Cash: The Autobiography (27 page)

stool, with my black D2.8 Martin and two mikes, singing for the folks. I learned the trick of making myself feel like the audience was just that one other person late and alone in a room, and that too was a great pleasure. It was also more than rewarding to find that the young people were eager, perhaps even hungry, for the spiritual songs I've always loved. I'd always prayed that might happen. I found acceptance and appreciation in different places. It felt great. At the Glastonbury Festival in England I sat on my stool and played my songs for an audience of a hundred thousand young people who really listened, and that night I realized I'd come full circle, back to the bare bones of my music, pre-stardom, pre-electric, pre-Memphis. I could have been back in Dyess, singing with just Moma to hear me on the front porch under the clear night sky of Arkansas in the 1940s with the pan- thers screaming in the bush, and it seemed, finally and almost miraculously, that the audience enjoyed that feel- ing almost as much as I did. June also found a whole new world of appreciation among the young people. They loved the Carter Family classics, and they loved her. One night in England shortly after the release of American Recordings, as the new excitement was just beginning, she was coming off stage when a nineteen-year-old in tattered black, with tattoos and body piercings and spiky hair and the whole bit, tapped her gently on the arm and said, “Mrs. Cash, you really kick ass.” I like to remind her of that when she's feeling down or discouraged. “Mrs. Cash, don't worry about it,” I'll say. “You kick ass.” I'm still going strong with Rick Rubin and American Records. I made a second album, Unchained, with a band (Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Marty Stuart, and others), and we're planning another, perhaps two. So my creative blood is up and I'm having a good time.

These days, when songs start forcing their way up through me, I can allow myself a fair expectation that if I do my part with them, a significant number of people might hear them. I have no idea what my long-term recording future will hold. Whatever it is, I'm looking forward to it. I'm certainly anticipating my next couple of projects with pleasure. At this point we have a large backlog of good songs, so the next album will probably be a seleaion of those and perhaps some others I haven't met or written yet, recorded with or without a band; we'll see. The other project really has my blood up. Rick and I are talking about mapping out a selection of spiritual songs—not old gospel music, but contemporary songs I've found and written that speak of the spirit—and then recording them in a cathedral. Rick has scouted out a location that might work. I can't wait.

Terrible news came today. The daugh- ter of a friend of mine, aged just twenty-six, got drunk after being sober for three months in a recovery pro- gram and shot herself to death in front of her husband and children. I don't know if you can imagine how I feel. Maybe you can if you yourself are an alcoholic or addict. It's not just—just!—that this poor girl did such an incredibly ter- rible thing to herself and her loved ones; it's that the dis- ease got her—and everyone in her family. Her father, also an alcoholic, has been sober in recovery a long time, but it got him. Her children had never taken a drink or a drug, but it got them. It got me too, reminding me that I myself am surrounded by the ghosts of close friends killed by alcoholism and addiction, and I can't even begin to count the acquaintances, the friends of friends and the people I meet somewhere, then read about in the news- papers. I've already called my children. They're all alive; they're all okay. I've never considered taking my own life. I lay down to die in Nickajack Cave, it's true, but that wasn't suicide, and God didn't let me slip away from my hell on earth so easily. I've been close to death, of course. It happened many times when I was high, probably more often than I even knew about. Crawling from the wreckage of this or that vehicle, I'd sometimes realize that death had passed by without taking me, but there must have been many other occasions when I felt its breeze but didn't recognize it or when just another few milligrams of some chemical would have pushed me squarely into its path.

