In last month’s issue of Uncut , we brought you the inside story on the House Of Johny Cash. We spoke to his family, friends and collaborators to tell the definitive story of the Man In Black. Over the next few weeks on www.uncut.co.uk, we’ll be printing the complete transcripts of these interviews.

To read more, click on the links in the side panel on the right.

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Today: TOM PETTY
Petty and his Heartbreakers backed up Cash on his second Rick Rubin-produced album, Unchained (1996).

UNCUT: When did you first meet Cash?

PETTY: I met him I think around ’82 or ’83. I liked him right away. I always liked John. I was a bit in awe of him when I first met him. I think everybody is. He’s very imposing, but very warm. Not quite gregarious, I’d say, but very warm.

If you think of him now, what’s the first thing that comes to mind?

His laughter. He had a pretty good laugh. It was almost conspiratorial. He had a way of making you feel like you were in on the joke.

Were the Unchained sessions the first time you actually worked with him?

I think so.

What sort of condition was he in – I know he had an undiagnosed nervous disease then, and those operations on his jaw…

Well, his jaw was bothering him at the time. And John had this incredible way of walking through extreme pain. At one point I think he had his knee replaced, and he acted like that was nothing. That was around that time. I was saying, “Well, how do you deal with that?” He was on the road, and he called me from it. And he said, “Well, I go on stage and nothing hurts.” But yeah, his health wasn’t great. He wasn’t as fragile as he would be some years later. He would work for a while and then he would rest for a while, you know. So with the sessions, we might work for an hour and then rest for half an hour, and then come back and work for a while longer. It just depended on how he was that day. But he was pretty sturdy. He was still hitting the road really hard then.

Rick Rubin was choosing songs on that record that were deliberately a stretch for him to sing – how did you see that manifest itself at all?

I don’t know if he was at his limit. I do know that he was definitely in on the songs that got recorded. Rick was laying a lot of songs down for his consideration, but John was the final call. If John didn’t want to do it he didn’t do it. And I remember on that album we did several that John came up with himself on the day – “One Love”, and a real old, old song, and “Unchained”.

It was incredible. He was an interesting artist because he’s pictured as a country artist, but he wasn’t necessarily completely in that bag, you know. I always thought of him as a folk artist. Because he knew so much about folk music. And the country that he performed wasn’t really much like any other country that you’d heard. It was an unusual thing, his bag was pretty wide. I mean he could trace folk music back to early Irish shanties or hymns or whatever you call ‘em. And I remember many times on a break he might sing one of them with June.

When you went back to work with him on “I Won’t Back Down” and “Solitary Man”, how had he changed?

Well, I don’t think he had changed much as a person. But his health was a little more delicate, I thought. I could tell he was more fragile definitely than he had been. But when we were doing those tracks he was very up and in the room and into it all. But my wife and I were there. And he would sit down in the back and tell us, “Oh, God, I don’t feel, I’m not very strong”, and I felt bad for him.

What was it like watching him sing so close up?

It was such a beautiful sound. Even in those last sessions, he had a really nice big, round voice that sounded so great. And it didn’t matter – I’ve seen people sit in the control room and really try and make a singer sound good. But he just came across the mic like that. It was a beautiful sound. When we were cutting in the studio I kind of had to watch him, because he was singing live.

It was great fun. I think about those sessions, and they were just some of the best times I ever had in the studio. Just very charmed sessions. Everyone was so at ease but really into the project at the same time, and really, really enjoying playing. You weren’t even nailed down to your particular instrument. I might wind up playing the organ, and the bass quite a bit. I remember on this song “The Drunkard’s Plea”, was that a Louvin Brothers song? I didn’t know it, and we started to play it, and John said, “Ah, we need a Hammond organ on this. Tom why don’t you play it, it just needs kind of a churchy intro.” I’m standing there going, [deep reluctance], “Oh, okay…” and I just played some chords. And he seemed very pleased with it. And about a year later I heard the Louvin Brothers record, and the intro’s exactly what I played! [laughs] And I’d never heard the record. It was that kind of thing where we were just really enjoying it. We didn’t do a lot of takes of anything. And we’d come in, and it would sound really glorious, when Rick would play it back.

