Cash: The Autobiography (26 page)

of engineering and production, and I think it stands the test of time; people still show up backstage at my concerts with copies for me to sign. I had three songs go into the top end of the country charts one after the other in 1976, and I still like them, too: “One Piece at a Time,” “Any Old Wind That Blows,” and “I Would Like to See You Again.” I loved Guy Clark's “Texas, 1947” and “The Last Gunfighter Ballad,” and The Rambler, in 1977, was another concept album from the heart; it's a shame CBS didn't see fit to tell many people about it. Generally speak- ing, I think we did okay out at the House of Cash. Country music changed a lot in the 1970s, beginning with the Outlaw movement, a kind of revolution by Nashville's most creative people, and ending in the Urban Cowboy fad, a kind of feeding frenzy among their oppo- sites. I wasn't profoundly affected by either extreme. I was never publicly identified with the Outlaw movement, though in both spirit and practice I was closely aligned, and, thankfully, I wasn't involved in the mechanical bull manure at the end of the decade. I just kept doing my own thing. The other stuff swirled around me without moving my music one way or the other. I got into a good streak in 1979, when Brian Ahem came in from the West Coast to produce my twenty-fifth- anniversary album, Silver. He was married to Emmylou Harris at the time, and those two came down to Jamaica with us, which apart from anything else gave Brian and me time to get to know each other and start clicking cre- atively; by the time we got back to Nashville we were ready to record. He brought me a lot of good songs for that album—“The L&M Don't Stop Here Anymore” and “The Ballad of Barbara” stick in my mind—and the sessions were fun. I also enjoyed two other albums I made around then, Rockabilly Blues with Earl Poole Ball and Jack Clement, and my double gospel album, A Believer Sings the Truth. The turn of the decade was a good time for my music.

The same wasn't true of my record sales, though, and my attitude suffered. Sometimes in the early '80s I really cared about recording, but sometimes I didn't. It was hard to get excited about an album project when I knew the people at my label had come to regard me as a long shot and, when the chips were down, weren't willing to put money and muscle into pushing my records. They, and all the other major record compa- nies in Nashville, were betting on the younger genera- tion and starting to play by the rules of “youth appeal.” If you were a little too old and your anatomy not quite “hot,” it didn't matter how good your songs or your records were or how many fans you'd had for how long: you weren't going to get played on the radio. So my record company was losing interest in me, and I in them. Periodically, someone took the initiative and sug- gested something new or different to turn the situation around, but nothing ever worked. The Baron, my 1981 album with Billy Sherrill producing, was like that. Billy is legendary in the country music business for creating the slick “countrypolitan” sound of the late 1960s and early 1970s and producing strings of hits on George Jones, Tammy “Wynette, Charlie Rich, Tanya Tucker, and oth- ers. But by the time I got to him and he got to me, we were both pretty cynical. I remember going into his office and seeing a big cardboard box full of tapes—songs submitted for my album by songwriters and publishers—and saying, ”Well, what have we got?“ He didn't even look at me. ”Absolutely nothing,“ he said, kicking the box over so the tapes, several hundred of them, spilled out onto the floor. ”Isn't it about time for you to record 'My Elusive Dream'? Everyone else has." And so it went. We tried, sort of, but we certainly didn't give it our best. The Baron flopped and the situa- tion between me and CBS deteriorated. Maybe that's when the clock really started ticking. It was coming up on

ten years since John R. Cash. My contract with CBS was set to expire in 1986. Though I made some records between '81 and '86 that I still like—The Survivors, recorded live in Germany with Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis; my Rainbow album; Highwayman with Waylon, Kris Kristofferson, and Willie Nelson; a collaboration with Waylon alone called Heroes—I really wasn't motivated, and neither were the people at CBS. I got so tired of hearing about demographics, the “new country fan,” the “new market profile,” and all the other trends supposedly working against me, that I just gave up and decided to have fun with it. The last record I gave CBS was called “Chicken in Black,” and it was intentionally atrocious. I was bur- lesquing myself and forcing CBS to go along with it; I even made them pay for a video, shot in New York, with me dressed like a chicken. If I were running a record company and one of my artists did that, I know exactly how I'd respond, so I wasn't surprised when Rick Blackburn at CBS Nashville declined to renew my contract in 1986. That caused a real uproar in some circles—people were going into Rick's office, pounding on his desk and calling him names—but I understood. I called him and told him, “Well, you did what you thought you were supposed to A0. I've always enjoyed working with you, and I like you.” Which was true. Looking back on “Chicken in Black,” it's no wonder to me that it took a while to get another decent record deal, people were probably afraid to bank on an artist who'd make a mockery of himself like that. For a while I wasn't even interested in a new recording venture, but that didn't last long, and soon I was shopping around. One possibility I considered was Jimmy Bowen, who at the time was Mr. Big in Nashville, producing best- selling albums night and day and running his own opera-

