Cash: The Autobiography (8 page)

mance in that North Memphis church, I began getting in my '54 Plymouth, driving out to the little towns around Memphis, finding the local theater manager, and pitch- ing myself and the boys (who at that point didn't have a name; they became the Tennessee Two later). Given a job, we'd have posters made up promoting the show, then get out our black shirts on the appointed night and go do it. We performed a mixture of material, most of it gospel-oriented: “Peace in the Valley,” some of Red Foley's songs, “He'll Understand and Say Well Done,” sometimes black gospel blues songs like “I've Got Jesus and That's Enough,” and always “I Was There When It Happened,” the sacred song Jimmie Davis had made a hit (Marshall sang on the chorus of that one). Often I sang what was then my favorite among my own songs, “Belshazzar.” I found Marshall and Luther through my brother Roy, who worked with them at Automobile Sales Company Service. Marshall and Roy were the two ace mechanics, the ones who handled the biggest, most com- plicated jobs, while Luther worked on radios in the back. They'd been asking Roy to introduce them to me, and when he did we hit it off pretty well. I liked them both, but from the first I felt instinctively closer to Luther. He was a radio technician, ior one thing, so we had that interest in common. Then, too, we were both guitar play- ers (using the term loosely), while Marshall played the bass. Luther was one of those men who've never met a stranger. When I first met him after coming back to the States from the air force, he welcomed me like an old friend from home—while Marshall was a little more reserved. We got along beautifully. We really enjoyed working together. We'd go to Luther's or Marshall's house or my place and sit out on the porch and play music until the yard was full of neighbors, and it was great. I feel very fondly about those days.

Roy was a big part of things then; in fact, he'd been a major factor in my musical life for a long time. When he was a senior in high school back in Dyess, he and some buddies got together in a string band they called the Dixie Rhythm Ramblers, and they even broadcast a few times over KLCN in Blytheville, Arkansas. That, more than anything, got the idea of singing on the radio planted in my head as something I might really do, and Roy encour- aged it. He'd always believed in me. Even when I was little, he'd tell me, “J.R., someday you're going to be somebody. The world's your apple, and you're going to peel it,” and because I looked up to him so much, I believed that. Sadly, Roy's musical career didn't work out. He was the only one of the Dixie Rhythm Ramblers to survive World War II, and after that he lost the heart for it. He still kept encouraging me, though. While I was in the air force he and I corresponded a lot, and that in fact is how he first told me about Marshall and Luther. I was set up to meet them before I even got back to the States. Once we all got together, Roy was one of the gang. He came along on dates with us to help drive, set up, and do whatever needed doing. Looking back, then, Roy was very significant in my life. He went on to have his own career, first as a master mechanic and then, for twenty-five years, as Mid-South Regional Service Representative for the Chrysler Corpor- ation, with his own office in the Sterick Building in Memphis. But all the way through he kept his eye on me. When I got into the amphetamines so badly, he didn't ignore it or downplay it the way some people did; he was there to ask me—to beg me—to take care of myself. His attitude toward me never changed. He never looked down on me or condemned me, no matter how low I went. That meant an awful lot to me. Roy died peacefully just a few years ago on his couch in Memphis. The offi- cial cause of death, I believe, was exhaustion. He was just worn out. When I made my first move on Sun, I told Sam Phillips

on the telephone that I was a gospel singer. That didn't work. The market for gospel records, he told me, wasn't big enough for him to make a living producing them. My next try didn't work, either—that time I told him I was a country singer. In the end I just went down to the Memphis Recording Service one morning before anyone arrived for work and sat on the step and waited. Sam was the first to appear. I stood up and intro- duced myself and said, “Mr. Phillips, sir, if you listen to me, you'll be glad you did.” That must have been the right thing to say. “Well, I like to hear a boy with confidence in him,” he replied. “Come on in.” Once we were in the studio, I sang “I Was There When It Happened” and “It Don't Hurt Anymore” for him. I sang;“Belshazzar.” I sang Hank Snow songs, a Jimmie Rodgers song, a couple of Carter Family songs, whatever else I'd taken into my repertoire from among the popular country songs of the day. Sam kept direct- ing me back to my own repertoire: “What else have you written?” Though I didn't think it was any good, I told him about “Hey, Porter,” and he had me sing it for him. That did it. “Come back tomorrow with those guys you've been making the music with, and we'll put that song down,” he told me. I was really nervous in the studio the next day, and the steel guitar player, Red Kernodle, another mechanic at the Automobile Sales Company, was even worse; he was so jittery he could hardly play at all. The results were predictable: the first track we recorded, “Wide Open Road,” sounded awful, and it didn't get any bet- ter. After three or four songs, Red packed up his steel and left. “This music business is not for me,” he said,

