Cash: The Autobiography (12 page)

8 We did okay at the Fillmore. We all pulled in the same direction through “Rusty Cage” and put it across without embarrassment, even with spirit, and the crowd liked us, and I liked that. I love playing for country people, with their graciousness and quiet appreciation, but I also thrive on the blast of raw adrenaline coming at me from a charged-up crowd of city kids (or, more accu- rately, people in young adulthood who have chosen the intensity of a city like San Francisco—not, of course, that there are any cities like San Francisco). A crowd like that can get a pretty good show out of me, and last night they did. It was tiring, especially so since the preshow ritual of meeting and greeting was unusually protracted, featuring people from my publishers and my record company as well as the usual complement of friends, music business acquaintances, and local radio personal- ities who come to me wherever my show rolls into town. Tonight I stood there in that funky little dressing room, doing exactly what so many musicians have done ever since Bill Graham got the place cranked up back in the Summer of Love. I felt like an impostor playing a king receiving courtiers—but I felt, too, like just a man meet- ing others. I prefer to meet people before my shows, not after. When I walk off that stage I'm no longer the char- acter I was in the songs I sang—the stories have been told, their messages imparted—but often it's a while before I'm J.R. again. When I meet people, it's important for both of us that I'm J.R. Exhaustion is calling now, though the energy from the show still runs in me. That's a vaguely uncomfortable sensation even after the thousands of times I've experi- enced it, but I know there's nothing really wrong. Tonight was good. I did well. The band did well. I like my band; we fit. When we're all doing our job, we can sound exactly the way my music should.

As Unit One climbs away from the Fillmore toward Nob Hill, I hear Bob Wootton's voice from up front, talking navigation with Vicki, and I start thinking about him, thinking about guitar players and me. I haven't worked with many of them, but I sure have liked the ones who stuck, particularly Bob, Marty Stuart, and of course Luther. Carl Perkins also played guitar in my band for several years, but I hesitate to call him “my guitar player.” I loved having him with me on the road and he was an amazing opening act, but I was never very comfortable having him standing behind me on stage, lit- erally in my shadow. He is after all Carl Perkins. I'm not well enough acquainted with the field to know whether music historians and rock 'n' roll fans celebrate Carl the way they should today, but if a hundred years from now he's not recognized as a great master and prime mover, somebody will have messed up badly. There's certainly a sense that Carl stands in the shadow of Elvis, Jerry Lee, and me. You can see that when people talk or write about the so-called Million- Dollar Quartet session, the only time to my knowledge that all four of us sang together. Somehow Carl's name always seems to come last in the list of participants, but in fact it was his session that day. Nobody else was booked into the studio. I was there—I was the first to arrive and the last to leave, contrary to what has been written—but I was just there to watch Carl record, which he did until midafternoon, when Elvis came in with his girlfriend. At that point the session stopped and we all started laughing and cutting up together. Then Elvis sat down at the piano, and we started singing gospel songs we all knew, then some Bill Monroe songs. Elvis wanted to hear songs Bill had written besides “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” and I knew the whole repertoire. So, again contrary to

what some people have written, my voice is on the tape. It's not obvious, because I was farthest away from the mike and I was singing a lot higher than I usually did in order to stay in key with Elvis, but I guarantee you, I'm there. I forget exactly when Jerry Lee came in, but I remember clearly when Elvis invited him to take over at the piano and he launched into “Vacation in Heaven.” That was the first time I ever heard Jerry Lee, and I was bowled over. He was so great that the next thing I remember, Elvis and his girlfriend were gone. The thing I remember after that, apart from going next door for cof- fee and cheeseburgers, is seeing the now famous “Million-Dollar Quartet” photo in the Memphis Com- mercial Appeal and wondering what happened to Elvis's girlfriend. She'd been sitting on the piano when the photo was taken. If you're wondering why Elvis left right after Jerry Lee got started, the answer is simple: nobody, not even Elvis, ever wanted to follow Jerry Lee. And no, I don't remem- ber Jerry Lee ever saying anything disparaging about Elvis. He didn't have an attitude about Elvis especially; he just had an attitude. Now that I've contributed that grist to the rockabilly history mill, I'll add an opinion—Carl Perkins is the Rockabilly King—and get back to the subject of people I can call my guitar players, beginning at the beginning: Luther Monroe Perkins. He was a gracious man, about five years older than me. He was a good driver, and he enjoyed it; he'd stay up at the wheel all night, not making a sound, while I crashed in the backseat of the Plymouth, then the Lincoln, then the others. When I first met him, in 1954, he had a Fender Telecaster that had lost the plate where the heel of your hand rests and a little Fender amplifier with an eight-inch speaker, the rig he used on my records at Sun, laying his right hand on the strings to mute them as he played. That's where boom-chicka-boom came from, Luther's right