Was that openness in the sessions to do with Johnny?

I think it was. He knew most all of us from just coming around. He used to come to some of the Heartbreakers sessions from time to time. He was comfortable, and we were. Rick was very good at – whatever he does, gotten everybody into the right place. He’d already done his time with Johnny where they’d decided what songs they wanted to try, and they would play us a demo, we’d make a note or two, then we’d go to the studio and run it down. And usually by three or four takes, we’d have something they liked. It was very spontaneous, we’d keep moving around. Rick’d say, “Let’s play Mike on acoustic, and Tom you’d play guitar.” Made no sense at all, you know, but it kept things fresh. I was happy every day to go there.

Are there stories or moments with Johnny that stick in your mind?

Well, there was always a story. June was there almost every day. And June alone is a feature film. I remember particularly the few days that Carl Perkins came. God, they had a good time, the charisma of the two of them was palpable. There was so much laughter, I mean really loud. They’d tell stories on each other. Really exceptional people, that’s what I would say. In any walk of life I think they would have been exceptional.

What was exceptional about Johnny?

There was such a sense of justice about him. And very honest. And he was a great listener. So much of it probably came pre-packaged, because I’d been a fan all my life. But he seemed a very just person. I remember one day he went out before the session. I got there and he and June had been sitting at the bus-stop across the street from the studio. “We thought we’d just sit out there and see if anybody recognised us.” “So how’d he it go?” He said, “Nobody said a word to us. But we met lots of pretty interesting people.

I heard he used to go to Walmart a lot, just to mix with people…

Yeah, I wouldn’t doubt it. I went to his house once. I think Nick Lowe took me there, in the early ‘80s. The plan was we were going to have a Sunday lunch with John and June, and both of them it turned out were sick at the last minute and in the hospital. But as we were seated at the table, one of the people working there came and tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Could you come into the next room, John wants to talk to you on the phone.” So I did, he was saying, “Thanks for coming out, sorry I couldn’t be there”, it was very strange. And when we left, June was on the phone, and as each person left the house, she said goodbye to them. Very unusual. They were that kind of people.

The thing that interested me was seeing what would really light him up musically. And he had a very soft spot for Gene Autry, and was very proud of his guitar that Gene Autry had signed the front of. He pointed that out to me more than once. And he would play us Gene Autry songs. I remember once being in the car, and Rick I think had come up with a bunch of Hank Williams bootlegs, at the time – live radio shows. And John was completely knocked out by this. He could sing every song that started. And we drove around for quite a while just playing that record.

I remember one thing that I thought was kind of spiritual. The tape-machine broke in the middle of a particularly hot moment in the studio. And instead of freaking out, June came out in the room, where everyone was looking pretty low. And she said, “I think if we all sing a hymn, maybe God’ll fix the tape-machine. [laughs] Not a procedure I had seen before! And John said, “Yeah, let’s sing a hymn.” And June said, “Yeah, but we’ve gotta all hold hands”, so we did. And I swear within minutes the machine worked. I always thought that was pretty interesting. That that would be their instinct if something was broken, “We’ll sing a hymn.”

He had spent a great deal of time with Rick. He was living at Rick’s house, and I think Rick even went to Tennessee several times, and that cabin John had across the road from his house, where he liked to go and hang out, and did his demo work. So every time they came to record, I remember when they came to record American Recordings, they’d drop around and play some of that in the evenings, because we were in different studios at the same time. And he had come up with most of the songs himself. Rick started moving him towards more and more contemporary music. But I really don’t think any of it was forced on him. Because it always seemed that he liked what he was singing.

What did you talk about when you socialised with him?

It could be anything. Where to get a good pair of boots. One time Rick brought a fortune-teller, a psychic, into the studio, and we all took turns going in to see him. And John came out and said the guy had told him that he’d met Jesus in a previous life. [laughs] I said, “Wow…”

He wasn’t very happy with what was happening with country music. We had many talks about how it had completely lost the thread as far as he was concerned. And he said, “It’s actually music for people who hate country music.” He was such an interesting man. It was really a privilege to spend any time at all to talk with him. He was one of those people you don’t encounter much. It’s easy to say, I guess, when someone’s been a big, iconic celebrity and they’re gone. But he really was a fascinating person, who had really lived a rich life, and who I felt lucky just to be around. And to be his friend was amazing.

