Remembering Johnny Cash (1932-2003)

The wild life of Johnny Cash: drugs, a historic concert in prison and the loss of a love he couldn’t stand.

On September 12, 2003, Johnny Cash died. He was 71 years old and his career had been revitalized recently. The great love with June Carter. His addictions and his problems with the law. The day a forest fire started. Why they called him “The Man in Black”?

Hello, I’m Johnny Cash. This is how he presented himself to the public in each of his recitals. The custom was born in their first performances, multiple festivals, collective concerts, in which people did not know very well those who stood in front of the microphone. Then he became a superstar . But the custom did not lose her. The deep, hollow and resonant voice, the guitar and his songs of losers, defeated, desperate, marginalized and outcasts would do the rest. The threatening pose, the danger translated into his throat and a handful of verses.

He could have, when appearing in front of the public, said that he was The Man in Black , they would have also recognized him. It had been the title of one of his albums, that name was more than a nickname, it illustrated his monochromatic way of dressing and also described the humor that inhabited his songs and also in his own life.

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Johnny Cash became a myth long before his death. He triumphed in three different genres: country, gospel and rock (he is a member of the Hall of Fame of all three genres). He sold more than 90 million records. But his legend is much bigger than the story of his fluctuating career. There are songs, of course, but also danger, illegality, an indelible love, infidelities, excesses, problems with the police, rebellion until the last days and a spectacular comeback , shortly before the end, when no one seemed to expect anything new from him.

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For more than one generation, Johnny Cash is that older man, with a face chiseled by wrinkles, thick skin marked by life, and a basement voice who with a frugal accompaniment—barely piano and guitar most of the time—came to the heart, exposed the soul, of songs by U2, Tom Waits, Tom Petty, Leonard Cohen, Depeche Mode and Nine Inch Nails. His covers from the American Recordings project (produced by Rick Rubin) often become the definitive versions of those hits, which in his voice seem to be, at the same time, songs recorded for the first time (we listen to them as if never before). would have sounded) and become immediate standards .

He was born in Arkansas on February 26, 1932. From the moment he chose his name, it was clear that life would not be conventional. His father named him JR. So, just the initials with those two dots. Although the reason is not well known, many prefer to believe that it was because the parents could not agree on what to call him and when the father came to write it down he decided on the initials of the name he preferred and that of his husband; the J would be for John and the R for Ray.

He had a tough childhood. From a very young age he worked in the cotton fields. At the age of 12, his older brother died in a work accident in a mill. Everything went dark in his life from that moment on. And, perhaps, it never fully cleared up again. At that time he started writing some songs. He also took a few singing classes but his teacher asked him not to return, telling him that he did not want to ruin the natural gifts he had received with technical instructions.

Already in the 1950s, he approached Sun studios to offer his gospel songs, which he sang on Sundays in church. Sam Phillips heard him and praised his voice, but rejected him: “Come on, I committed several sins, I wrote about them and then I came back,” he told him. And Cash listened to him. When he returned with his country songs he got a contract, he was a different person. The owner of the record company removed those enigmatic initials from his name and baptized him Johnny. Their first songs had some success in Memphis.

One afternoon in 1956, while Carl Perkins was recording some new songs accompanied by Jerry Lee Lewis on piano, Elvis Presley entered the studio. Shortly after, Johnny Cash arrived. The four of them began to improvise and sang some gospel songs. What they didn’t know was that Sam Phillips, the owner of the studio and the record company that had them under contract, Sun Records, left the tapes running and recording the celebrity meeting. At the same time he released an album, The Sun Sessions , with those songs: the record of a historic day . By then all four were triumphing.

In 1958 he recorded his first LP for Sun Records, an album that sold a lot. Their first big hit was Folsom Prison Blues . A few months later came one of the signature songs of his career, Walk The Line .

Dissatisfied with the royalties that Phillips was paying him and tempted by a great offer from Columbia, Johnny changed record companies. The boost that the record giant gave him was strong. Advertising, good recording conditions and constant releases. His success multiplied. Despite the new situation, a strange phenomenon occurred for a few years: his albums appeared on two different labels. In Sun he had left a vast catalog of unreleased recordings, which their owner published regularly to take advantage of Cash’s popularity.

Those were years on the road and of constant album releases, up to four every twelve months. His image was definitively established, his voice was recognizable to the public. And many stories and legends began to spread about him.

Some, because of his habit of dressing in black, called him The Gravedigger . When asked for an explanation about his clothing, Cash simply responded that black clothes stained less , the dirt was less obvious and that was very important for someone who was always on tour. Over time he developed another explanation and spoke of the neglected and those who suffered, that it was a way of representing them.

The most important thing about Folsom Prison Blues , beyond establishing him in the United States as a country singer, happened a decade later. In 1968 Johnny went to Folsom Prison, where he had sung, and gave a recital for its inmates . Then it became a live album. There were two other albums that recorded his prison appearances. The following year was San Quentin and a later one in Stockholm in 1972.

Live From Folsom Prison was another great success: it sold more than 6 million copies. stage And it was the cause of Cash’s most mainstream , the one in which he managed to jump the fence of country. He headlined a late-night television show for more than two years and sales of his albums skyrocketed. He also participated in episodes of several series. The two most notable were Columbo and The Ingalls Family (much later, with his great return, he would also do so in The Simpsons ).

