'Man in Black' cast long
shadow over the valley
By Kelly Feser Eells

"A Boy Named Johnny," one Johnny, nee J.R., Cash, has died. But memories of the perennial "bad boy" balladeer are alive and well, especially in the Ojai Valley, which he graced with his fun-loving presence for the first half of the 1960s.

Those who knew Cash when - when he lived in Casitas Springs, that is - didn't know the tee-totaling crooner who once remarked, "The only one who talks to me is the Lord; the only woman who'll have me is Betty Ford," but their memories of him are fond ones all the same.

When he came to the valley in 1959, few knew more about him than what they'd read in his album liner notes, which, in the pre-People, Rolling Stone Magazine years, served as mini-biographies of the (featured) artist. The liner notes for "The Sound of Johnny Cash,"

Columbia Records, 1962, for example, read, "Whether singing country ballads, hymns or any kind of song, Johnny Cash has proved himself one of our most versatile artists. He comes naturally by his feeling" for a song - songs of personal struggle and heartache, in particular - "having heard many of them in his (impoverished) hometown of Dyess, Arkansas and having himself sung many of them to entertain his family and friends." As Cash gained confidence in his singing and playing, he began to compose songs himself," such as "I Walk the Line" and "Don't Take Your Guns to Town," both huge successes.
"When he isn't traveling, Johnny lives in Casitas Springs, California with his charming wife and their four young daughters."

If anyone knew that Casitas Springs' most famous resident was addicted to amphetamines, they didn't care. By all accounts, Cash was a good neighbor - when he was home. The tawdry tales about "wrecking hotel rooms and playing with guns" were tales of another Johnny, the traveling Johnny, who was arrested in Texas for attempting to smuggle amphetamines across the Mexican border in his guitar case. At home, his biggest crime was accidentally starting a fire in Los Padres National Forest ("I was high," he's been quoted as saying) for which he was fined $85,000.

During his Casitas Springs days, he and drinking buddy Carl Smith (fellow country singer and first husband of Cash's second wife, June Carter, who died last May) were known to go on wild binges, once managing to ruin June's Cadillac convertible without it ever leaving the driveway of Cash's understatedly elegant white home on Nye Road.
Legend has it that this is the same Cadillac convertible Cash drove up and down Highway 33 "with four naked women as passengers" while on a bender, but there is no record of him ever being cited for such a thing, and (now retired) law enforcement officials like Vince France and Larry Baugher "never heard anything about it."

Indeed, Cash's innate sense of decency and lifelong relationship with God - even when he was courting booze and pills on the side - would have made such an escapade unlikely. And though he appeared in several westerns during the '60s, he refused to appear in any films with "gratuitous nudity."

Baugher didn't know Cash personally, but his friends and family remember him as being a regular church-goer and "genuinely nice guy."

That's how Ventura resident Jennifer Petree remembers him, too. Petree attended St. Bonaventure High School with Cash's daughters, graduating in third-oldest daughter Cindy Cash's class.

"Johnny used to come and see the girls a lot," after he and first wife Vivian Distin, also of Ventura, divorced. "He was very quiet and unassuming and, naturally, always dressed in black," Petree smiled.

"He came to our graduation - all the girls' graduations," she added, "and they were always going to visit him (in Nashville), too. He was a good dad."

Randy King, whose family has run the Lake Casitas Boat and Tackle Shop for decades, also doubts the naked women story.

"He used to come out here all the time," said King, "alone. He'd take his boat out in the middle of the lake, get drunk, and pass out. I can't even count how many times we'd see his Tony Lama (boots) hanging over the side, water pouring out of them. We'd make a phone call, and someone always came right over to pick him up and take him home."
King adds, "Johnny got lucky (when he met June Carter). She saved his life."

One of Cash's "young daughters," the now-47-year-old Roseanne, released her 11th album, "Rules of Travel," this past spring. Two weeks before her father's death, Roseanne told (Scotland) Sunday Herald Magazine reporter Vicky Allan that she wrote one of the album's tracks, "September When it Comes," with her father's "mortality in mind. My sisters and brother and I had just about gone crazy from running back and forth to the hospital (with him getting sick all the time) and us 'not knowing.'"

The song, she added, "is a reflection on the cycle of aging."
It is also the only father-daughter duet they ever recorded. "My husband (folk-rock producer John Leventhal) suggested it," said Roseanne, explaining that she hadn't been keen on the idea at first. "I said 'no' because I always said 'no' whenever anyone suggested" she and her legendary father collaborate. "And I kept saying 'no' for a couple of months. I had to let go of 25 years of my 'stance,' my 'I'm not going to use my dad' stance."

However, before Cash would agree to record his daughter's song, he wanted to see the lyrics.

"Isn't that cute?" she said. "He's an artist first and foremost and not even for his child would he do something artistically or say something that wasn't right. Which I think is so beautiful. I kind of felt, 'Well, it's going to have to be really bad for him to say 'no.'"

Though Cash's health had been on a rapid decline for the last several years, he was, as his daughter said, an "artist first." Throughout the "September When it Comes" recording sessions, as well as the sessions for his recent cover of (Nine Inch Nails front man Trent Reznor's) "Hurt" - a song about the agonies of addiction and recovery that Cash parlayed into seven MTV Video Music Award nominations - he was in the hospital more than he was out of it. Yet his pipes are just as strong, his trademark quaver just as heartrending on these, his last recordings, as they are on "Ring of Fire," "I Walk the Line," or "Folsom Prison Blues."

And though he only appears on one of the album's tracks, "Rules of Travels" has Johnny Cash written all over it. Somehow, one doubts his daughter minds.

© 2003 The Ojai Valley News

Back to the news