Cash: The Autobiography (25 page)

It's a new day in Tennessee, and a pretty one. I walk out Captain Weems's front door, get in the Range Rover, and go for a drive. This is good land. I bump up the back pasture, over the crest of the hill, into the woods, along the creek, and back up through the woods to the old family graveyard where Captain Weems and his people rest. It's good to stop here: another special place for peace and contempla- tion, restful and intriguing all at once. It has a different feeling entirely from another nearby place I like to visit, the remains of a tiny community that was abandoned in 1912 (I don't know why; somebody does, I'm sure, but not me). There, the feeling is of human life interrupted rather than laid to rest. Any moment you expect to hear chil- dren's voices ringing through the trees, the sound of a dinner bell clanging or the thud of an ax chopping fire- wood, even though everything you see makes it obvious that the people are absolutely gone. It's a strange sensa- tion. Close to where the schoolhouse stood—razed to its foundation now—somebody in the first decade of the century laid out a ball field on more or less level, cleared ground using worn-out tires for the bases, and the tires are still there. The people left them where they lay, and as nature began reclaiming the land, plants grew up around and through them. Now, where second base used to be, there's a forty-foot elm with an intact pre-World War I automobile tire clinging tightly around the base of its trunk. There's fine timber in these woods: yellow poplar, white oak, black oak, hickory, elm, cedar; ash. Down in the valley there must be two hundred yellow poplars more than a hundred feet high, arrow-straight; a few of them would build you a mansion. Several years ago I

bought two parcels of land in here and I'm just sitting on it, watching the value grow with the trees until it's worth too much for me to justify keeping it. Not, again, that we own the land, but that's how we humans organize our- selves, so I do it too. My Uncle Edgar, when I went to visit him in my brand-new Cadillac in the late '50s, stopped playing dominoes long enough to tell me, “Well, I don't know. You seem to be making a lot of money, but I hope you'll do one thing with it.” Then he paused and waited me for me to speak my part, which I did. “What's that?” “Buy land.” I didn't pay any attention then, but I do now. Even if it's too late to do me any good, it'll serve my grandchil- dren well. He gave me some more advice I didn't follow. “Another thing you ought to do is buy gold,” he said. “Right now it's set at thirty-five dollars an ounce by the government, but they're going off the gold standard, and gold is going to go sky-high. Anyone who's got a lot of gold is going to get very rich real suddenly, overnight.” He was right, too. I really should have paid atten- tion. I appreciate my Range Rover greatly. It's a special vehicle with a special story. At a time when I needed a four-wheel-drive vehicle and had decided that I really wanted it to be a Range Rover, I was flipping through The Robb Report when I saw a photo of the one I had to have. It was an '89 model that had been used in the French production of the movie The Jungle Book, and it featured an appropriate paint

job: a base of matte black, my favorite color, embellished all over with brightly colored, hand-painted jungle plants and animals, sort of Rousseau-esque but more primitive (for you art lovers). And it was a bargain! Only twenty- three thousand dollars would make it mine. That price, furthermore, just happened to coincide with the amount of money my brother Tommy, as executor of our mother's estate, had just told me to expect in the mail; all the legal- ities had been satisfied, and that was my share. Plus, the dealer was only a couple of hundred miles away in Memphis. I called him, and of course he still had the vehicle. With all that going for me, how could he not? “I want that Range Rover,” I told him. “My mother bought it for me.” My mother died in March 1991, after a lifetime of encouraging me in my music, praying for my well-being, and helping me and all her children in every way she could. For about the last ten years of her life she worked at the House of Cash, running the gift shop. The shop, in fact, was her idea. When we first moved into the building and set up our offices and the recording studio, Moma came up with the notion that we should also open part of the building to the public and set up a museum and a place for fans to buy souvenirs, beginning with the cook- books she'd written. I was a little hesitant, but she really wanted to do it, so we went ahead, and for many years Moma played host at the House of Cash. She did a lot of good there: greeted a lot of fans, sold a lot of souvenirs, and satisfied a lot of people's curiosity and need for per- sonal contact. At times it was difficult for me, having to meet anywhere from a dozen to a hundred people when- ever I went to the office, but I swallowed my shyness and did it, and I survived and Moma enjoyed her job. After she died I decided I didn't want to be in the souvenir business anymore and turned that part of my

