Cash: The Autobiography (6 page)

I'm thinking about my BBC experience. The inter- viewer was good, obviously an old hand, but even so, it was difficult to distinguish his questions from anyone else's in the chain of interviews I've done recently. They've all wanted me to talk about the same current work-related stuff, as they usually do—which makes sense, since they all get their information from the same press kit—and sooner or later, most of them have worked their way around to the same few questions peo- ple have been asking me for forty years. There are three of them. Question One: Why was I in prison? I never was. That idea got started because I wrote and sang “Folsom Prison Blues,” my 1955 hit, from the per- spective of a convicted, unrepentant killer, and twelve years later I made a concert album, Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison. In fact, I've never served any time at all in any cor- rectional institution anywhere. During my amphetamine years I spent a few nights in jail, but strictly on an overnight basis: seven incidents in all, different dates in different places where the local law decided we'd all be better off if I were under lock and key. Those weren't very educational experiences, but I do remember learning in Starkville, Mississippi, that trying to kick the bars out of a jail cell isn't a good idea. I broke my toe that night. There are those who just don't want to accept the nonfelonious version of me, and on occasion I've had to argue with people firmly convinced that whatever I might say, I once lived a life of violent crime. To them all I can offer is an apology: I'm sorry about this, but that line in “Folsom Prison Blues,” the one that still gets the biggest rise out of my audiences, especially the alternative crowds—“I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die”— is imaginative, not autobiographical. I sat with my pen in my hand, trying to think up the worst reason a person

could have for killing another person, and that's what came to mind. It did come to mind quite easily, though. Question Two is tough: How do I write songs? There is no formula, no set method; it happens all sorts of ways, and so the answer differs from song to song. For instance, I wrote “I Walk the Line” when I was on the road in Texas in 1956, having a hard time resist- ing the temptation to be unfaithful to my wife back in Memphis. I put those feelings into the beginnings of a song and sang the first two verses for Carl Perkins back- stage before a show. I keep a close watch on this heart of mine. I keep my eyes wide open all the time. I keep the ends out for the tie that binds. Because you're mine, I walk the line. I find it very very easy to be true. I find myself alone when each day's through. Yes I'll admit that I'm a fool for you. Because you're mine, I walk the line. By John R. Cash, © 1956 House of Cash, Inc. “What do you think?” I asked. “I'm calling it 'Because You're Mine.'” “Hmm,” Carl said. “Y'know, 'I Walk the Line' would be a better title.” Then he went on stage, and I fin- ished the song while he did his set. It came fast and easy, almost without conscious thought. The source of the feelings in the song is obvious. The source of the tempo and melody is more obscure: a reel- to-reel tape recorder in a United States Air Force barracks in Landsberg, Germany, in 1951.

A tape recorder was a real novelty in those days, high technology of the first order. I had the only one on the whole base, bought at the PX with savings from the eighty-five dollars a month Uncle Sam paid me to fight the Cold War. It was a pretty fascinating piece of equip- ment, and central to the creative life of the Landsberg Barbarians: me, two other airmen with guitars, and a West Virginian with a mandolin he'd had sent over from home. We'd sit around together in the barracks and murder the country songs of the day and the gospel songs of our youth—we were all country boys, so we all knew them—and that tape recorder would let us hear the results. Amazing. I still have some of the tapes, trans- ferred to cassette now. We were crude, but we had fun. It was one of the Barbarian tapes that gave me the melody for “I Walk the Line.” I was on the eleven-to- seven shift in the radio intercept room one night, listening in on the Russians, and when I got back to the barracks in the morning I discovered that someone had been mess- ing with my tape machine. I put on a Barbarians tape to test it, and out came the strangest sound, a haunting drone full of weird chord changes. To me it seemed like some sort of spooky church music, and at the end there was what sounded like somebody saying “Father.” I played it a million times, trying to figure it out, and even asked some Catholics in my unit if they recognized it from one of their services (they didn't), but finally I solved the puzzle: the tape had gotten turned around somehow, and I was hearing Barbarian guitar chords played backward. The drone and those weird chord changes stayed with me and surfaced in the melody of “I Walk the Line.” The air force taught me the things every military service imparts to its enlisted men—how to cuss, how to look for women, how to drink and fight—plus one skill that's pretty unusual: if you ever need to know what one Russian is signaling to another in Morse code, I'm your