How did he show his friendship?

Well he would send me gifts from time to time, or really nice letters. He once sent me a note on my fiftieth birthday that said: “You’re a good man to ride the river with.” I took that as high praise.

NICK HASTED

In last month’s issue of Uncut , we brought you the inside story on the House Of Johny Cash. We spoke to his family, friends and collaborators to tell the definitive story of the Man In Black. Over the next few weeks on www.uncut.co.uk, we’ll be printing the complete transcripts of these interviews.

To read more, click on the links in the side panel on the right.

LOU ROBIN:

Cash’s concert promoter between 1969 – 1972, after which he became manager to Johnny and June, “without a contract”, for 30 years.

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UNCUT: How did you come to meet Johnny Cash?

ROBIN: I had been promoting concerts since 1957 – we were promoting jazz – Duke Ellington and Dave Brubeck and Stanley Kenton and then public mood changed to folk music in the early Sixties. We got tired of the craziness of promoting acid rock and we decided to get into promoting country music, so we met with Johnny’s manager, in 1968, which was about three months after the Walk The Line story actually ended. Our first concert series was promoted in California and Nevada in February of ‘69. Earlier John had called and asked me – I hadn’t even met him yet – if I would set up a concert at San Quentin prison as part of that tour. And I said, well I never promoted a concert in a prison, but it was easy to work out with the state of California because he had done a concert there previously.
So Columbia records wanted to record it and Granada Television wanted to film it. It got a little complicated to work out all those logistics and bring all those people inside the prison, but the prisoners appreciated him being there, and he’d had Folsom before. It was a wonderful experience. So we started promoting his concerts like Madison Square Garden in December of ‘69, so when his manager left in 1973 we asked to take over the management, which is what John and June agreed to. We held that post until they both passed away and now I coordinate a lot of the business affairs for the estate.

What were your first impressions of the man…
He was riding very high. He had just come from Vietnam when we did our first tour, and he was getting over pneumonia that he had caught there. I just found him to be a very honourable pleasant person, as June was as well. Very easy to get along with and they did a great show.

Was the a conspicuous difference between the public and private man?
No there really isn’t. He had great business instincts. He knew what direction that he wanted to head in at all times with his music. Sometimes recordings weren’t publicly accepted sales wised in the later years, but I think every artist has to have a producer to work with and the producers that he worked with were provided by the record companies. They and John didn’t see eye to eye on philosophy and tunes so that was a problem.

As a performer, was he ever nervous?
He was always nervous. Nervous as a cat. He was always concerned that the people wouldn’t like what he had to offer, which was very self-effacing, because people liked everything that he did. But until he got on that stage and started into the first song he had that doubt in his mind at all times. I remember we played Czechoslovakia in 1978, we did 4 shows in two days at the ice arena there to 44,000 people. He turned to me in the wings that first show and said do you think they’ll know the music? I was so shocked by the question that I said “I guess you’ll find out soon enough.” Which was not, I’m sure, what he wanted to hear. I wasn’t trying to be smart about it. I just didn’t know what else to say. But of course when he went out the crowd went wild.

The thing about Cash is that he has this persona, like a western gunslinger – and he had this battle between right and wrong.
I think so. He fought the medical demons, which was unfortunate. But he always knew ultimately what direction he was headed in. and with June’s help and the family’s help he would stay on that track. But he was fascinating to sit and talk to because he was always up on current events – you could talk to him on any subject whether that be religion – not so much politics because he would support people from Tennessee – his home state – whether they were Dem or Rep that were running for office. He thought they should be supported. Also he would support whoever was president. He said well he was elected and we should support him now. That is the attitude he had – there were no hidden agendas, he didn’t want to force his own thoughts on his audience with the exception of the Tennessee people that he new well.

