Cashing In

The brassy sound of the studio band cuts off, the lights go down, a spotlight flicks on, picks up the broad back of a big man wearing a black frock coat, striped pants, patent-leather boots and a six-string guitar. The figure swivels around and drawls, "Hello--I'm Johnny Cash." At that, the 3,006 people who have been smothering their enthusiasm back in the cavernous depths of the Grand Old Opry House break loose like a thunderstorm on a hot July day. For like the man said--it's Johnny Cash.

No Flashy Stuff. After 15 years in show business, Johnny Cash is finally being discovered by network television. Starting this Saturday, he will host his own one-hour series on ABC-TV, The Johnny Cash Show. An easygoing show, taped before a live audience at the Opry House in Nashville, Tenn., it has a guest list that is casually shot through with such names as Bob Dylan, Glen Campbell, Mason Williams, Roy Orbison, the Cowsills, the Monkees, Buffy Sainte-Marie. There are no "Johnny Cash Dancers," no fleshy production numbers. ("I don't go in a lot for that flashy stuff.") Nothing but a minimum of talk and then down to the substance of Johnny Cash and his show: singing songs. One regular singing session that Cash conceived and is particularly proud of: "Ride This Train," a wandering medley of folk songs and film clips through times and places in American history.

It has been a steady climb to this peak for John R. Cash, 37. A solid coun-try-and-western success since 1955, he has occasionally crossed the boundaries and sold to the wider pop audience (Ring of Fire, I'll Walk the Line). He was rediscovered by the public at large last year when his At Folsom Prison climbed to the top of the charts and sold over 1,000,000 albums. In 1968, he made $2,000,000, and this year things look even better.

Bitter Beginnings. Times were not always so good for Johnny, fourth of the seven children born to Ray and Carrie Cash. From a three-room shack in Kingsland, Ark., the hard-pressed Cash family moved to Dyess, Ark., in 1935, when a New Deal colony opened up there. Like the other landless farmers who gathered in search of their American dream, they ended up with 20 acres, a house, barn, chicken coop, a mule, a cow and a plow. The work was hard, the income meager. But, insists Johnny, "I was never hungry a day in my life. Aw, sometimes at supper we had to fill up on turnip greens and sometimes at breakfast it was just fatback and biscuits--but that was plenty." And the entertainment was strictly homemade, usually singing along to the crackling of a country station on a wooden radio.

After a four-year stint in the Air Force (where he learned to play the guitar to combat boredom), he headed for Memphis, where he met two auto mechanics who were also pretty good musicians. With Luther Perkins and Marshall Grant, he formed a trio--"Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two"--and began the round of playing free-for-alls at church socials, schools, county fairs and charity bazaars. "Finally somebody got the bright idea of auditioning," Cash recalls. The trio trooped off to Sun Records in Nashville and sang a little ditty of Johnny's called Cry, Cry, Cry. Within a matter of weeks, it had climbed to the top of the charts.

From then on Cash followed a familiar route: a series of one-night stands that kept him traveling every day so he could sing every night. It was a nomadic existence bounded on one side by the dusty windows of a chartered bus, on the other by countless anonymous motel rooms scattered in a shotgun pattern across the U.S. and Canada. Somewhere in between was Johnny Cash onstage, his guitar slung over his shoulder, his big, blackstrap-molasses voice spreading out over the audience. It was a killing pace that produced 400 original songs, nearly 200 concerts a year, 19 record albums and three gold records. It put Cash among the top five in Columbia record sales --along with such formidable favorites as Simon and Garfunkel, Barbra Streisand, Bob Dylan and Andy Williams.

The pace took its toll. Cash was strung out on amphetamines--up to 100 Dexedrines a day, until the morning he woke up red-eyed and rueful in a Georgia jail cell. "I decided right then that I was a better man than that," Cash said. He has been off pills for three years now. Then his marriage, which had been floundering for some time, finally went under after 14 years and four children. A year ago last March he married pretty June Carter, a cheerful charmer who is a member of Nashville's singing Carter Family.

Hard-Scrabble. Quietly, he has taken up good works. When Luther Perkins died in a fire last fall, John went about setting up a tribute: a burn research center at Vanderbilt University. Hearing of the desperate straits of the Ogallala Sioux at the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, Cash turned down a lucrative offer to tour England, packed his team up and played a benefit on the reservation that brought in funds for the Sioux. Cash, however, takes no exalted view of himself or his good deeds. "I'm not all that damned noble," he says.

As a successful self-made millionaire, Cash is very much the man of the present. He is also a man very much rooted in his past, a past filled with memories of that hardscrabble existence back in Dyess, Ark. "The hardest thing I ever did in my life?" Cash asks rhetorically. "Hell, that's easy: cotton. Plantin' cotton, pickin' cotton, choppin' cotton." He and his songs are also rooted in the basics of a country life: the land, lost loves, wanderlust, the seasons, lonely trains hooting across the still prairie night, preachers and prisons and sweet Jesus and home sweet home. As Cash now views his life--past and present: "Ah'm so damned happy Ah could bust. Ah'm havin' a ball." But there is one thing. "Jes' give me some pretty weather so Ah can do some water-skiin' and some fishin' next month. Then Ah'll really be happy."

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