affairs over to Bill Miller of the Odyssey Group in California. Bill has been a good friend for years and a fan even longer; he was on the souvenir and collector scene when he was just a kid, “Little Billy Miller.” He named a son after me, and I was honored. Both the unfortunate story of how I acquired Bon Aqua and the happy fact that I'm sixty-five and solvent, with land, leads me to the subject of Marty Klein and Lou Robin. I was introduced to them in 1968 by Barbara John, a very sharp and competent woman who was with me for about three years in all, handling the lighting on my shows. I started working with Marty and Lou shortly after that, and stuck. Marty was my agent until his death just a few years ago, and Lou is still my manager. Right from the start with me, those men did it right. They got my dates booked and covered and serviced, and for the first time in my career I started seeing the money that was due me immediately, without thirty-day gaps and all manner of deductions between the promoter handing over the cash and my check arriving in the mail. Lou gave me a check to take home with me on the night the tour ended, plus an exact accounting of every penny that had come in and gone out from start to finish. Needless to say, I liked that. I couldn't quite believe it at first, but it really was true. Marty and Lou worked very closely and effectively, with Marty staying mostly at his home base in California and Lou traveling the road with me. It's coming up on thirty years now that everywhere I've worked, Lou has been close by, keeping it all running, putting out the fires, knocking down the problems, setting up the opportuni- ties. At times, neither he nor Marty had a very coopera- tive client in me, but they took my periodic abuse (usually in my times of active addiction) like true friends. Marty became a member of the family, and it was a very hard blow losing him to a heart attack. Lou is family, too, has

been for many, many years. We're very close, and I trust him absolutely, with every reason to do so. He's traveled the world with me, been everywhere, seen everything, known every kind of scheme and scam and trick and trouble the music business has to offer, and he knew most of it, moreover, before he even met me. He was booking the Beatles when they first came around. Artists Consul- tants is the name of his organization; I'm not sure what kind of artist I've turned out to be, but he's a great con- sultant. He's kind, too, a genuine gentleman. These days he works closely with Roger Vorce at the Agency for the Performing Arts, Marty Klein's successor and another very good man indeed. With these people advising me about business and handling the money I make, I've arrived in 1997 able to jive very nicely and work as much as I want. I could even retire. In that case, though, I'd have to let many of the people who work for me go, and that's just not some- thing I want to do. They're wonderful people, attracted to my employment and kept at my side by a kindly fate, some of them for decades, and I would miss them badly. Besides, I don't want to lounge around and get fat. The fun isn't over yet.

I came out to Bon Aqua today from Nashville, not the road. For a few days this week I was shooting a commercial for Nissan at their plant in Smyrna, Tennessee, and then this morning I went to the Cowboy Arms Hotel and Recording Spa, as Jack Clement has christened his studio/office/country soul salon on Belmont Boulevard, and recorded a spiritual with the Fairfield Four. That was fun. I love black gospel music, and those men are so good at it, and Jack's attic studio is a wonderful place to make music. That whole scene is where it's at. Sometimes I go down to Belmont Boulevard t record. Other times I go just to sit across the desk from lack and play his Gibson J200 while he plays his Dobro and we sing whatever we feel like—Hawaiian songs, “Steel Guitar Rag” (yes, it's got lyrics, even if most peo- ple don't know them), bluegrass songs, gospel songs, pop and country and blues songs he and I have known all our lives and never get to sing anywhere else. We're from the same time and the same turf, Jack and I. We're on the same wavelength; we can just pull songs out of the air and click right into them together. Maybe we'll do the “Jack & John Show” sometime, he and I sitting on a pair of stools with just our acoustic guitars, swapping it back and forth. We did that on one of my Australian tours about ten years ago and had a really good time. Jack's been a real inspiration to me, and also to a lot of other people. He's been a great innovator in the coun- try music business and a great friend to other musicians, singers, and writers a little bit ahead of their time, outside the pack, and too good for their own good. He had a lot to do with the success of Sun Records, and even more with the quality of the music coming out of that studio. He introduced Charley Pride to Nashville and produced all his major hits. He wrote "Guess Things Happen That

