Johnny Cash's career was in major trouble by the mid-1960s. He hadn't had a crossover hit on the Top 20 of the pop charts since "Ring of Fire" in 1963, although he had had a number of songs that went as high as No. 2 on the country charts. Scoring on the country charts, however, meant selling so many fewer copies than needed for the pop charts that you might not even register on them. But this doesn't even hint as to how severely his career had bottomed out.
Cash was strung out on pills. He showed up late and unprepared for recording sessions and missed live shows. "Between '58 and '68 he was, in Kris Kristofferson's words, the epitome of the self-destructive artist. No hotel was safe. He'd urinate on the radiators in his room, and saw legs off the furniture. In Australia he was ejected from a hotel after taking on Sammy Davis Jr. in a fast-draw gunfight, firing blanks in a lobby and terrifying guests," reported Sylvie Simmons. 1
This wasn't the worst damage he did to his career. Simmons continued that he "kicked out the footlights on the Grand Ole Opry Stage in 1965, angered by a microphone that wouldn't come out of its stand. He was informed that he needn't come back, which enraged him even more. He took June Carter's Cadillac – he had already totaled his own and countless others – and drove it into an electricity pylon, breaking his nose and setting off flashes of sparks as the wires hit the ground. The policeman sent to investigate the incident, as it turned out, was June's second husband, Rip Nix." 2
Even those incidents don't represent how low his career and life had sunk. In 1965, he was also arrested for smuggling more than 1,000 pills, uppers and downers, over the border from Mexico. The same year he was also arrested for starting a forest fire.
Johnny Cash & the Tennessee Two first played a prison show in 1957 when they were invited to Huntsville State Prison in Texas. The trio continued to play prisons, doing about 30 shows over the next decade. The first time they played San Quentin was in the late 1950s. Merle Haggard, who was serving three years for robbery, was in the crowd and was deeply inspired by the show. Early on, Cash thought that taping some of these shows for an album would be great. Everyone at Columbia Records turned him down flat.
Cash's career at that point, as with all the major Columbia Nashville artists, was in the hands of Don Law. Since the mid-1940s, when the label split off its country & western music division, establishing headquarters in Nashville, Law had run the show there. He was responsible for Columbia's C&W division east of El Paso with another executive responsible for the rest. By the early 1950s, he not only ran the whole show but usually, working with Frank Jones, produced all the major stars. Working with Jones or alone, he recorded Cash, Marty Robbins, Flatt & Scruggs, Jimmy Dean, Carl Perkins, and the Statler Brothers, all of whom Bob Johnston later worked with, as well as Ray Price, Lefty Frizzell, Rosemary Clooney, Little Jimmy Dickens, and Johnny Horton. Law's production was very singles-oriented, somewhat narrow-focused, and formulaic Nashville though with exaggerated boundaries. Law favored more traditional country instrumentation and stayed away from strings.
Law produced some classic music by great artists including Marty Robbins ("El Paso," "Don't Worry"), Johnny Horton ("The Battle of New Orleans," "North to Alaska"), Stonewall Jackson ("Waterloo"), and Jimmy Dean ("Big Bad John"). The dominant historical perspective is that, along with "Chet Atkins at RCA, Owen Bradley at Decca, and Ken Nelson at Capitol, Law was instrumental in re-establishing country's commercial viability during the so-called Nashville Sound era (ca. 1957–1972)." 3
Born in England, Law loved American music. Early on in his career, working for the American Record Corporation, he recorded the only masters of Robert Johnson. There were two different recording sessions. The first was in 1936 in San Antonio. Famously it was a rundown hotel using two adjoining rooms in the Gunter. The recording equipment was in one and the artist in the other with cables running between the rooms. There was also a 1937 session in the back of a Dallas office building.
Law very much controlled the careers of the label's artists and his team, and he simply didn't buy the idea that Cash live at a prison would be in any way commercial. They turned down the idea every time Cash brought it up.