tion at MCA (or Warner Brothers, or Capitol, I forget which; for a while there everybody on Music Row seemed to be playing Follow the Bouncing Bowen). People kept telling me I should go see him. I decided I'd approach him the way I did Sam Phillips: just go in there by myself with my guitar, sing him some songs, and show him what I had. Act like he'd never heard of me, in other words, and hang it all on the music. And that's what I did. I sat down in his office and sang songs to him for about half an hour. He sat back and listened intently until I put up my gui- tar. “Well, that's all I've got that I can think of right now,” I said. “What do you think?” “Let me think about it,” he replied. I said okay, put my guitar back in its case, left, and never heard a word from him after that. Not a phone call, not a note, not a peep. Bye-bye, Bowen. I found a deal I liked at Mercury/Polygram with Steve Popovich, a good man, and with his blessing I teamed up with Jack Clement again. So I was very happy for a little while. We all were. Then the power at Mercury/Polygram in New York shifted and I became, again, an artist the company wasn't interested in promot- ing. Jack and I still cared and made some music to be proud of, but it was like singing in an empty hall. Radio stations didn't get my singles. There was no publicity. They only pressed five hundred copies of my last Mercury album, The Meaning of Life. I heard lots of interesting things about demographics. Jack and Steve worked really hard for me, trying again and again to get New York to put up more money and muscle, but it was useless, and I probably didn't help much. By that point I'd given up. I'd already started thinking that I didn't want to deal with record companies

anymore. Saying good-bye to that game and just working the road, playing with my friends and family for people who really wanted to hear us, seemed very much like the thing to do. I began looking forward to it. Rick Rubin showed up in my life in 1993. He called Lou Robin and asked to talk to me; after hearing him out, Lou put it to me. Sure, I said, thinking I had nothing to lose but a few minutes of my time, and so we set it up. Rick came backstage at a show in Los Angeles, and I sat down and listened to what he had to say. He was inter- ested in me as a possible artist on his label, American Records, he told me, and he really wanted to hear the music I wanted to record. I thought it all pretty unlikely. He was the ultimate hippie, bald on top but with hair down over his shoulders, a beard that looked as if it had never been trimmed (it had- n't), and clothes that would have done a wino proud. On top of that his label was all rap, metal, and hard rock: the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Beastie Boys—young, urban music. Besides, I was through auditioning for producers, and I wasn't at all interested in being remodeled into some kind of rock act. Although the man knew my work and talked a good game and I thought I saw something in him—I told June after the meeting that he talked a little like Sam Phillips—I really didn't take it seriously. He'd lose interest after a while, I thought, or something else would distract him the way it does in this business. I was wrong about that. He came right back at me on the same California tour and spelled it out for me: “I'm deadly serious about signing you to my label. I really want to produce you. I need you, and I think I know what to do with you, and we'll do it together.” I started taking him seriously. I asked him how he'd go about recording me. What would he do differently from what everyone else had tried?