hand. As I've said before, Luther wasn't anything like an expert musician and sometimes it would take him quite some time to learn a new song, but once he had it, it was locked in. He'd never alter his part, either to change it rad- ically or embellish it slightly; he always played it straight down the line, and it always, always sounded right. It was unorthodox, the way we worked it so that his guitar line matched my vocal, but it was effective and people liked it. Once the records started getting around, guitarists all over the world began copying the Luther Perkins style, and he became a kind of cult hero. Keith Richards came to one of our English shows, at a U.S. military base in the early '60s, but he wasn't interested in me; Luther was the one he couldn't wait to watch. Luther accepted it all very politely once he under- stood that these people weren't making fun of him, and it never went to his head. He knew his style was unique, but also that it originated in his technical limitations—which is often the story of original sounds in popular music, even if some of us aren't comfortable having it go down in his- tory that way. Luther was a very tolerant man in the usual course of things. I have a clear memory of him during the time when my amphetamine insanity was expressing itself in destruc- tive acts. As I chopped a new doorway through the wall between my motel room and Marshall Grant's with a fire ax, he just sat and watched, grinning and saying, in a tone of genuine wonderment, “Well, I'll be damned. I'll just be damned.” He did have a temper, though, and he did express it. A fair number of amps got kicked in frustration over the years, and often the air around him filled up with curses. He had it under control a little better than I did, but we shared that edge of nervousness.

In my very worst times, Luther's house was one of the ports in my storm. I could go over there at any hour of the night, and Luther and his wife, Margie, would get up and make coffee, listen to me, and try to make me feel okay. Dixie Dean, who'd just arrived from England and was to become Tom T. Hall's wife, was another person who extended that kindness to me. It was during such an act of mercy that she played me a demo of Tom singing “I Wash My Face in the Morning Dew,” his first record, and I real- ized what a great gift he was going to be sharing with us all. Well, perhaps not with me; by that time I had my doubts about my staying in this world much longer. Luther passed on in 1968, the victim of another house fire on Old Hickory Lake. My belief is that he went to sleep on the couch with a lit cigarette in his hand and was overcome by smoke. When Margie found him, there was a catfish in the sink in the kitchen and a note saying, “See, I told you I could catch catfish.” She'd been telling him that the trodine he'd run out into the lake would never work, but obviously it had, and he was pleased about it. That doesn't sound like the final act of a man about to kill himself, which is what the police said they suspected— that or “foul play.” Luther didn't die right away, but we knew he was going to. When Marshall and Carl Perkins and I went down to the hospital, one of the doctors came out and said, “Well, he looks good. He's in good shape, if he'd only wake up.” We knew that wasn't the deal as soon as we saw him; it hit each of us immediately that he was as good as gone. The only good thing to come of the loss of Luther, I believe, was Bob Wootton. After showing up that night in Oklahoma the way he did—dropping out of the sky, it seemed, just when we needed him, ready and able to play every song in my repertoire note for note exactly as Luther

had recorded it—he stepped right in and came as close as any man could to filling the hole Luther had left.

9 Thinking about Marty Stuart, who played in my band for several years just before launching his solo career, always cheers me up. Marty cheers everyone up. He's one of those characters who has an electric kind of effect on the people around them. He's not so much a power source as a power booster and a connector, a unit that fires up the creative energies in a group of peo- ple, puts them all together, and gets the power flowing in the direction it really wants to go. That's not his only talent, of course; he's also a master musician in every sense of the word, an artist in his own clear right. He's funny, good-looking, and he knows exactly how to dress and act and present himself. He's kind of amazing, really. More than that, he's a person country music really needs, not just because he's got such a great collection— all those country music artifacts he's found, rescued, bought, and traded for over twenty-plus years—but because he's a tale-teller. He carries stories, he builds leg- ends about people, and he knows—knows everybody in the business and what they mean to the music, knows the history of the music, knows what's important and what isn't. I don't remember exactly where or when I first met him. It was probably when he was playing mandolin in Lester Flatt's band, which he joined when he was just thirteen. I remember when I hired him, though. He came to one of my shows when he was in his early twenties and showed me what he could do with his guitar. I took him off the market immediately. He became much more than the multi-instrumental- ist in the band. He was a great public relations man, a great soother of conflict, a great key to the musical resources of Nashville and beyond. He knew where to