Way,“ ”Ballad of a Teenage Queen,“ ”It'll Be Me,“ ”Fools Like Me,“ ”Gone Girl,“ ”Miller's Cave," and dozens of other great songs. He produced what many people think is Waylon's best album, Dreaming My Dreams, and was a major force in the Outlaw movement of the '70s. He's given shelter, encouragement, inspira- tion, often free recording time, and even financial sup- port to many of the best songwriters ever to hit Nashville. He was experimenting with video long before anyone else in town. He's staged events and launched fads (polka fever, the Summer of Hula) that have delighted many and puzzled many more. He's gathered a corps of deeply tal- ented music makers around him (keyboardman/arranger/ producer Charles Cochran and engineer/producer David Ferguson are the ones I've known best and longest) and collaborated with them on all kinds of high-grade pro- jects. He's welcomed talents from all over the world and all fields of music to the Nashville community and steered them where they'd do the most good (pointing Tom Petty and U2 toward me, for instance). All in all, he's done a fine job of being the chief wild card in Nashville's deck for the past thirty years. Surprises have always awaited at the Cowboy Arms. So, for me, has friendship. Jack has stood by me through everything, especially when life hasn't been too inspiring. Day or night, whatever my condition, I've always found a refuge in his presence. Jack says he's a C-plus Christian, but if I were doing the grading I'd bump him up to a B minus. He makes an easy A in ballroom dancing—he used to be an Arthur Murray instructor—and his timing and physical coordi- nation were good enough to win him a place in the United States Marine Corps ceremonial drill team. He's a patriot, though not a flag-waver; once a year he takes a trip to Washington, D.C., to visit the national shrines and spend a day in the Smithsonian, getting in touch with his American roots.

You don't get a yes-man when you work with Jack. If he thinks you haven't done your best, he'll tell you and make it clear he wants you to do better, and he certainly has his own ideas about how your records should sound. I'm bullheaded too, so he and I have locked horns many a time about almost anything a producer and artist can: song choices, instrumentation, the mix, the whole thing. We've always resolved our differences in the end, though, and it's never been boring. If there's been any consistent area of disagreement over the years, it's been the issue of minimal versus elaborate on my records. I like to keep it simple, just me and a basic band. Jack likes to play with it once I'm finished, adding this, trying that, and working through as many changes as he wants until he's satisfied. He likes to live with a track in progress; when you stop by the Cowboy Arms you're quite likely to find him in his office, swaying in time or waltzing by himself in the mid- dle of the floor, dreaming up new sounds as a song you cut a week or two ago thunders through his big JBL stu- dio monitors at a couple of hundred decibels. People call him “Cowboy,” though he can also be Pineapple Jack (in his Hawaiian mode) and Pop Country. Somebody should write a book about him. He should write a book about himself (or anything he wants, for that matter). He's a brilliant, talented, funny, ultramusical, very kind man. * * * I've had a lot of producers, which doesn't surprise me and shouldn't surprise anyone, given how many records I've made and how long I've been recording. It's possible, in fact, that I've even forgotten some producers with whom I made an album here or did a special project there. That's not a reflection on them by any means: it's just the sheer volume of recording sessions I've done combined with the inevitable attrition of the years on my memory. Anyone over fifty can relate, I'm sure. The producers who stand out clearly and have been

significant in my musical life are, in chronological order, Sam Phillips, Jack Clement, Don Law, Frank Jones, Bob Johnston, Larry Butler, Charlie Bragg, Earl Poole Ball, Brian Ahern, Billy Sherrill, Chips Moman, Bob Moore, and Rick Rubin. Among others responsible for various productions along the way are four of my now former sons-in-law: Jack Routh, Marty Stuart, Nick Lowe, and Rodney Crowell. And as I said, it isn't over yet. Going back to the beginning, it was Sam Phillips, Jack Clement, the Don Law/Frank Jones combination, and Bob Johnston who took me up to 1974, when I underwent a kind of mental divorce from the CBS power structure on Music Row. At that point I pulled back to Hendersonville as far as recording was con- cerned, working in my own studio at the House of Cash, mostly with Charlie Bragg and Larry Butler, and record- ing whatever I wanted. I made that change after going along, reluctantly, with the CBS bosses on John R. Cash, which was their idea of an album to restore my sales potential. They sent a producer down to Nashville with a bag full of songs jjiey thought I should record, had me decide which ones I would record and what key I'd sing them in, and pipped the producer and the song choices back to New York. Then they recorded the instrumental tracks with their musicians and arrangements, sent the whole pack- age back to Nashville, and had me record my vocals onto the tracks. I wasn't pleased with either the process or the results, so I decided I wouldn't do that kind of thing again—that is, I would not make any more music I didn't want to make. I'd never just cave the way I did on John R. Cash. I went through the mid-'70s doing my own thing, stay- ing away from the politics on Music Row, making my own albums my own way, and handing them over to CBS when they were done, and I'm still proud of some of that work. The soundtrack to Gospel Road was a monumental labor