Only once have I been right up to it and seen it. I was on a respirator in critical care with double pneumonia after my bypass surgery in 1988. There came a moment when, after fighting for breath for so long and not getting it anymore, I felt myself fading away. I could hear the doctors—“He's slipping, he's slipping! We've got to do something fast!”—but their voices receded and every- thing got quiet and dark and calm and peaceful. Then a light grew around me, and soon it enveloped me, and it was more than light: it was the essence of light, a safe, warm, joyous brilliance growing brighter and more beau- tiful every moment. I began to drift smoothly into its very center, where it was so much better than anything I'd ever experienced that I can't possibly describe it. I was unbelievably happy. I've never felt such utter joy. Then it just vanished. It just went. My eyes flew open and I saw doctors. I couldn't believe it. Sorrow welled up in me. I started crying, and then I got so angry that I was sobbing and snarling at the same time. I found my wits and began trying to tell them to let me go, to send me back, but they had a tube down my throat, so I couldn't get it across to them. I gave up trying. And then, after a few minutes, I was glad to be back. I was restored, as they say, to my senses. I never forgot that light, and it changed me. When I was still in the hospital and one of my children came into my room, I'd feel a strange, overpowering blend of joy and sorrow, and my tears would roll. After I got home, I'd bawl like a baby over a passage in a book or a scene in a movie. When friends came over, I'd watch them and a solitary little tear would sneak down my cheek. People got used to it. They'd see it and smile: there goes John, crying again. It's not so extreme today, but I still cry at almost any- thing. It can be something as profound as the beauty of a grandchild in my arms or as trifling as the smile of a

pretty girl winning a skating championship on TV. Life has become very moving. Something thumps and stirs me from a reverie (a night- mare?) about a day on pills in the desert in 1963, and my eyes come open and focus. I'm back at home on Old Hickory Lake, and what's woken me is Joseph, my grandson. He's a couple of months into his second year now. He comes stomping into the room with his sturdy little legs spread wide apart for better balance, swaying a little with each step, still unsure on his feet and having to concentrate, controlling his momentum with a look of intense focus on his face as he lurches toward me. Then he arrives. He slaps his hands onto my knees for balance, breaks concentration, and turns his face up to mine with a big, delighted, wide-open smile. What a tonic. How lucky I am. How grateful I am to be here now, not back there then. I'll take my cue from Joseph and concentrate on the really important stuff: my children and their children. Rosanne Cash is my oldest. She's famous, and justly so. As a matter of fact, she's had as many number-one country hits as I have. She's a great singer and a great writer of songs, fiction, journalism, and poetry. Her first book of stories, Bodies of Water, got a wonderful review in the New York Times, and in The Illustrated History of Country Music it says that her music is “an auteur odyssey, a chronicle of songs taken directly from her own life and feelings with very few holds barred, for which there isn't a parallel in modern Nashville.” All I'd add is that it's been a chronicle of very good songs, and she doesn't live in Nashville anymore. She moved to New York a couple of years ago and is very happy there. That was the right move, I think; she belongs in a bigger, more cosmopolitan creative community. Sometimes I call Rosanne “The Brain.” She and I operate on much the same wavelength, so there's always

been a special closeness between us. It's not a matter of deeper love (or hurt) than between me and the other girls; it's more like a greater degree of instinctive understand- ing. One of the nice ways she and I have shared each other in recent years is in book swapping. She's a great literature scout, going out there ahead of me and mark- ing the trail. Rosanne is married to John Leventhal, a fine musi- cian and record producer; she and Rodney Crowell sepa- rated while she still lived in Tennessee. Caitlin, her eldest daughter, another writer, is sixteen, and Chelsea and Carrie are coming right along behind Caitlin. They're all still in school in New York. The other daughter of the Crowell-Cash household, Hannah Crowell, is already out in the world, living in San Francisco. Just as in my house, nobody in Rosanne's family talks about “step- daughters” or “stepsisters.” Sparkle Carter, for instance, is my daughter, though not biologically. Publicly known as Carlene Carter, born Carlene Smith when June was married to Carl Smith, she's “Sparkle” to me because that's her character. You cannot keep Carlene down; no point in trying. She throws out sparks wherever she goes. She too is famous and jusdy so: she's a very fine song- writer and singer and a great performer. I saw her once opening for Garth Brooks, and she just blew him away— so don't compete with Carlene unless you're Elvis, and I know you're not. She made some great country-rock records when she was on the Nashville scene in the '70s and then some very cool country-rock-pop-dance records while she was married to Nick Lowe and living in London. Now she makes wonderful Carlene Carter records that put it all together, usually with the help of Howie Epstein, her live-in beau. Howie plays bass in the Heartbreakers, Tom Petty's band, and is an ace producer. Carlene's kids are Tiffany Lowe, who's causing a