Did he have strong sense of respect for the audience?
He did. That came I think from responsibility to his family and it translated to having the same respect to his audience. He always quoted his father as saying “Give the employer a good day’s work for the money he’s paying you.” That was how it worked. He would be on stage some nights for two hours, two and a half hours, cos he was enjoying himself, and as long as the audience wanted to hear the songs he was there to sing them. He could go anywhere in the world and sing. Whether it be Northern Finland or Thailand.

Do you think he was a genius?
He wouldn’t think so. He was very modest about his accomplishments. He said he would records songs for his albums and if people didn’t like them they would, to quote him, throw them back at him by not buying the records. He was always very self-critical. But genius – I don’t know. Who else would be in that category. I felt what he did was a stroke of genius because there were very few people that came close to accomplishing what he did, on a worldwide level. Also, outside the US he was not thought of as a country singer – he was thought of more as an entertainer. He was known almost solely as The Man in Black in Germany. That’s how he was known to the average person there.

Rosanne said it was difficult when she was young and he was absent… did that play on his mind?
Oh, I think it did. But it was better than selling vacuum cleaners, which he tried to do, being a door-to-door salesman, which he couldn’t stand. He didn’t want to force somebody whose house he’d been to buy a vacuum cleaner when maybe they didn’t want it. That was how he made a living. I did the same thing. I was on the road 140 days a year promoting concerts or managing John or travelling back and forth from one to the next, and my wife had to raise two children. It was tough.

Was he ever difficult to get along with?
No, not really. He was very good. He didn’t let things bother him for a long time. He tried to resolve them, and if he couldn’t, he would let them settle. June was a great influence along those lines.”
June sorted him out? Yeah – she was what we call here in the Boy Scouts a den mother. In other words she was the confidante of everyone in the group. If they had a problem, they would come to her. Or if she and John had friends that were having problems – drug problems or financial problems – she would always be in the forefront of setting up the meetings and they would meet with these people and try to help them in any way they could. They were wonderful.

What memories do you have of San Quentin?
That was the first prison I ever went into with him. But when that third steel door slams behind you as you go in, you know you can’t turn and run. The mess hall – the food hall – that the concert took place in held over a thousand prisoners – they were all just sitting at the food tables there watching the show. And of course the most prominent prisoners in the pecking order sat in front in tailored uniforms. I remember seeing one prisoner light a cigarette for one of these people. It just gave you an idea that it’s like any other organisation. There are people at the top and there are people that aren’t. I think there’s even a picture of me standing in the back of the hall in the San Quentin album. At every concert I walk around the room as soon as it started to see if the sound level was ok. And at the back of the San Quentin hall where I was standing for a while, I looked up and there was a fork with food on it sticking in the soundproofing in the wall about six feet over my head, and I wondered how long it had been there. I said to the head of security, you know, there are only about 10 or 12 guards in this place. Is that enough? And he said, first of all, it’s enough. But secondly, if we had a hundred guards and these guys wanted to riot, what’s the difference? He said they police themselves. Now this was a time in American prisons where there weren’t gangs, and it was pretty much a homogeneous population so there was a lot more control of what was going on than maybe there would be now.

What was Cash’s motivation in going into prisons?
He was for prison reform. He just felt that there wasn’t enough being done to rehabilitate these men while they were in there so that when they came out they would not go back to their old ways and their old playmates. They would head in another direction ‘cos they might have gotten vocational training or high school. After a while he started to do fundraisers for the widows and children of policemen and firemen. He always had some project that he tried to lend his efforts to help them on their way.

Were you surprised at Rubin revival?
It was fortuitous that Rick Rubin had come upon the scene doing hip-hop music. And he professed an interest to meet John and we arranged that at a dinner theatre outside of Los Angeles in 1992. I said to Rick to come backstage at the end of the show and John would meet him, although reluctantly because we were without a record deal at that point and it was a very difficult time because all of a sudden all the labels that I talked to all thought, well, maybe his popularity has run its course. So I took Rick to the dressing room and he sat down, and he and John stared at each other for about two minutes, sizing each other up. And then they started to chat and they found that they had a very common meeting ground where Rick said you don’t need the singers and the orchestras and all the stuff that was going on. You just need to go and sing whatever songs you want to sing with your guitar. And John never heard anyone say that to him, and we signed a record deal with American and he did first album in ‘93. John would come to Rick’s house sometimes, he’d come to LA for a week or more, and every night, starting late and through the night he’d just sit in Rick’s living room where there was all kinds of recording equipment set up, and record songs that he liked and songs that Rick liked, and Rick would have many songwriters come in and have them sing a song that they thought was good for John. And they would work around it, and often that was a song that ended up on the album.