man. I had such a talent for that particular line of work and such a good left ear, that in Landsberg, where the United States Air Force Security Service ran radio intercept opera- tions worldwide, I was the ace. I was who they called when the hardest jobs came up. I copied the first news of Stalin's death. I located the signal when the first Soviet jet bomber made its first flight from Moscow to Smolensk; we all knew what to listen for, but I was the one who heard it. I couldn't believe that Russian operator. He was sending at thirty-five words a minute by hand, a rate so fast I thought it was a machine transmitting until I heard him screw up. He was truly exceptional, but most of his comrades were fast enough to make the best Americans sound like amateurs, sloppy and slow. It didn't matter, though. Our equipment was so good that they couldn't make a noise anywhere in the world without us hearing it. Our receiver worked pretty well bringing in WSM, too. Some Sunday mornings I could sit there in Germany and listen to Saturday night at the Grand Ole Opry live from Nashville, Tennessee, just like at home. I heard the enemy every day in the air force, but I never saw combat or even came close to it. I enlisted a week before the Korean War broke out, so I was already in the system, and once they'd discovered my aptitude, trained me, and assigned me to the Security Service, Korea wasn't an option. My only choice was between Germany and Adak Island, in the Aleutian archipelago off Alaska. That wasn't hard: frozen everything or food and Frauleins? I chose Landsberg. I'd ended up in the military the same way most other Southern country boys did, for lack of a better way out of the cotton fields. I tried the other common option, going north to find a factory job—in my case, hitchhiking to Pontiac, Michigan, and getting on the line at the Fisher Body Company running a press that punched holes in

pads for the hoods of '51 Pontiacs—but that hadn't worked out. The job itself was horrible, the accommoda- tions no better: a boardinghouse crammed tight with men who drank and cussed and carried on more than my ten- der young country sensibilities could stand. Three weeks was all it took to send me hitching back home with more money in my pocket than I'd seen before in my whole life. There was nothing at home. Our land was ex- hausted, producing barely half a bale of cotton to the acre. The only job I could get, in a margarine plant where Daddy had gone to work as a laborer, was far worse than punching holes in Pontiacs. At first they had me pouring concrete, but I was too puny for that, just a long tall bag of bones, so they set me to cleaning out tanks, working for low money in filth beyond belief and heat I'd never imagined possible. After that, a government paycheck and a clean blue uniform looked pretty good. I enlisted for a four-year hitch. Recently, watching my hair turn grayer, my step get slower, and my energy level sink a little more each year, I've wondered about having given so much of the prime of my life to the United States Air Force and the cold war. At the time, though, it was the thing to do. We boys wanted to serve our country. As I said, military service instructed me in the things it teaches everyone. Violence, for example. I saw my first race riot in the air force. I was in a nine- story building in Bremerhaven, our temporary home after our voyage across the Atlantic from the States, when I heard a roar of angry voices. I looked down, and there they were, whites and blacks, comrades in arms— American military units had just been integrated—tearing at each other with everything they had. Men were being cut and beaten mercilessly; it's a miracle nobody died. Plenty of them ended up in the hospital and the stockade.

I'd known the fight was coming, because there'd been a lot of tension aboard ship and hard talk since we landed in Bremerhaven—men jacking themselves and each other up for action the way they do—but I didn't want any part of it, and I didn't really understand why so many men did. I had no problem sharing a barracks with blacks, and I couldn't imagine hating them so much that I was willing to wage a private war on them. It's quite a thing, the inno- cence of youth; my views haven't changed since then, but I've certainly learned more about race hatred along the way. One point about that fight. There in Bremerhaven you had a lot of men, black and white, who'd been very strongly encouraged to kill people (North Koreans, Chinese, Russians), then jam-packed together and told to behave like gentlemen for a long, hard, boring voyage fol- lowed by enforced idleness ashore. They were a boiler waiting to explode. My own personal nonviolence didn't last long in Landsberg. Once I knew how to drink beer and look for a girl, it was no big thing learning how to drink the hard stuff and look for a fight. Finding one wasn't difficult, either. The United States Army didn't have any bases nearby, so we were denied the chance to do combat with our natural enemies, but the Germans obliged us willingly enough; someone would always rise to the occasion. It was just part of the evening's fun for angry young men and red-blooded guardians of democracy. The air force broadened other horizons for me. I went to London and I saw the queen (her coronation, in fact, in 1953). I went to Oberammergau, home of the famous Passion Play, and fished (Bavaria has the world's best trout fishing). I went to Paris and watched the girls at the Folies-Bergere. I went to Barcelona and watched the girls everywhere. I heard flamenco guitars played in caves. I bought my own first guitar for twenty deutsche marks, about five bucks American at the time,