well-deserved stir in Los Angeles with her own music, and John Jackson Routh, the son of songwriter Jack Routh. John's a sharp boy and a hard worker, going to school at Vanderbilt University and holding down two jobs, one of them as football coach at Good Pasture Christian School in Nashville. Like Rosanne, Carlene had a lot to prove when she first began making her way in the music business. People watched her closely and judged her very criti- cally because of whose daughter she was, and in some ways I think she had a harder time making it because of her name. I'm proud of her for fighting her way through that. * * * Kathy, my second daughter and the last born in Memphis, holds the current family record among my children for marriage duration: she and Jimmy Tittle, a songwriter and once my bass player, are working on fif- teen years now. Kathy never had any show business ambitions. All she ever wanted was to make a home and family, and she's succeeded; she and Jimmy live in a house they built on fourteen acres in middle Tennessee with two fine children, Dustin and Kacy Tittle. Kathy's first child and my first grandson, Thomas Coggins, is now a big, strapping specimen of a man who looks a lot like Tarzan (he works out) and is as decent and level- headed as you'd want a young man to be. He's a police officer in Old Hickory, Tennessee, but he also writes songs and plays guitar pretty nicely, so while he hasn't pointed himself in that direction professionally, I suspect he might someday. By the time this book comes out, he and his wife might well have given me my first great- grandchild. I have twelve grandchildren, you know. Sometimes that just astonishes me.

Cindy, daughter number three, is the tomboy. She likes to shoot, and for a while she was into fast draw. I kept telling her she was going to shoot her toes off, but I was wrong. She doesn't do too much of that now; she's more likely to be found on horseback or with a fishing rod, not a Peacemaker, in her hand. She has a daughter from her first marriage, Jessica Brock, who's studying at Western Kentucky State University and is headed toward a career in family counseling. Cindy herself wears several hats. She's a master barber and a much-sought-after hair and makeup artist in the music video business; she recently authored and produced the excellent and suc- cessful Cash Family Scrapbook, although she doesn't have the kind of drive toward a musical career that Rosanne and I have—a compulsion, almost, down in our bones—she writes good songs and carries a tune with the best of them. Now and again she comes on the road and sings with us. Cindy and I are very close. We love each other fiercely, and fight that way too. She fights just like her mother, though, so I win most of the time by being able to predict what she's going to do. She has fire. She used to be married to Marty Stuart, but that ended years ago and we all survived. Our sense of humor even came back. Marty called me the other day. “Uh, John,” he said, chortling, “me and Cindy are having trouble.” If Rosanne is The Brain, then Rosie has to be The Voice. She's a regular part of our show, and she wows the crowd every time. Songs like “Amazing Grace” and “Angel from Montgomery,” two of the numbers on which she solos regularly, were written for a voice like hers, big and bluesy, with immense power and depth. She has her own style and quality, but if I had to make com- parisons for the sake of description, I'd look among names like Mahalia Jackson and Bessie Smith rather than any country singers I can think of.

I believe that if Rosie ever really wants to become a recording star, she will. She's been close several times, but something has always happened to keep her from the final step, and perhaps that hasn't always been someone else's fault; she may have been more afraid of success than failure. She knows that. I've told her. I've also told her that one day she'll commit herself. When she does, watch out. Rosie has real soul. She doesn't have any children of her own, but she loves them—and old people, and anyone who's in trou- ble and could use her help. She's one of the most actively compassionate people I know; a lot of her time and money are spent helping people, both in and around the family and elsewhere. I feel a special spiritual connection with Rosie. Perhaps that's because I've seen her struggles with the family disease from closer range than has been the case with the other children. And now, the babies. Tara, my youngest daughter, is in Pordand, Oregon, with her husband, Fred Schwoebel, and their son Aran (named after the Aran Islands, where they went on their honeymoon). She, too, works in video, though mostly in commercials and on the production end of things. She's qualified for almost any job on the set, from wardrobe manager to assistant director, and she's got as much work as she wants. Fred and Tara are low-consumption types, frugal and wise in how they live and how they spend their money. They're mountain climbers, hikers, and cross- country skiers. They're very good together. Tara is soft-spoken and sweet by nature, not at all eager for conflict. For several years she went off and turned her back on the problems in the family, living her own life and doing her own thing until the rest of us