Cash: The Autobiography (9 page)

always been to get out of it as quickly as possible, mut- tering something like, “I just want to sing and play my guitar.” I feel bad about not being fluent in music and money, and I look up to people who are. Jack Clement has no dif- ficulty thinking and talking and doing business, but he still enjoys playing a G chord. He's been that way all the years I've loved and fought and worked with him, and I've always admired him for it. Still, I've always tried to be straight with money and pay what I owe. After my very first tour as a Sun record- ing act I walked into the Home Equipment Company office with the money I'd saved and paid George Bates every penny I owed him. And as I'd promised Vivian, I didn't buy a star car until we had our own house. It wasn't a new Cadillac, either. It was Ferlin Husky's very slightly used Lincoln, the Car of the Year for 1956. That car was gorgeous, and just right for me: rock 'n' roll pink and Johnny Cash black. I'm thinking now about Sam Phillips, concerned that I might have created an impression of discord between us. That's not so. Whatever differences I had with him, they've been long resolved. I bear no grudge against the man who did so much for me. In 1984 the citizens of his hometown in Alabama held a dinner and roast for him, and Jack Clement and I drove down from Nashville and spoke. It was like a lovefest: a lot of hugging, a few tears, some old stories, and some struggles to get them right, the way they really happened. I have so much respect for Sam. He worked so hard and did so much good for people hke me. If there hadn't been a Sam Phillips, I might still be working in a cotton field.

5 It wasn't money that took me away from Sun. Money, in fact, has never had much to do with my relations with record companies. For me it's always been more about music and the control of it, all of which can be reduced to a single question: How much freedom will I have to make whatever music I want? With Sam Phillips the issue was gospel. I wanted to record gospel music, and I wanted it badly. He refused to let me for purely financial reasons. “You know, I love gospel music,” he told me. “I love gospel singers, but I can't make money recording it. Unless you're Mahalia Jackson, or somebody that estab- lished, you can't even cover the cost of recording.” To record sacred music by a new country singer like me—and some of it original music, songs I'd written myself, that nobody had ever heard—was something he just couldn't do. That didn't sit well with me, and when I started thinking in terms of other hard-sell music—the ideas that led eventually to my Ride This Train album— I got more restless still. When Don Law, a Columbia Records producer, called me and said he'd like to come down to Memphis to talk with me about a new recording contract, that's what came immediately to mind: Would Columbia let me make a gospel album? They would, said Law, no question about it. How about the concept album? Well, he said, he'd be very interested in hearing about that. So he came down, our talk went well, and I signed an option to go with Columbia when my Sun con- tract expired. I don't know why I found it easy to lie to Sam about it, but that's how it was. He heard about the option somewhere and asked me if it was true. No, I told him, it

wasn't. I hadn't signed any option. Roy Orbison told him the same sort of lie around that same time, and as it happened Roy was at my house when Sam, who'd found out the truth, tele- phoned to confront me. Sam was pretty angry and wanted to know why I'd lied. Well, I said, he hadn't been truthful with me about a few things (which itself wasn't true; he'd always told me the truth, but I'd been too ignorant to know what it meant), so I thought I'd just pay him back a little. That made him even madder. He got Roy on the phone and really let him have it. “Why, you little so-and- so. You can't sing! I had to cram the microphone down your throat just to pick you up, your voice is so weak!” Roy just laughed at him. He thought that was pretty funny. So did I. I didn't find it so hilarious when I got a letter telling me that, in order to fulfill my contract with Sun, I still had to record a number of songs and therefore I'd be at the studio on such-and-such dates to do just that. I was quite seriously annoyed, but I did as I was told, and in retrospect I'm glad I did. One day I walked into the stu- dio and only two people were there, Jack Clement and another young guy sitting at the piano putting some of his songs on tape for me. It was Charlie Rich, who'd just signed with Sun, and after I'd listened a little while I real- ized how lucky I was. Nobody would have to force me to record those songs. “The Ways of a Woman in Love,” “You Tell Me,” “Story of a Broken Heart”—I became a Charlie Rich fan right there and then. To my mind, he was the best thing to hit Sun since Elvis. He and I never got to be buddies, though. Roy and I did, and we were friends for the rest of Roy's life. It was a particularly close friendship, too. We