In March 1967, despite Law's impressive track record, the powers that be forced him to take retirement and Frank Jones to take an executive position. Bob Johnston was brought in to run the Nashville office. Johnston had been recording in Nashville for years, but bringing Bob Dylan to town really attracted national attention and company interest. Highway 61 Revisited, Sounds of Silence, Blonde on Blonde, and Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, produced by Johnston, were all in release and successful. Especially notable were Highway 61 and Blonde on Blonde, where Dylan's sales finally began to match his reputation. Cash came to Johnston's office one day and asked him the same question he had long been asking everyone else at Columbia.
"Sure," Johnston said and got on the phone to call the wardens.
The two albums, 1968's At Folsom Prison and '69's At San Quentin, were both enormous sellers, re-establishing Cash as a major artist. "A Boy Named Sue," the biggest single of Cash's career, was released off of San Quentin. Bob Johnston picks up the story.
Cash Asks for a Favor, Johnston Delivers
After Leonard Cohen, I did Cash. I might have done Cash before Dylan even. You'd have to check out the records and see which ones came out, but it was one of those.
First time I ever heard from Cash was when I came back to Nashville in '66. I received a letter one day, written in longhand on yellow notepad paper. The letter was from Cash: "Dear Bob," it said. He was telling me that Dylan had talked to him at Newport and said he had a song that he thought Johnny would be great at, so Cash asked me, "Will you please send it to me? Dylan said I could call you and you would try to get me the song."
What really made me realize the kind of a situation that existed in Nashville was that Johnny said, "Please don't say anything to anybody else about this. Especially to Don Law." If Law ever found out he was trying to get a song from Dylan, he'd ruin his career and never let him record again.
Don Law had been the head of CBS in Nashville for years and had the ultimate power. He was an English gentleman who had complete control over what the artist did. To think, that one guy had control over somebody like Cash or Dylan or anybody. To think of those people who never sing, write, perform, play. The idea of them telling Johnny ...
I thought to myself, what a screwed-up way to treat people who are responsible for your jobs. If it hadn't been for Johnny Cash, and all the Johnny Cashes, there'd never have been a Don Law or a George Martin or Bob Johnston.
Anyway, I remember I got him the song and never heard back from him. I don't remember which one it was. I have the letter somewhere in a trunk. I think it's in a file cabinet at the University of Texas.
Johnston Visits Cash at Home and Predicts the Future
First time I went out to see Johnny, he said, "Come out to the house."
So I went out to the house. He said, "Come on with me and get in the boat."
I said "I'm not going to get in that boat with you."
Instead we walked through the woods. Finally, we sat down on a stump, a tree branch that was falling down.
Cash said, "Can you tell me, have you any idea what's going to happen to me?"
I told him: "I think you need to do those albums. Then I think you need a TV show, whatever thing, because it's all going to be big, and it needs to come out there on TV."
Folsom Prison Break-In: The Beginning of a 'Beautiful Friendship'
Cash called me one day, asked if he could meet with me. He was about two or three hours late. June and part of the family were waiting outside for him.
Cash came in and said, "I have an idea. I've always wanted to go to a prison and record an album, but nobody would ever let me in the eight years I've been asking. I don't guess you will either."
I said, "Screw you!" I don't want that printed, but I said it. I picked up the phone and called Folsom and San Quentin. I got through at Folsom first. Got the warden. I said, "Warden Duffy, Johnny Cash is coming to do a concert for you."
He said, "Where is he?" I handed the phone to Johnny, and he put it together with the Rev. Gossett, people in that ward.
Like Humphrey Bogart said to the chief inspector in Casablanca, "Louie, I think this may be the start of a beautiful friendship." It was!
Columbia Says 'No Way' to Prison Recording
Then Cash called me one day and said if he went to the prison, Columbia would drop him and fire me. And the powers that be told me the same thing. They said, if you do it, it will ruin his career; you'll never do business with CBS again.
I said, good enough.
Cash called me and said, "They told me I couldn't do it."
I said, "Johnny, go ahead and pack."
Traveling to Folsom
Johnny, June Carter, and their entourage flew to San Francisco and stayed in a hotel on the outskirts of town. It was cold and raining the next morning when, at daylight, we drove to Folsom Prison, which was in Folsom, Calif. We took the highway for a couple hours, then turned off on a side road leading to the prison.