and I didn't contest the point. After that we settled down a little and managed to get a respectable take on “Hey, Porter.” Sam liked it. “That's going to be a single,” he declared. “What do you mean, a single?” I asked. I thought we were still auditioning. “We're going to put out a record,” Sam replied. What a wonderful moment that was! I hadn't thought we had a chance, and now there I was, about to become a Sun recording artist. “Now,” Sam continued, “if we had another song, a love song we could put on the other side, we could release a record. D'you have a song like that?” “I don't know,” I said. “I'll have to think about it.” “Well, if you don't have one, go write one. Write a real weeper.” That's what I did. A couple of weeks later I called him with “Cry, Cry, Cry” in hand, and he had us come back in and cut that, too. We had to do thirty-five takes before we got “Cry, Cry, Cry” right, mostly because Luther couldn't get his guitar part worked out. I kept changing the arrange- ment on him, and he kept messing it up. It was a com- edy of errors until finally I told him to forget about the guitar break we were trying for and just chord his way through it. That worked out fine, I thought. The boom-chicka-boom instrumental style suited me, and it came naturally to us. Marshall Grant was mostly right when in later years he said that we didn't work to get that boom-chicka-boom sound—it's all we

could play. But it served us well, and it was ours. You knew whose voice was coming when you heard it kick off. Marshall and Luther limited me, it's true, especially in later years. Songs would come along that I'd want to record, but I didn't because I couldn't figure out the chords myself, and neither could anyone else in the stu- dio. “City of New Orleans” by Steve Goodman was one of those. Kris Kristofferson sent it to me before anyone else got a shot at it, and if I'd taken the time and made the effort to learn it, I might just have had myself a major hit. Instead I let it pass and just kind of drifted along with Marshall and Luther (and, after '59, Fluke). I can't blame Marshall and Luther, of course. There were plenty of people I could have called to come in and show us what we needed to know, but I didn't bother (it's only in the last few years, in fact, that I've learned a couple of new chords). I took the easy way, and to an extent I regret that. Still, though, the way we did it was honest. We played it and sang it the way we felt it, and there's a lot to be said for that.

My feelings about Sam Phillips are still mixed. I think he was another of those angels who appear in your life, but I'm not sure he treated me prop- erly in a financial sense (I'm not sure he didn't, either). Mainly, though, I'm still annoyed that he never gave me a Cadillac. He gave Carl Perkins one when Carl sold a million copies of “Blue Suede Shoes,” but I never got one when “I Walk the Line” became such a huge hit. I don't know. Maybe it was because Sam saw Carl as his future in rock 'n' roll—he'd sold Elvis to RCA by then— whereas I was country, and you just don't give Cadillacs to country stars. It's a rock 'n' roll thing. I still think I should have that Cadillac, though. I should just call Sam and tell him to send one over: black, with dark black trim and maybe a light black interior. I don't know what they cost now, but in 1956 you could get one that was top of the line for thirty-five hundred dollars. I'm calling the man Sam, but back then I called him Mr. Phillips. We all did, even though he told us not to—he wasn't that much older than us, after all. I think it was Elvis, just nineteen when he signed with Sun, who got it started, and the rest of us followed along. The women at Sun, Marion Keisger and Sally Wilburn, reinforced it. We'd take our questions and problems to them: Where were our royalty checks? Could we change the song we'd just recorded? They'd listen and then say, “We'll have to talk to Mr. Phillips about that.” I was well into my forties before I changed my ways. I started worrying that if I kept calling him Mr. Phillips, he might start calling me Mr. Cash, and that would make me very uncomfortable. Mr. Cash was my daddy, not me. Sam Phillips was a man of genuine vision. He saw the big picture, which was that the white youth of the 1950s would go crazy for music that incorporated the rhythms