became like brothers right from the start, when we'd tour together and Roy would come over to my house in Memphis, and we stayed that way until the end. By the time of his death in December 1988, we'd been next-door neighbors on Old Hickory Lake for twenty-plus years. While most of the time we passed like ships in the night, the way traveling entertainers must, that didn't distance us; we were close enough that when our schedules coin- cided, he'd drop by for breakfast and be more than wel- come. I really loved Roy. He was a very kind, considerate man, sweet-natured and good-humored; funny, too. The tragedies in his life seemed so unfair. Talk about bad things happening to good people: I can't think of any man much better than he was, and I can't think of any- thing at all that could be worse than having to endure the death of your children just two years after the death of your wife. Claudette Orbison was Roy's first wife, killed when he and she were riding their motorcycles together in 1966. Roy D. and Tony Orbison, the two youngest of their three young sons, died in 1968 when their house— the house next door to mine—burned while Roy was on the road in Europe. I, too, was gone at the time. As far as the fire marshals were able to tell, the fire started when the boys, in their room behind a closed door, were playing with matches and an aerosol can, squirting it and igniting the spray. The inevitable fol- lowed. The fire flared up so fast and strong that when their grandparents heard something and went to investi- gate, it blew them all the way across the house as soon as they opened the door. There was no way they could reach the boys, though they both got burned trying; they were lucky to save themselves. The house was consumed. When Roy got home only the chimney was left standing. June and I canceled our tour dates as soon as we heard the news and chartered a jet to get us home quickly, but there was nothing we could do for Roy. We

heard that he didn't want to talk to anybody, so we just stayed home until the funeral, looking out the window now and again at that blackened chimney. I couldn't even approach Roy at the funeral—for the first time in my life I was at a total loss for words, ges- tures, anything—and it was a week or more before I found it in myself to call him; then I just told him that I loved him. He said he'd be all right, but I couldn't imag- ine how he could be. I didn't see him for a long time after that. He'd moved in with his parents, who lived across the road, and they'd put a no visitors sign on the door. I asked his father about him from time to time, but the answer was always the same: he was there in the house, but he stayed shut up in his bedroom. Eventually I had to act. I crossed the road, told his father I had to see him, and went to his room. And there he was: so pale that he could have been dead himself, just sitting in bed with his shades on, facing a large-screen television with the sound turned all the way down. He didn't get up from the bed when I came in. I don't know if he was crying because I couldn't see his eyes. I don't know if he even looked at me. He didn't speak. I was still at a loss for words that seemed anywhere close to adequate, so I said what I could: that I loved him and that I wouldn't know how to handle it if I lost my own son that way. “I don't know how to handle it, either,” he said, and that was all. I left. The next time I saw him, he'd emerged from his room and decided to build a new house on a lot adjacent to the old one. I walked up to the construction site one day and was happy to find him almost his old self. We talked about the new house, and then he told me that

he'd like June and me to have the old lot. Sure, I said. We worked it out and I bought it from him, and then I told him I'd never build on it or sell it to anyone else, even though it was the most valuable land in the neighbor- hood. I'd plant a vineyard and an orchard there, and their first fruits each year would always be his. He liked that; I think he was glad that strangers wouldn't live where his children died. Roy married again and we became close with the new Orbison family. Today June and I are godparents to two of Barbara Orbison's sons, and we act like we're godpar- ents to all of them. Sadly, we lost Roy to a heart attack in 1988, seven years after the bypass surgery that saved him the first time around (which happened to Marty Robbins, too, so I was more than a little worried when I reached my own seventh year after surgery). Roy's death was sudden and shocking, but some- thing wonderful did occur before it happened. The day before Roy was taken, he went to see his surviving son from his first marriage, Wesley, and closed the distance that had grown between them. They hugged, said they loved each other, and sat up singing and writing songs late into Roy's last night on earth. Wesley says it was the most wonderful night of his life. Wesley is still within our circle. A few years ago I started seeing him leaning against the fence bordering the place where his brothers died, where the home of his childhood once stood. One day I stopped and asked him what he was looking at. “Oh, I like to come up here sometimes and look at this lot,” he said. “It gives me a little comfort.” Well, I told him, there were some mighty good fruit trees and grapevines in there and whenever the fruit was ripe he should just go on in and help himself. Bring a bas- ket. “Okay,” he said. “Thank you. I will.”