I was feeling really excited about the record when I saw a big sign outside that said, "All visitors are subject to search from this point on." I panicked for a moment, thought to myself, "God Almighty, hope I didn't leave anything in my pockets!"
Johnny said, "What are you doing?"
I said, "I'm just checking!" I was going through my pants.
Inside the Prison
We finally went thought the entrance, parked, and entered a door next to the big iron gates. Warden Duffy met us, took us through a maze of sliding steel-bar doors and through the metal detectors. We exited into the prison yard, entered a huge gray building, which served as a cafeteria. The ceilings were about 60 to 100 feet high; there were walkways all around the place with guards patrolling over the prisoners' heads. They carried automatic weapons with full-clip, chambered rounds.
I had seen what it was like outside, but I had no idea what it was like inside. The noise was deafening; the smell was antiseptic, the stench of unwashed bodies. Everything was steel and concrete. Even the prisoners were steel and concrete.
The guards were like razor blades; they blinked continuously behind their mirrored sunglasses, their heads swiveling around back and forth like the Australian prairie dogs who keep watch over the predators that may come to devour them at any second.
The Prisoners
I spoke with one felon and asked him why he was in. He got this crazy look on his face and barely whispered, "I beat three men to death with a baseball bat." Then he added, almost nonchalantly, "Yeah, by God, and I'd do it again if I had the fucking chance."
Everything said inside Folsom is either "goddamn," "fucking," or "cocksucker." These words are just an everyday part of life. I think the prison population and the guards would be struck dumb if they couldn't use these words.
I asked him about time. I said, "What's it like to do time here?"
He looked up at me with this crooked grin on his face. He wasn't very big, 5 feet 6 inches, 150 pounds, wire rim glasses, and a mouth full of bad teeth. He didn't look like he could whoop anybody's ass, much less beat three men to death with a baseball bat. He got this vacant stare and said, "Time? Nobody does time in this fucking shit hole. There's no rehabilitation in here."
I asked him what the first night was like. He said the first night was the worst, because of the unknown. He said there's two ways to go: You either have to submit to being somebody's wife and get fucked in the ass, or you have to fight.
If you choose to fight, you'd better be quick, you'd better be good, and you'd better not have a conscience. If you get somebody down, you better keep him down. If you don't, he'll come after you. He'll come after you and hit you because there are no rules here. No one announces, "Tonight, we have a fight between prisoner one and prisoner two." None of that goes on. They simply sneak up on you one night and stick a sharpened spoon in your sternum or an icepick in your brain.
The third option is no option at all. They simply have a gang come around after lights out. Either way, he said, there's two things going to happen: Either you fight and win, or you're going to get fucked in the ass. You can count on that.
He also said most of your human emotions leave you after a few weeks in this place. The only emotions you keep with you at all times are fear and hate.
Hello, I'm Johnny Cash!
Then it was time.
We had recording trucks from San Francisco come to Folsom. They just backed the trucks up in there, close to where Cash was performing. They ran wires in and recorded.
It was Johnny Cash, the Tennessee Three, Carl Perkins, as well as June and the Carter family. All the prisoners were sitting at the tables; things got quiet.
They had a guy named Hugh Cherry. Nice guy, sang with Presley. I said to him, "What are you doing?"
He said he was going out to introduce Cash.
"No way!" I said.
Cash said, "What are you talking about?"
"All you need to do is go out there, jerk your head around, and say, 'Hello, I'm Johnny Cash,' and it doesn't matter what you record," I answered.
Cash said, "Get out of my goddamn way!"
He pushed everybody aside, went out there, turned around, and said – the prisoners weren't expecting it, cause they were all talking – "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash."
And that was it! He could've recorded "Lil' Bo Peep"!
I never thought Cash would say anything about what really happened at the start of the Folsom show, which is why I never said anything. But he told Ralph Emery one day, Cash said, "I was going out there, in front of all those prisoners, and they thought they were gonna have someone introduce me. But Bob Johnson said, 'Get out there, turn your head around, and say, "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash."'" Cash said that. I didn't.
