and Shel Silverstein sang "A Boy Named Sue. " I asked Shel to write down the Iyrics to it. When I went to San Quentin, June asked if I had it. I said, "Yeah, but I haven't had a chance to rehearse it, I can't do it. " She said, "Take the Iyrics, put it on the music stand and read it off as you sing it. They'll love it." That was the one and only recording of "A Boy Named Sue. "

MUSICIAN: Live at Folsom Prison is the album everybody remembers, but San Quentin really walked the edge of chaos. It reminds me of the Clash driving punk crowds crazy playing "White Riot. " Some of your songs articulate a prisoner's view so well that they are almost dangerous to sing in a prison: In "San Quentin" you say, this place will never reform me, will never change me, I hope San Quentin rots and burns in hell. The convicts go wild. Then you do the song again. You can hear the crowd going insane. Then you ask a guard to come up and bring you a drink of water! Clearly they're about ready to skin the poor guard. Then you turn around and say, "I want to thank all the guards and the warden. "

CASH: The guards were scared to death. All the convicts were standing up on the dining tables. They were out of control, really. During the second rendition of that song all I would have had to do was say "Break!" and they were gone, man. They were ready! I've got a book called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds that I've studied for years. I knew I had that prison audience where all I had to do was say, "Take over! Break!" and they would have. Those guards knew it, too. I was tempted. But I thought about June and the Carter Family-they were there with me, too~and I controlled myself. [laughs] 'Cause I was really ready for some excitement. I tried to cool things off by asking for the drink of water and thanking the guards and the warden for letting me be there, 'cause the convicts wanted me to do something like that. That's the way I felt about the prisons when I played them, though: "May you rot and burn in hell! " all you're doing is dealing misery. They're overcrowded, they don't have the money to hire proper officials and properly house prisoners. There's no rehabilitation. First of all, with a lot of them there was no rehabilitation in the first place.

MUSICIAN: When Peter Tosh was killed I remembered that a few years earlier your home in Jamaica was invaded by bandits who held you and your family al gunpoint.

CASH: The robbery didn't stop us from going back. We love Jamaica. We bought that house in 1974. The economy's bad, and of course there's a criminal element there like everywhere else. We just happened to be unlucky. We were sitting down to Christmas dinner and three guys came in three different doors and surrounded us with a pistol, a hatchet and a knife. They held the pistol to the back of my son's head for two hours while they ransacked the house and took everything we had. One of those guys is in prison, one of them was killed in another robbery, and one of them is free living in Kingston. The Christmas after that we went back and the prime minister sent the army on maneuvers in the fields around our house. We don't run scared in Jamaica. I love the Jamaican people. We've got a lot of friends there. We're involved with an orphanage right over the hill from us: SOS Children's Village. Every year June takes down clothes for the kids there. On Christmas day we do a fundraiser. We're really involved in Jamaica. I like it down there and I don't think it's any more dangerous than Broadway Street in Nashville on Saturday night. I like to sit on my porch of my house and listen to the reggae played from a place called the Concrete Jungle, a quarter of a mile away from us. On a dear night you can hear the reggae musicians real good. I didn't know Peter Tosh but that's really a tragedy. They've lost two great ones, Bob Marley and Peter Tosh.

MUSICIAN: At breakfast this morning you were quoting Lincoln, who you've studied so much. You project a sort of abolitionist image. Even when you recorded "God Bless Robert E. Lee,"you added a spoken intro saying that you blessed Lee for surrendering to Grant, for stopping the bloodshed You obviously love the South, but l suspect your sympathies were with the Union.

CASH: Hey, let's go back a few years before Lincoln. I mean like for almost a century the federal government sanctioned slavery. It wasn't just the South. The federal government let it happen until 1861. It's not the South that's guilty of slavery. It's the federal government of the United States. Hell, I'm an American. I happen to live in the South.

MUSICIAN: You've gotten threats and hate mail from the Ku Klux Klan?

CASH: Yeah, I do. I'm proud of that. It's good to know who hates you, and it's good to be hated by the right people. The Klan is despicable, filthy, dirty, unkind. It's a shame sometimes that we have all these freedoms, 'cause freedom allows them to exist. I'd love to see them all thrown in prison.

MUSICIAN: You mean so many things to so many people. You must have people who you don't like or agree with come up and say, "You speak for me. "

CASH: Well, I try to stay true to myself and what I'm all about. I'm aware of the public figure image, the position of influence, but I'm also aware that I'm in it for the love of music. For songs and performing and recording. That's really what I do. I've been used as a beacon for a lot of things, but the causes that are really close to my heart are the retarded citizens of our country, and the battered women's shelter in Nashville. And the children, the orphanages. You know, you can really get discouraged if you get involved in prison reform, the prison system is really not right. I do a jailathon for the American Cancer Society every year. They put me in jail; everybody makes donations to either keep me in or bail me out. Last year they raised $42,000. My mother just had an operation for cancer so that's a thing close to my heart. These causes come and go. Like the tornado victims in Texas, or building a humane animal shelter in my county. But you know, I'm not pushing any causes or waving any flags right now.

MUSICIAN: What's the song Johnny Cash hasn't been able to write?

CASH: I always wanted to have a big spiritual song, like Kris had "Why Me, Lord" in 1970. All these years I've tried to record gospel and spiritual but I've never had a hit record with it. When I called Sam Phillips the first time, I told him I was a gospel singer.

Emotions are bared in my songs, and they're pretty well universal emotions. About pain, heartbreak, despair, disappointment, loneliness. That's not something really to sing about, but when you do, and communicate it to a person who's experienced that, they say, "Hey, he knows how I feel. " As far as I'm concerned, that's what performing is-communicating those emotions. That's why I always wanted to have that big spiritual song. I'd like to share the uplifting of the spirit that I feel sometimes. 'Cause but for the grace of God I could be laying there beside Elvis.