Johnny Cash was unlike anyone else. Paul Hemphill, country historian, described him this way: “Cash wearing all black, Cash with suffering in his deep eyes and tortured face, insolent and taunting from the stage, Cash in his long black coat with pants from the same color as if he were an elegant gravedigger, Cash twirling his guitar, pointing at the spectators as if he had a long gun in his hands.

By then the image of Johnny Cash as someone on the limit of what was legal , as a man from the edges and marginal had been consolidated. Many believed that he had given the prison concerts because of his status as a prisoner. There are at least seven recorded episodes in which he was detained by the police. Drunk driving, street fights, damage to private property (drunk bar fights), resistance to authority. He never spent more than one night in a cell. They were all reduced to minor, anecdotal episodes, records of an ephemeral fall.

The most serious incident occurred in 1965. He was arrested with more than 688 amphetamine pills and 475 tranquilizer pills in his car after crossing the border with Mexico; The police thought they would find some cocaine or a little heroin but they found a pharmaceutical arsenal. But at that point he was already an established and overly famous artist and the mechanisms of leniency and laxity of justice with the famous were put into motion and his stay, once again, did not exceed 24 hours.

That same year (it is clear that 1965 was not an easy year for him) he caused a large forest fire. While camping with a mobile home in the Los Padres National Park, he started a bonfire that he did not put out – presumably due to the effects of drugs – and that got out of control, first setting the vehicle on fire but spreading to the surrounding forests. In total more than 200 hectares were set on fire. There was damage to trees and animals.

A specialist, in the trial that followed, confirmed that the fire had destroyed the vegetation of three mountains, had killed dozens of animals and had scared away 49 of the 53 endangered California condors that lived there under the care of specialists. Cash replied: “I care very little for your yellow crows . ” He managed to avoid prison once again but was punished with a fine of $125,000. It is believed that in some subsequent agreement he managed to reduce it to $85,000.

His problems with alcohol, amphetamines and other drugs were known and visible for many years. This caused various inconveniences in his personal life and his professional career was harmed. He canceled some concerts and his behavior on stage (and under it) became erratic and violent. He returned to the country circuit and his records stopped selling. There was some rebound when he teamed up with Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings on tours and a trilogy of albums. But since the late 1970s and 1980s, Cash became a nostalgic consumer. It seemed that his career could only live on the past, on the memory and perpetual repetition of his old hits ( Ring of Fire among them) and on the occasional cover that managed to impact occasionally. However, Johnny had one more life, he would change his (musical) skin again.

It is difficult to understand Johnny without June , without the story of that shaken, complicated but intense love that brought them together. June Carter sang in a family group, the Carter Family. The Carters were often Cash’s co-stars. They met at a festival in the middle of the United States. It was 1956. They looked at each other and there was some flirting but not much else happened. She was very young and he, who was already married and had several children, was excessively problematic. Difficult character, bad habits, worse company.

They met again in 1964 and became lovers. The relationship had ups and downs. Johnny promised her that he would leave his wife and June sometimes believed him and sometimes abandoned him. Until at a concert in Ontario, Johnny asked her to marry him. They married in 1968. She accompanied him and urged him to give up drugs, to settle down, to take care of his money. They had a son. But shortly after, and in the midst of Johnny’s artistic and commercial boom, it was learned that he had gotten another woman pregnant.

June forgave that extramarital child and continued by his side, trying to distance him from his personal demons, although she also had her own. It was June who managed to get Cash into rehab several times and who didn’t abandon him after his relapse.

Their love story was crystallized in Johnny and June , the biopic starring Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Whiterspoon.

When it seemed that nothing new could be expected from the waning Cash, one afternoon he received Rick Rubin at his home. For him it was just a long-haired stranger. I had no idea who he was. Rubin was a very successful rap, hip hop and heavy metal producer. On his Def Jam Records label he had released and produced the Beastie Boys, Run DMC, Public Enemy, LL Cool J, Meat Puppets, Husker Dü, Slayer among others. In 1994 Rubin changed the name of his label to American Recordings. He wanted to do his first project with that worn-out and somewhat tired man who welcomed him into his house and who had not had a hit for more than 15 years (in 1993 he had recorded The Wanderer with U2 and had regained notoriety).

He proposed to Cash to record six covers of recent songs and many others written especially for him. They wouldn’t go to a studio; They would do it at home and only with Cash’s traditional guitar. The album was called American Recordings and had great commercial and critical success. There were four other installments (in the second the supporting band was Tom Petty and the Heartbrekers). Recorded from One by U2 to I Won’t Back Down by Petty, from Tom Waits songs to Paul Simon songs. He also recorded Personal Jesus by Depeche Mode and his big hit, Hurt by Nine Inch Nails.

As soon as he heard her, he didn’t want to have anything to do with her and all that noise. Rubin patiently asked him to listen to the lyrics. Trent Reznor, the author, didn’t like the idea either. And he refused to listen to the version for a while, until one afternoon while he was watching MTV, the video for the song appeared. At the end of Cash’s version, Trent Reznor had tears in his eyes. Some time later he said: “Now the song is his.”

A degenerative neurological disease that was difficult for doctors to diagnose left him confined to a wheelchair in recent years. On May 15, 2003, he received a blow from which he could not recover: June Carter died in his arms . A few weeks later he asked Rick Rubin to keep him active and recording new songs, otherwise he would die. But it wasn’t enough. Johnny Cash lasted less than four months without June. He died on September 12, 2003. He was 71 years old.

Johnny Cash – I Walk the Line (The Best Of The Johnny Cash TV Show)

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