look for the good songs, the good pickers, the good stu- dios, everything, and of course he was a great man to have on hand in a recording session. He could play any- thing. And as if all that weren't enough, he loved his mother. He still does: Hilda Stuart, a beautiful woman. Just as Marty has a favorite story about almost everybody in country music, we have our favorite stories about him. Mine, though, is really more about myself. It centers on a guitar he had, a horribly scruffy, beat-up old thing, worse-looking than even Willie Nelson's infamous instrument. It was probably a wonderful guitar, one of the best Martins ever made—he certainly treasured it as if it were—but its ugliness was beyond dispute. I took exception to it. One night on stage somewhere in Minnesota, I stopped in the middle of the show and told the audience, “You know, Marty Stuart started in this business when he was twelve years old. Mr. Lester Flatt hired him and saw that he was a young man who could go far. Marty really appreciated that, so ever since then, at least once a year, he has tried to pick out a twelve- or thirteen-year- old boy and do something nice, the way Lester did for him.” As I said all this, I had my eye on just such a person, a boy sitting in the front row. I took the plunge. “There's a young man sitting in the front row tonight,” I said, “and Marty would like to give that young man his guitar.” Before Marty could do a thing about it, I took that ugly guitar away from him and held it out to the boy in the front row. The boy couldn't believe it. He was so happy. He got up and went over to Marty and hugged him, thanking him repeatedly. Eventually he let go, and I shook his hand before he left the stage. “Learn to pick it, son,” I told him. “Learn to pick it like Marty.”

I looked over at Marty and his face was scarlet with anger. I thought for a moment he was really going to lose it. I just kept looking at him. I held his eye and started grinning, and then his face broke and he started grinning back. Marty has such a great wit. He was playing outdoors at a state fair one night, decked out in one of his louder, more beautiful Manuel outfits, all vivid colors and sparkling rhinestones. As it happened, the stage was close to an enormous, fully lit Ferris wheel looming over one side of the concert ground. About halfway through his show he sauntered up to the mike between numbers. “Don't y'all be concerned if you see me keep kinda leaning over to the left tonight,” he drawled. “I keep getting pulled that way.” Then he pointed up at the Ferris wheel. “My suit thinks that's its mother.” Marty knows me well. Once when he was still work- ing for me, he came up to me and asked, “Are you taking pain pills?” “No, not yet,” I replied. He looked at me and grinned. “Does your foot hurt?” he asked. I raised my left foot and stamped it down onto my right. “It does now,” I said, and took a pill. The time came for Marty to go out on his own, as we all knew it would. Even before he came to the decision him- self, we were prodding him: “Hey, Marty, who're you gonna take to open your show?” “Better enjoy that pay- check, Stuart. You're gonna be the one giving them out before long.” Eventually he got to where he needed to be about it all and came to me one night. “Do you think it's time for me to make a move?” he asked. Only he knew that, I told him, but in my eyes he was ready. I told him

that if he made the decision to go for his own career, the first thing he'd have to do was stop making Johnny Cash his number-one priority. And that's how he left, under his own steam with my thanks and blessings. He's been back, of course, from time to time. He was a vital component of my Unchained album, acting in the studio as the link between me and my world and the musical language Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers speak. That's by no means a long-distance link, since Tom and his band and I have known each other a long time (they're family, in fact: Howie Epstein and Carlene have been living together for years), but nei- ther is it so close that it couldn't be strengthened by Marty's fluency in all the American musical languages. He did really well in those sessions. So did Tom and the Heartbreakers. Making that album was the best kind of fun. Marty, as some of you may know, was once married to my daughter Cindy, though now he's not. It doesn't matter to me. He's still my friend and he always was. I'm like that with my sons-in-law, or at least I'm like that with the ones I like. Long ago I took the position that the marital affairs of our family's younger generation! s)—all of them, including June's girls and the ever-growing corps of grandchildren—are no business of mine. When Cindy and Marty divorced and I started hearing stories about who did what to whom, I turned a deaf ear. I wanted no part of it. As I told Cindy once, “I didn't rec- ommend that you people get married, I didn't bring you together, and I'm not the reason you're divorcing.” It's not that I couldn't see problems in their marriage or that I didn't feel for them; it's just that I didn't want their troubles. Don't give me your troubles, I've got troubles of my own ... The same went for Carlene and Nick Lowe, and Rosanne and Rodney Crowell. I always liked both those men, and I still do. They're friends of mine and friends of