“I won't do anything,” he told me. “You'll do it. You'll come to my house and sit down in my living room and take a guitar and start singing. At some point, if you want me to, we'll turn on a recorder, and you will try everything that you ever wanted to record, plus your own songs, plus new songs I might suggest that you think you could do a good job on. You'll sing every song you love, and somewhere in there we'll find a trigger song that will tell us we're heading in the right direction. I'm not very familiar with a lot of the music you love, but I want to hear it all.” Now he really had my attention. His idea connected directly with a desire I'd had for years to make just such an album, a collection of my favorite songs recorded very intimately with just my voice and guitar, as if it were mid- night and you and I were in a room together all by our- selves. I first started talking about it almost thirty years ago, in a conversation Marty Robbins and I were having about pet projects, and I'd suggested it to CBS right after that. They thought it was a bad idea at that time and had the same reaction when I suggested it again years later. Mercury had the same reaction when I put it to them. Still I cherished it. I even had a title, Late and Alone. I saw problems, though. “I don't want to record on your label and be marketed on the alternative music scene or to the rock 'n' roll crowd,” I told Rick. “I have no illusions about who I am, how old I am, and what a stretch it might be to relate to these young people.” That didn't worry him. “I've watched you onstage,” he said, “and you haven't lost your fire and your passion. Let's bring that fire and passion to our new work and see what happens. We'll just be totally honest.” “That'll be the only way I'll do it,” I said. "I won't record with a lot of rock 'n' roll musicians just to try to relate, because the fans won't take that. They'll throw the

records right back at me, especially my older fans.“ He assured me that nothing of the kind was on his agenda, and I believed him. I talked to Lou and June about it, and with them both in agreement I decided to give Rick Rubin a try. My contract witb Mercury was running out, and the most this new initiative could cost me was a wasted trip or two to California. I went to Rick's house, and for three nights he and I sat in his living room and I sang my songs into his microphone. When I was finished I was really excited. The idea of an album made that way had become very appealing, to me, and now I saw that it could work, it could happen. Rick was hedging his bets. ”Well, just don't count on it all being you and your guitar,“ he said. ”We may want to put musicians on some of these songs." I didn't know if that was a good idea, but I trusted him, so I kept an open mind about it. I told Lou to go ahead and negotiate a deal, and shortly thereafter I signed a contract with American Records. From there we proceeded exactly as we'd planned, with just him and me together. It was a great experience. I took my music all the way back to its roots, back to the heart, and recorded about a hundred songs. Then we lis- tened to it all, marked out the songs that had the late- and-alone, intimate feeling we were looking for, and went to work getting them right. We experimented with added instrumentation, but in the end we decided that it worked better with me alone. We bore down on it that way and got our album: no reverb, no echo, no slapback, no overdubbing, no mixing, just me playing my guitar and singing. I didn't even use a pick; every guitar note on the album, which we called American Recordings, came from my thumb. So Rick really did succeed in what he set out to do: he got the honest, unadulterated essence of

Johnny Cash, whatever that is. The songs were about anything and everything, a couple of them outright humorous, another couple so dark that they shaded into the psychotic. Track one, “Delia's Gone,” for instance, originated in a levee camp holler or a Delta blues song about the killing of a woman; I wrote new verses to it to make it a story song told by the killer. It was pretty strong. To write it, I sent myself to the same mental place where I found “Folsom Prison Blues” and, being older and wiser to human depravity, picked up on some darker secrets than I'd seen in 1956. It turned out to be a pretty popu- lar song with young audiences, though it made a lot of people uncomfortable. I got no big kick out of singing it, but it was one of those things I felt right about doing at the time, and it definitely had a place on an album whose scope was all the music that had made me. Many of the biggest, most popular songs I grew up with, in country and folk and blues, were about crime and punishment, mayhem and madness, trouble and strife writ large and lurid. The reaction to American Recordings, as I've already said, was very positive. I don't think I lost any of my old fans, and I might have gained a few new ones. I got good reviews and won a Grammy for “Best Contemporary Folk Song Album,” and out on the road it started feeling like 1955 again. I began playing young people's places like the Fillmore as well as the city auditoriums and arenas I'd been playing for the previous twenty years. I discovered all over again how it felt to play for a crowd of people with no chairs or tables, standing on their feet, jammed to- gether, energizing each other. The new generation wanted to hear the songs I'd recorded at Sun in the '50s, and it was a real pleasure to oblige. I've always loved those songs, and it still thrills me to hear the beat kick in behind me and Bob Wootton's Fender start running its electric lines. When it came time for me to sing the American Recor- dings songs, I could bring it all down to just myself on a