and style of the “race” records he produced for artists like Howlin' Wolf, Bobby Bland, B. B. King, Little Milton, James Cotton, Rums Thomas, Junior Parker, and others (a list of names at least as impressive as those of the young white rockabillies with whom he is more famously associ- ated). He also had a fine eye for talent and potential in individuals, even if it hadn't been pulled out of them before. In my case he saw something nobody else had seen and I hadn't even realized myself. He didn't run with the pack, either (which almost goes without saying, given the originality of his accomplish- ments). He wasn't one of those many music business- men/producers who make their living forcing singers and musicians to sound like whatever is selling. He always encouraged me to do it my way, to use whatever other influences I wanted, but never to copy. That was a great, rare gift he gave me: belief in myself, right from the start of my recording career. I liked working with him in the studio. He was very smart, with great instincts, and he had real enthusiasm; he was excitable, not at all laid-back. When we'd put some- thing on tape he liked, he'd come bursting out of the con- trol room into the studio, laughing and clapping his hands, yelling and hollering. “That was great! That was wonderful!” he'd say. “That's a rolling stone!” (by which he meant it was a hit). His enthusiasm was fun. It fired us up. And he really did have a genius for the commercial touch, the right way to twist or turn a song so that it really got across to people. A case in point was “Big River,” which I'd written in the backseat of a car in White Plains, New York, as a slow twelve-bar blues song and sung that way on stage a few times before I took it into the studio and sang it for Sam. His reaction was immediate: “No, no, we'll put a beat to that.” He had Jack Clement get out his J2.00 Gibson, tune it open, take a bottleneck, and play that big

power chord all the way through, and that was just great. I thought it was fabulous. The groove he'd heard in his head was so much more powerful than mine, and I'll always be glad he felt at liberty to push ahead and make me hear it, too. He did have strong ideas. Sometimes I didn't like it much when I felt that his mind was closed to something I wanted to do—he had a way of ruling out ideas, seem- ingly without even thinking about them—but ultimately I never had a real problem with that. I don't think it ever caused us to lose any good work, and anyway, he listened to me most of the time. By no means—that is, by no remote stretch of the imagination—was he one of those producers who like to impose their own “style” on artists who come into their studio. Sam's basic approach was to get you in there and say, “Just show me what you've got. Just sing me songs, and show me what you'd like to do.” And basically he and I saw eye to eye. We both knew up front that my music had to stay simple, uncompli- cated, and unadorned, and we both felt that if the perfor- mance was really there at the heart of the song, it didn't matter much if there was some little musical error or a glitch in the track somewhere. There are mistakes on sev- eral of my Sun records—Luther fumbling a guitar line, Marshall going off the beat, me singing sharp—and we all knew it. Sam just didn't care that much: he'd much rather have soul, fire, and heart than technical perfection. He did care when something I did challenged his notions of good and bad music, though. Then he was quite frank. “That's awful,” he'd tell me. “Don't do that.” I'd say, “All right, I won't,” unless I disagreed strongly. Then we'd work it out between us. It was truly a beautiful day when Marion Keisger handed me my first royalty check. The amount was tiny—$6.42, I believe—but to me it was like a million

-dollars. Maybe I wouldn't have to keep pretending to sell those refrigerators or get any other kind of job I really didn't want; maybe by the end of the year I could pay the rent on the little house I shared with Vivian and Rosanne; maybe, if I could keep borrowing from my father-in-law and George Bates at the Home Equipment Company, I could stay afloat until the end of the next royalty pay period, when Marion had told me I might get a much big- ger check. Maybe, just maybe, I could make a living at this! Elvis was doing okay, after all. He was running around buying his own Cadillacs. The euphoria faded as I began to learn, slowly and often quite accidentally, how the business of music worked. It's embarrassing remembering how ignorant I was about business back then. It's even worse to admit that I'm not much better today. I've been forced to learn some basic rules during forty years on the job, but I've resisted fiercely and effectively; only the most unavoid- able home truths have gotten through. I've always resented the time and energy business takes away from music—lawyers desperately needing decisions when the song in my head desperately needs to come out; accoun- tants telling me I need to go there and sing that when I really want to stay here and sing this. The concepts don't match up. A businessman looks at a song and sees a pile of money surrounded by questions about its ownership; I see one of my babies. I remember how strange it felt sitting in a meeting in the '80s, looking down a long list of my own songs whose copyright was finally available for me to acquire, and seeing the title “Wide Open Road” among them. I was suddenly overwhelmed with a vivid memory of exactly how it felt thirty years before on the cold, rainy morning when I sat in the barracks in Germany with my five-dollar guitar and conjured that song up out of the air. How could anyone but me own that? I don't know. I've canceled the vast majority of my meetings with lawyers and accountants, and whenever I've found myself forced into one, my strongest urge has