and carried it back to the base with me through the freezing German winter. I'll never forget that walk, four miles though knee-deep snow; I was numb all over. Up to that point I'd had to be content with just singing, and of course I sang all the time, both alone and with the other guys. In a way it was just like it had been back in Arkansas, except that the context and the content were often a little different. At first, in basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, I really missed singing with everyone in church, but marching music was fun, too. I still remember the first song we sang that way, a group effort written collaboratively by my whole flight of fifty-seven men and sung on the march: Oh, there's a brownnose in this flight And his name is Chester White. He's got a brown spot on his nose And it grows and grows and grows. My guitar survived until 1957, by the way, when my brother Tommy and one of my nephews, horsing around at my house in Memphis, smashed it to pieces by accident and neglected to mention the event until one day when I happened to notice it was missing. I didn't care; by then I had a Martin. The air force appreciated my nonmusical talents and tried to hold on to me, promoting me just before my hitch was up—“We've made you a Staff Sergeant a little early, Sergeant Cash, and we would like for you to seriously con- sider reenlisting and making a career of this”—but it was far too little, way too late. They'd kept me in Germany for three years with no home leave whatsoever and only three telephone calls back to the States, and on top of that they told me that if I stayed in the air force, I'd never leave the Security Service. “What if I want to be in the air force band?” I asked.

“No way,” they said. “You've taken an oath of secrecy. You can't go anywhere. You're still in, even after you're discharged.” For one horrible moment I thought they were trying to tie me up for life, but they weren't; they let me go. It was a good thing they did. The beer and the wurst were wonderful, but I was dying to be back in the South, where the livin' was easy; where the fish were jumpin', where the cotton grew high. Question Three is simple: Why do I always wear black? Strictly speaking, I don't. When I'm not in the public eye I wear whatever I want. I still wear black on stage, though, for a couple of reasons. First there's the song “Man in Black,” which I wrote in 1971. I had my network TV show at the time, and so many reporters were asking me Question Two that I saw an opportunity to answer with a message. I wore the black, I sang, “for the poor and beaten down, livin' in the hopeless, hungry side of town.” I wore it “for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime, but is there because he's a viaim of the times.” I wore it for “the sick and lonely old” and “the reckless whose bad trip left them cold.” And, with the Vietnam War as painful in my mind as it was in most other Americans', I wore it “in mournin' for the lives that could have been. Each week we lose a hundred fine young men. I wear it for the thousands who have died, believin' that the Lord was on their side.” The last verse summed it up: Well, there's things that never will be right, I know, And things need changin' everywhere you go, But until we start to make a move to make a few things right, You'll never see me wear a suit of white. Oh, I'd love to wear a rainbow every day, And tell the world that everything's okay,

But I'll try to carry off a little darkness on my back, Till things are brighter, I'm the Man in Black. By John R. Cash, © 1971 House of Cash, Inc. Apart from the Vietnam War being over, I don't see much reason to change my position today. The old are still neglected, the poor are still poor, the young are still dying before their time, and we're not making many moves to make things right. There's still plenty of dark- ness to carry off. My other reasons for wearing black date to my very first public performance, in a North Memphis church before I'd made any records or even gotten in the door at Sun Records. I'd already hooked up with Marshall Grant and Luther Perkins, though, so in theory at least we were a band, and we thought we ought to look like one. Unfortunately, none of us had any clothes a “real” band would wear—I didn't own a suit, or even a tie—but each of us did have a black shirt and a pair of blue jeans. So that became our band outfit, and since the folks at the church seemed to like us and musicians are deeply super- stitious—if they tell you otherwise, don't believe them— I suggested we stick with the black. Marshall and Luther did so for a while; I did forever. My mother hated it, though, so after my first couple of hit records, I gave in and started wearing the bright, flashy outfits she made for me—I remember one particu- larly festive white suit trimmed in glittering blue—but that didn't feel good at all, so I went back to black. And ultimately, everything else aside, that was the real deal: it just felt right. I wore black because I liked it. I still do, and wearing it still means something to me. It's still my symbol of rebellion—against a stagnant sta- tus quo, against our hypocritical houses of God, against people whose minds are closed to others' ideas.