It was June who got the idea to give him more than the fruit. I agreed, and without any further fuss we signed the lot over to him free and clear. Now when I see him leaning on the fence I know he's thinking about the house he wants to build there someday, and I don't feel like I lost a thing in the deal. I feel like old Roy smiled down and said “Thank you, John.” There was a time when Roy and I should have gotten together, but didn't. It was in Dublin some years after I'd bought the lot from him, a ships-in-the-night affair when he was playing one place one night and I was playing another the next. He called me, but I was so high on amphetamines that June had already canceled my show. I put him off. “I'm not in very good shape, Roy,” I croaked. He didn't care, he said, he was coming over anyway. I wouldn't let him in. I just lay there in silence, so wired that my whole bed was shaking, listening to him at the room door and waiting for him to go away. He knocked and waited, knocked louder and waited, knocked louder still and waited again; then he gave up and left. What a hard, sick few minutes those were. It was months before I saw him again, in Tennessee on one of those days when we both happened to be home at the same time. “I'm really sorry about Dublin, Roy,” I told him. “I heard you knock, but I couldn't face you. Knowing the grief you've gone through, I didn't want to see you hurt, and I know you'd have been hurt if you'd seen my face.” I was so full of shame and ego, so sick of letting people down and worried about what they thought of me. Roy reacted like a friend. “Oh, man, don't worry about it,” he said. “I've been that way too.” He was a good man.

The last time I saw him was a few months before he died, and my favorite Roy Orbison story begins then. Among other things, we talked about hair. I told him I'd always admired the way men dressed and styled them- selves in Thomas Jefferson's and Andrew Jackson's day, and now I really wanted to wear my hair as Jefferson wore his, in a ponytail tied off with a black ribbon. “I'll see if I can talk June into letting me grow enough hair to do that,” I said. Roy thought that was a grand idea. “Tell you what,” he said. “I'll do it if you do it.” It was a grand idea, but I chickened out, and I never talked to Roy again. I saw him, though, when I took Wesley down to the funeral home where they'd laid Roy out for his friends and relatives. Wesley didn't want to see his father dead and wouldn't approach the casket, but 1 did. I walked up and leaned over to get a good last look at my old buddy. When I saw him I couldn't help myself; I started laughing. That son of a gun had done it! There, sticking out from under his head, was a neat little pony- tail, and it was tied with a black ribbon.

6 I miss Roy. I miss him coming over for breakfast. He had total recall, you know. Around Roy, you didn't dare tell a story about something in which he'd been involved without asking, “Is that the way it was, Roy?” He'd tell you exactly why you were wrong, or right. He could repeat twenty-year-old conversations word for word. He could tell you what you were wearing. It was almost scary. Roy was just my buddy, but sometimes I'd look at him and wonder. I once gave him some terrible advice. “You know, Roy,” I told him when he was despairing of ever getting a hit record at Sun, “you need to do two things: change your name and lower your voice.” That was fairly typical of my commercial judgment, the firm grip on market realities and public tastes that has graced my whole career. It was I, for example, who insisted that Jack Clement's “It'll Be Me” was a far stronger song than “Whole Lot of Shakin' Going On,” which of course proved to be Jerry Lee's first big hit and is now recognized as one of the great moments of rock 'n' roll recording. For my little buddy Jerry Lee's sake, I even went to Sam Phillips and begged him not to push that song to the radio stations. Sam, to his credit, listened to me just as if I were making sense, and then went ahead and pushed the song as he had planned. We Sun singers got along well. There was never any great tension between Carl and Elvis, Roy and Jerry Lee, or any combination of us. About the only disagreements I recall were centered on Jerry Lee, who often objected to what you might call perceived threats to his supremacy. Even that wasn't serious, because nobody would fight with him. If we were all on the same bill and he couldn't