He Walked the Line

...While myth and moviemakers have Cash cleaning up in order to marry June, former sideman Marshall Grant says Cash was back on dope soon after the wedding and, except for a dry period during 1970-76, was rarely drug-free...

...Following his death in 2003, a basic theme ran through many Cash remembrances, including a popular fi lm starring Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon: After years of wretched excess, the Man in Black saw the light, married June, and basically lived happily ever after...

...Yet this new biography indicates that even the Good Lord couldn’t keep him clean for long...

...Streissguth writes that a 1962 appearance at the fabled New York venue found Cash so debilitated that he could only manage to “whisper” his lyrics...

...His spirits, Streissguth writes, collapsed as the sun fell...

...In October 1965, Cash crashed and burned on the stage of The Steve Lawrence Show (CBS), where he had been slated to open the evening with his mega-hit “I Walk the Line...

...I remember one year Mom went an entire year without knowing where he was...

...While she’ll no doubt eventually convert her troubles into a career-boosting sympathy tour, that she could be considered even a minor practitioner of the dissipative arts indicates a severe decline in standards...

...In addition, Cash, who lent his talents to the Billy Graham organization, seems to have spent the 1970s and ’80s in the occasional company of various Jezebels...

...Consider, for example, the late Johnny Cash, a world-class pill-popper who, according to long-held lore, was saved only by divine intervention, along with a little help from wife June Carter Cash...

...Guitarist Luther Perkins played the intro, Streissguth writes, but Cash blanked on the lyrics...

...In the early part of their romance, which ran concurrent with Cash’s fi rst marriage, June Carter was also popping pills, though at a reduced rate, according to Streissguth...

...Cash was rarely out of addiction’s grip...

...There wasn’t fi ve days from 1976 until he came down with his disease that he was straight,” Grant is quoted as saying...

...The author, who also wrote Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, is clearly an admirer, yet does not look past the soft spots in Cash’s body of work...

...His typical intake was 20-30 amphetamines at a time, three to four times a day...

...Streissguth recaps a few of Cash’s other troubles, including being forced to fork over $82,000 for causing a forest fi re in Los Padres National Forest in California that destroyed 500 acres and much of the (endangered) condor population...

...It only got worse...

...We are also reminded that Cash, like many touring musicians, was not the best of family men...

...It was the hour when she had passed...

...And in any case, whatever his personal shortcomings, much better JC than Britney, who should put on some underwear, get back to rehab, and recognize that her ring of fi re, like her voice, is a mere fl icker compared with the real thing...

...Yet according to Michael Streissguth, rumors of his rehabilitation were greatly exaggerated...

...The movie itself proved a compelling personal statement and a credible interpretation of Christ’s days on earth, if one could look past the sharp southern accent of Mary Magdalene and the preponderance of combovers among males in the cast...

...By 1967, as many as half of his dates were being cancelled...

...Dad quit coming home,” says Kathy Cash, a product of his fi rst marriage...

...Three chords or not, Cash was a prodigy when it came to doping, which played second fi ddle to nothing, including Carnegie Hall...

...Indeed, it seems that tales of divine intervention, at least of the subterranean type, were also ill-founded: Many Cash eulogies mentioned a pre-marriage descent into Nickajack Cave near Chattanooga, where his plan to commit suicide was vetoed by God...

...The gloaming, he’d say, invoking the Scottish term for evening, was the hardest part of the day...

...He Walked the Line The Man in Black ‘was rarely out of addiction’s grip.’ BY DAVE SHIFLETT Johnny Cash The Biography by Michael Streissguth Da Capo, 320 pp., $26 Britney Spears, the world’s most prominent lip-syncher, is under scrutiny these days, with tales of substance abuse and excessive butt-fl ashing that have put her at risk of losing permanent custody of her children...

...Johnny Cash: The Biography provides the basic background of Cash’s birth, first marriage, stints in the Air Force and as an appliance salesman, and his early musical career, playing threechord music on a fi ve-dollar guitar of German provenance...

...His alliance with producer Rick Rubin resulted in a series of recordings which are, as Streissguth has it, somewhat mixed: His originals could be compelling, though some covers are reminiscent of an old man crooning on a park bench to the full dismay of the local pigeons...

...That did not happen,” says Grant...

...Those wondering what it takes to compete at this level may be astounded by Cash’s dosage...

...He’d stare out the offi ce window, absorbing what he could discern of the shimmering of the setting sun on the lake...

...Streissguth also reminds us, movingly at times, that Cash’s latter years were hard...

...When it came time to throttle back, he’d knock back 20 or so tranquilizers...

...That debacle was followed, a few days later, with a drug bust in El Paso...

...Dave Shiflett is the author, most recently, of Exodus: Why Americans Are Fleeing Liberal Churches for Conservative Christianity...

...Perkins, an apparently patient sideman, tried 11 more times to get the ball rolling, yet Cash was too stoned to sing...

...Johnny Cash’s music remains popular— he sold over 50 million records— especially with a younger audience that considers the Man in Black to be one of their own...

...Besides addiction problems, he lost his Nashville recording contract, experienced an erosion of his songwriting talent, and was forced to endure a stint in Branson, Missouri...

...His fi nal days were black indeed, with June gone—according to the book, Rubin dispatched a faith healer on her behalf—and Cash slowly slipping away...

...And in an act of what might be karmic signifi cance, one of Cash’s worst years of drug backsliding (1983) came “after an ostrich that inhabited an exotic animal farm he owned attacked him and broke fi ve ribs...

...Eventually he simply stopped showing up for shows...

...He also writes with gentle humor about Cash’s big-screen version of the Jesus story, which the author says included a score consisting of Gospel set to boom-chicka-boom...

...They did a good job covering it up...

...He was a maestro on many fronts...