The Show
It was an electrifying moment. The prisoners were going crazy. The place just exploded.
Song after song he sang. "Dirty Old Egg Sucking Dog," "I Walk the Line," "25 Minutes to Go," "Busted," "The Long Black Veil."
I never was nervous. I mean, I've really never been nervous about anything. I think the old man is watching over me; otherwise, I would've been gone out of here half a century ago! But when we went out there; Cash did a song called "Dirty Old Egg Sucking Dog." The prisoners were supposed to stay at their tables, not get out of their chairs and applaud. No whistling or yelling. But by that time in the show, they were cheering and standing up.
Then Cash did a song, "Greystone Chapel," about Folsom. "You've been living hell to me, and may your walls fall," lyrics like that. They were just going crazy. So then he did it again. Then it was just umph! You could hear it! One of these days, I'm going to make the right kind of mix, put everything in there.
Cash would talk in between. He asked for a drink of water; George brought it in a tin cup. Cash said, "Do they serve everything here in a fucking tin cup?"
Then he went into "I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die."
The prisoners came unwound, standing up yelling. Then he sang an unexpected violent song, and they were on the tables, yelling at the top of their lungs. I didn't think it'd be a problem at first, but then the guards began backing up to their posts on the walkways, backing up against the walls in the cafeteria. I was picking me the closest door I could go through and seeing where the most guards were that I could use as a possible shield.
At the same time I was thinking, "You stupid son of a bitch; you should've let Billy Sherrill produce Cash, and you could've produce George Jones and Tammy Wynette!"
I really thought the place was going to explode. Then Johnny sang a couple of religious songs in a row. After five or 10 minutes, it was over.
Cash, Folsom, and Speed
Somewhere Johnny was quoted as saying that he had played Folsom on amphetamines. I didn't know it because I never took anything around Cash; I never got him anything, I never smoked a joint around him. I never did anything with him, except take care of his music because I thought that's what he needed. I know after that one thing, he never had any drugs at all while I was with him. I never saw him take a drug. I didn't even know he had amphetamines if he hadn't said it in print there. I had no idea.
But I think he was past amphetamines. I think that prison itself took him way past the place that amphetamines would do him any good because there never was that before. He was the first one and the only one, and I made it come off like that.
I don't ever remember Johnny being late, I don't ever remember him having a cross word, and I never remember him taking a pill or a drink. I remember Johnny always kept saying, "Put me in a box, and I'll break out of it!"
He never said anything that he didn't do. He was always honorable, and he was wonderful. I loved him. I loved Cash, man. Just being around him was joy enough. It made you tingle to be around him.
It made you tingle to be around Dylan and Simon. ... Paul Simon is another one, man.
The Album
Anyway, I took the tapes back to Nashville, mixed them with my engineer. We did two shows, but the album is almost entirely from the first one. The shows were maybe 2 1/2 hours long.
There were songs that didn't end up on the album. CBS said, "You're only putting 10 songs on the album. We have a policy now: only 10 songs."
I said, "Great!"
I think I put 16.
CBS released it, and it became the biggest album of '68. Won the CMA Album of the Year and launched Johnny into the pop mainstream forever.
Excerpt From Cash's Liner Notes
Cash wrote this: "Folsom Prison Blues – the culture of 1,000 years is shattered with the clanging of the cell door behind you. Life outside, behind you, immediately becomes unreal. You begin to not care that it exists. All you have with you in the cell is your bare animal instincts.
"I speak partly from experience; I have been behind bars a few times, sometimes of my volition, sometime involuntarily. Each time I felt the same feeling of kinship with my fellow prisoners.
"Behind the bars, locked out from society, you're being rehabilitated. Corrected. Re-briefed, re-educated on life itself. Without your having the opportunity of really reliving it. You're the object of a widely planned program combining isolation, punishment, taming, briefing, etc., designed to make you sorry for your mistakes. To re-enlighten you, or do what you should or shouldn't do outside, so that when you're released, if you ever are, you can come out clean, to a world that's supposed to welcome you and forgive you.
"Can it work????? Hell no."
