Still married to Vivian, a situation that was becoming more untenable all the time, and with his marriage proposal to Billie Jean rebuffed, Johnny had grown bitter and penned “Sing It Pretty, Sue.” It was a song many suspected was about Billie Jean, who aspired to a music career of her own, because it references a woman who cares more about her career than love.2
Known for its spectacular jazz and elaborate striptease performances, The Cave was an upscale supper club venue with high-end, quirky decor that featured velvet curtains, fool’s gold sparkling in dark corners, and stalactites hanging from the ceiling. Tuxedoed ushers greeted patrons at the door to escort them to their tables. With a capacity of about eight hundred, it was typically packed, especially on nights with big-name stars like Lena Horne.
Upon their arrival at the hotel, Johnny immediately went for his pills. Swiftly the calm, rational man that Saul had made note of on the airplane disappeared and was replaced by what Saul observed to be an entirely different person. By the time he stumbled backstage, Johnny was bouncing drinking glasses off the dressing room walls, leaving a wake of broken glass.
In between shows, Johnny went into Red Robinson’s Vancouver studio for an interview, though it was short-lived. “All of a sudden, I look over — I asked him a question, no answer — he’s fallen asleep at my desk because he’s gassed,” said Robinson.3
On the evening that Billie Jean was in town, Cash returned to the hotel and stormed down the hallways in search of her room. Pounding on the door, he threatened to break it down. The two argued, and she pushed him from her doorway and locked it. Enraged, Cash turned and ran the length of the hallway, shattering all the antique chandeliers hanging in his path.4
“True enough, they should have been smashed because they had to redo the whole hotel anyway. Certainly after he left, they had to redo it,” Saul recalled. To his credit, Johnny paid for the damages before their entire entourage was then thrown out of the hotel. By the next day, just as dramatically, Johnny settled back into his role as a pleasant travelling companion. The two men flew to Los Angeles and rented a car, and as they drove from LAX to Johnny’s mansion in Casitas Springs, they calmly discussed future career moves and Johnny’s possible purchase of a new car. Saul studied his client’s profile as they drove. It was curious. Once again, everything had changed. It seemed as though there was never any certainty about just who, exactly, you were speaking to at any given moment.5
At this juncture Saul had his work cut out for him. Not only did he already feel drawn to become Johnny’s protector and defender in a capacity that extended far beyond typical management duties, but Cash’s career was also lagging. Though he and the Tennessee Three had enjoyed regular performances on a wide variety of music shows like American Bandstand, and were more recently featured on Five Star Jubilee and Here’s Hollywood, attempts to branch out into television and film as a bona fide actor had fallen flat. A lead role in the ultra-low-budget crime drama Five Minutes to Live, in which he invested twenty thousand dollars of his own money, had floundered, and the reviews were scathing.
Musically, he was also adrift, and the dismissive Toronto Daily Star review wasn’t a one-off. The amphetamine-induced weakness in his typically rich baritone got so bad that criticism was trickling in from radio DJs, who until this point had been Cash’s greatest fans. “Tell Cash that if he ever makes another record as bad as ‘Locomotive Man,’ don’t even send it, because I’m not ever going to play it on the radio,” prominent Des Moines–based promoter and DJ Smokey Smith told Johnny Western. The pills also interfered with Cash’s motivation and ability to record. It had been two years since he had released a hit album, and in the spring of 1961, Cash wasn’t on any charts, country or otherwise. Earlier that year, in May he relented to Columbia’s request that he take a 50 percent cut to his royalties on the sales of his next two records.6
Despite this, ex-manager Bob Neal wrote to Cash on October 24, pleading with him to revive their partnership. Neal had fallen on hard times. Previously a DJ on Memphis station WMPS, he had managed Elvis until Colonel Tom Parker elbowed him out of the picture. He struck gold again with Cash in his early days at Sun Records, but was soon edged out in much the same manner by Stew Carnall. In 1958 he decided to buy radio station KCIJ in Shreveport, Louisiana, but three years later he ran into trouble. Desperate, he reached out to Cash.
“I waited all day the other day for your call,” Neal began the letter. After some preliminaries of asking how Cash’s tour of eastern Canada went, he then explained that he wasn’t doing so well himself. In fact, he was in way over his head at the station; “hanging on by his teeth” after losing everything he had in the venture. The possibility that he would have to turn the station back to its previous owner looked imminent. With this established, he made a plea to Cash: “Have you thought about the possibility of putting together our old Winning Team again? You know, with your talent and ability and my knowledge of the business, we had it going mighty good for a while,” he wrote. “I don’t know yet why we fell apart, but I do know that everything I built and was building for you was based on good solid realities.”7
Johnny replied almost immediately on stationery that indicated the address of the new office he had just opened on Main Street in Ventura, California. The tour had turned out well, he wrote back, despite the sheer lack of people in Newfoundland. He had a new promoter working for him, a Mr. Saul Holiff, who had already done a great deal on his behalf. Not only had Saul recently travelled to the Far East to look into a tour, Cash wrote, but he had also practically set a date for him at Carnegie Hall. “Also, he went with me to New York about three weeks ago and raised a lot of hell on my behalf, resulting in a relationship with Columbia Records that is and has been needed for a long time. I honestly think things are really going to swing now. Columbia is getting behind the Carnegie Hall deal as well as all the other things we laid out.”
That was about as far as Cash went in directly answering Neal’s request for a reconciliation, but his position was clear: For now, Saul was his right-hand man. Throwing Neal a bone, Cash added that he had some upcoming dates in Iowa and Wisconsin and had suggested to Saul, who would join him in Ventura in about two weeks, that they could perhaps arrange for Neal to promote those shows.8
Despite Johnny’s lukewarm status, Saul was still determined he would be a superstar far outside the conventional confines of country music, and, as Cash mentioned in his letter, Carnegie Hall was the next stop on the road map to getting him there. During the Columbia meeting Saul made sure to mention it as a signal of his intentions, and he had to make good on his promises, not least because of the burning sense of insecurity that fuelled much of them.
“I guess I felt that I never should be his manager,” Saul later confessed to a reporter. “This is as close to the truth as you’re ever going to get from me. I couldn’t find any way to justify why I was doing what I was doing, so I thought I had to keep performing. As a non-performer, I still thought I had to perform. And the only way that I thought I could perform was to come up with something that hadn’t been done before that would excite him, and that I was part of the reason he got excited.”9
Within weeks of the official managerial announcement, Saul moved to California and continued to mull over just how to package Johnny in a way that shifted him outside the confines of country music. He wasn’t anxious to play up the “country” label, because labelling was serious — if an artist became lumped into a certain category, it meant restricted airplay.10
He rolled the issue over and over in his mind. There was something that had hooked him when he had first heard Johnny’s music, as country wasn’t his taste. What was that unique quality that I heard, the thing that elevates him to a place where people relate to him? he wondered, rewinding back to the first Cash song he had heard on the jukebox in 1957. He pored over what his own feelings had been. And just as quickly, he knew. He’s a storyteller. That’s the way he approached putting a song together, like “Five Feet High and Rising,” and the reason he chose to sing songs about subjects like farming and poverty in the rural south. That’s what his people lived. And that’s how he should be portrayed — “America’s