Were you there when people like Nick Cave or Joe Strummer were there?
Yeah. I was there the afternoon Joe Strummer showed up. I walked into the studio at Rick’s house, and there were a lot of people there in the control room, and here was a guy sitting in the corner of the room on the floor. And finally I said to someone, who is he? This was Joe Strummer. So I met him, and he said “I’m so thrilled to be here, I just don’t want to be in anyone’s way.” He cut a couple of songs with John, he gave John a couple of other songs that he wanted him to have. That’s the way it was: people would just come and go. And you never knew who might show up.

There’s a real generous spirit in those records…
I think so. They were wide open to suggestion. John and Rick would often exchange cassettes of songs that they’d heard someone else sing that they liked, or a new song that John had written, like Man Comes Around, and then they would meet either in Nashville or LA. sometimes both, before an album was done, and they would start putting the songs down seriously. They would pick maybe 30 songs and they would put those down, an ultimately they would have to get down to 16 or 18 for the album. And the process of elimination was very difficult.

Is there more?
Rick said that there’s one more great album of songs of John’s that hasn’t been released – American VI – hopefully it’ll come out this Spring. But he said after that, from what they had mixed… they mixed some 60 songs after John died, of things that he’d recorded but hadn’t been mixed, so they listened to them, and of course as John became more ill, his voice faltered more, and there came a point where John wasn’t happy with what he was doing, and Rick didn’t want to put that out. ‘Cos in the last album you could note that his voice was getting a little weaker. But he was in the studio almost every day. He was in the studio two days after June died, because that was one of her wishes, that he continue with his music. So it was right up until a week before he died he was still re-recording songs that he wasn’t happy with, that he had put down maybe a month earlier. He did the best he could. And there’s a couple of concerts that are on videotape. The Viper Room concert is on film actually, and a concert at Manhattan Centre, one at House of Blues, so there’s some unseen product out there, it’s just a matter of when American wants to release it.

You’ve mentioned before that Johnny was swapping poems with Muhammad Ali…
I forget who Ali fought that night. It was in the Superdome in New Orleans. And we were in Dallas getting ready to do a show the next day and John had been talking to Ali by phone. They seemed to have a common meeting ground with poetry and became fans of each other. So Ali invited John to bring the band and come down and see the fight. And to come to his room before the fight and they could meet. So John brought all of us down to New Orleans and went to the hotel, and I went up to Ali’s room with John and sat there for an hour and exchanged their own poetry, and told each other they were great fans, and how much admiration they had for each other. This went on till 4.30 in the afternoon. And then we went to the fight and came back to say goodbye. And we had chartered a couple of limousines to get us from the airport to the hall and back, ‘cos we had to go back to Dallas after the fight. Well we went out and the limousines were gone. Somebody had taken them. So we were standing outside, not knowing how to get to the airport and the plane sitting there waiting, and I saw a whole bunch of empty city buses and I went over and I gave the driver a hundred dollars and I said will you take us to the airport if I give you a hundred dollars, and he said sure, so we all jumped on this empty city bus and he took us to the airport so we could go back to Dallas. It was kind of a crazy evening.

How do you best remember John?
I think of a brilliant man at his trade. I never saw anybody that could relate to people as easily as he did. He was generous. He was thoughtful. He had a good sense of humour. Just a rarity amongst people. So many defining qualities, with far fewer faults.

You’ve called him a poet in the past.
It just came easily to him. He could sit down on his bus with people walking back and forth and write a song, or write some poetry. He would just look out the window, whether it was on an airplane or on his bus. Things would come to him, and he would just sit down and write them. He would try a song out on stage sometimes and maybe go back and edit it the next time he did it. or toss it out, depending on what he thought the reaction was, from the audience or from himself.

INTERVIEW: ALASTAIR McKAY