Back to Prison: San Quentin
Maybe another six months passed. Cash calls and says, "Why don't we go to another prison?" I think he said San Quentin, and I said, "Yeah, man, that would be great."
Once again I got a call from a Columbia executive who had taken over the reins. With Folsom, they told me if I did that, they'd drop him and fire me. Cash told me that they told him the same thing. So we did it.
This time it was [Clive] Davis, I think, and, with the other guy, I think it was [Peter] Asher. He said if I did another prison album with Cash, it would ruin him and I'd never walk into a CBS facility again.
I don't want to go into all of these people's names; I don't even remember most of the names because they really didn't matter to me. They were just a waste of time, which I just tried to avoid as well as I could. But he said the same thing. He told Johnny that, and he told me. Said they'd drop him and it would ruin his career. They told me this over and over.
So, I said, "Well great, you're the boss."
Then I took Cash to San Quentin, and we recorded another album. San Quentin sold millions of units. "The Boy Named Sue" was a No. 1 single, and it knocked the Stones out of No. 1 with "Honky Tonk Woman," which blew my damn mind – for Cash to knock the Stones out of the No. 1 spot was quite remarkable to me.
Before the show we had talked for a long time about it. I said, "Man, you need all those songs, 'Dirty Old Egg Sucking Dog' and '25 Minutes to Go,' and 'Swingin', Swingin'.'" Cash had some great songs there.
Still, about halfway through the set, Cash turned around to Carl Perkins, who was playing up there with him. He said, "Dig that 'Sue' thing out."
"There ain't no melody to that song." Carl said.
"Make one up," insisted Cash.
"Ding da ding," he started playing what they always played, Cash and all of them together. Cash started singing. That was it.
Not only was it the first time the song was ever performed live, but I never had heard the song before. I had no idea it was coming, but I really didn't care. None of that meant anything to me. Whatever they had, you know.
San Quentin by Ralph Gleason
This was San Quentin. [Reading from a review by Ralph Gleason] "Cash's vision has not been altered or obscured. In fact the only time you hear Cash really being affected by his environment is when he catches the caged excitement of the convict audience at Folsom and San Quentin. San Quentin, the prisoners were going wild. So wild, that Cash did the song again. Then they really went apeshit. When I asked Cash about that, he said the guards were scared to death. All the convicts were standing up on the dining room table screaming. They were out of control 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 Delusion 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" and they would have. Those guards knew it too. I was tempted.'"
With June! And Maybelle, his buddies, all like that! He was tempted! For a second. All he'd had to do was say, "Screw 'em!" That was it.
All the guards had backed up to the door; there were maybe 12, 15 guards. The ones up there, they always had their rifles ready, things like that. I was standing there, because I thought first time something happens, they're going out there, and I'm going to be with the guards.
But nothing happened. The San Quentin album sold better than Folsom Prison, and it gave Cash his highest rated single on the pop charts ever. "A Boy Named Sue" was a No. 1 hit on the country charts for five weeks, a No. 1 hit on the adult contemporary charts for two weeks, and was No. 2 on the pop charts for three weeks. The only time Cash had a single break into the Top 10 on the pop charts."
Closing Comment, Christmas 1991, Robert Shelton
This is what I wanted to close this chapter with. This is from Robert Shelton, who's a great writer. It says, "As I write this, at Christmastime, 1991, Johnny Cash is heading to the Nashville Airport to catch a plane to Jamaica for the holidays. By tomorrow morning, the Man in Black will be sitting on his porch, listening to reggae music. I'm looking out my 39th floor window at the snow falling on Times Square, thinking of one of the hundreds of records Cash made that didn't get there. The 20th Century is almost over. Well it sure is, and I'll tell you what. When we get to the next millennium and our grandkids ask us what the 20th Century was like, we can play them this record and they'll know."
FOOTNOTES:
1. Simmons, Sylvie, Mojo, November 2004, p.78
2. Simmons, Sylvie, Mojo, November 2004, p.78
3. Daniel Cooper adapted from the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum's Encyclopedia of Country Music, published by Oxford University Press
4. All art from Columbia/Legacy's Johnny Cash at San Quentin box set (2006)
