In this latest blog I continue my look back at the articles and interviews I wrote for the Johnny Cash Fanzine I edited and produced between 1994 and 2019. This time it is back to December 2004 and my interview with 'Cowboy' Jack Clement, originally published in issue #41 of The Man in Black with additional images added. Please note that this interview is (c) Peter Lewry so please respect this and do not copy and use elsewhere. Thank you.
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'Cowboy' Jack Clement worked with Johnny Cash who recorded several of his songs. In this exclusive interview he talks about his days at Sun Records, working with Jerry Lee Lewis, songwriting, Johnny Cash, his recent CD and much more.
I’d like to start by asking where and when you were born.
I was born in Downtown Memphis, Tennessee, Sunday April 5th, 1931 in St.
Joseph’s Hospital, a Catholic institution. Well of course I was a Baptist at
the time. My name is not John it’s Jack, Jack Henderson Clement. Therefore, I’m
not being irreverent when I call myself Jack the Baptist.
I have to ask how the name ‘Cowboy’ Jack Clement came
about.
Me and a couple of buddies were hanging out one night and we just
started calling each other ‘Cowboy’. I was ‘Cowboy’ so and so, Allen Reynolds
was Cowboy so and so and Dickie Lee, as I recall, was ‘Cowboy’ Red River Sylvester.
I was a New Jersey cowboy named ‘Cowboy’Wallyaskey and the
name just kinda stuck, mine did. We called each other ‘Cowboy’ for a while
after that but somehow mine stuck, and I guess I let it.
And how did you get into the music business.
Well I
organised a band and played at the local schoolhouse when I was about thirteen
or fourteen, so I was in the music business from then on. Anytime you played
the local schoolhouse they gave us a little money as I recall, so then you’re
in the music business. Well that was back when I was about thirteen or fourteen
and now I am seventy three and I am still doing the same thing I was then,
getting up a band and playing at the local schoolhouse which is now known as
the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. I’ve got this really fine band and
we go down there and play once in a while and folks round here kinda like it,
maybe we’ll be coming to your town one of these days.
Who were your early musical influences.
Eddy Arnold
stands out more than anybody else because that’s when I really started to
appreciate the singing part of it. I always liked the instrumental part of
music too but Eddy Arnold is the voice that sticks out in my mind. I was singing
his songs when I was thirteen or fourteen. I always liked Burl Ives, Roy Acuff
of course, and his whole show. He had a great stage show, Roy Acuff and the
Smokey Mountain Boys. They did all of this comedy stuff, they had props and
they were great. The Delmore Brothers, they were on radio in Memphis, WMC,
Louis Armstrong and Bing Crosby. My father liked both of them, he would take me
to the movies that had both of them guys in. Earl Scruggs, Spike Jones of
course and, later in life, George Jones.
At this time did you intend to go into engineering and
producing.
I never intended to go into engineering. Producing was something
that came natural to me. Like I say I organised bands when I was thirteen and I
still organise bands. To me that’s producing, I mean we would organise bands so
we can go put on a show somewhere. I really think of an album as a show and so
I am particularly attentive to sequencing and so on. I’ve always been into
producing. As far as producing for record, I got interested in that after I got
out of the Marine Corps in 1952. I went in when I was seventeen, 1948, and
spent my last twenty-six months in Washington, DC which was a wonderful place
to be. There were little nightclubs right across the street from where I was
stationed, a special place called Marine Barracks. I was on the drill team and
I got to hear that great big Marine Corps band all the time, that’s something I
miss. That band rehearsed right there where I was stationed. Right across the
street from the gate was a nightclub called the Band Box and up and down that
street were little joints that I could go and play in and pick up some extra
money. We had a little dance job on Saturday night and I was doing pretty well,
so I was in the music business all the time I was in the Marine Corps, at least
the last twenty-six months. After I got out I heard about Dot Records, an
independent label in Galatin, Tennessee, and they had a bunch of big hit
records and my favourite was the Mac Wiseman records. I found out that there’s
a thing called record labels and you could go somewhere and have somebody press
one up, put your name on it and put it out. So I got to thinking about that
pretty early while we were trying to get something going with the band I had in
Washington after I got out of the Marine Corps. When I got to Memphis I woke up
one morning and Sleepy Eyed John, a morning disc jokey, said ‘here’s that
record everybody’s been talking about, raving about’, and he played Elvis and of course that was a wonderous
thing for me. I was hooked on Elvis right off the bat, because that was
something really different.
Then I found out that it was on a label here in town.
Memphis had a record label called Sun Records and they press ‘em up and get ‘em
out. So I started getting interested in what Sam Phillips was doing. Maybe I
could do that and I started thinking about putting together a record label.
Along with my buddy Slim Wallace, who had a nightclub in Arkansas, we almost
did. I had been sort of working my way through college and playing in his band
every Friday and Saturday night. Slim had this garage and I said why don’t we
get into the record business. We can buy this tape recorder from Sleepy Eyed John
for four hundred and fifty bucks and build a little studio in your garage. So
we did that and used it to practice in. We never got it to the point where we
could actually cut a master in there but it was a place where we could make demos,
as they call them nowadays. Worktapes, that’s a good name for them. When we
actually got ready to make a record we rented a radio studio Downtown at WMPS
and took Billy Lee Riley and two or three other people into the studio and I
produced my first record which was called Rock With Me Baby and the
back-side was Trouble Bound by Billy Lee Riley. Well I needed to get
somebody to master it so we could have it pressed. At that time Sam Phillips
was the guy in town who was known for doing that even though he was doing very
well, he had sold Elvis by this time and was making a lot of money. He had a
big hit on ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ but you could still hire Sam Phillips for
fifteendollars a side to master something. So I started off with Sam by hiring
him. I got him to make this master for me and when I went in to pick it up he
said he really liked it and would like to put it on Sun Records. I said I’d
have to ask my partner Slim. Sam asked me what I was doing and I said I was
working at a building supply place but I didn’t like it very much and he said ‘maybe
you should come and work for me.’ I said ‘maybe I should,’ and two weeks later,
June 15 1956, I went to work for Sun Records.
How and when did you first meet Sam Phillips.
At the
time Elvis was taking off Sam Phillips was almost as notorious as Elvis.
Everybody in town knew who Sam Phillips was, he’s the guy with this record
label, right here in town, Sun Records. Sometime around 1955 I called Sam and
told him I’d been playing music in Washington, Wheeling, West Virginia and Boston
and I’d like to come in and audition for him. So he set it up and I went in and
he gave me a really good audition. I guess he spent an hour with me, I sang a
whole lot of stuff. At that time I was more into Marty Robbins, Ray Price and
bluegrass. I’d played a lot of music by then, played in several bands, lots of
different kinds of music and I was pretty good. I think the conclusion was that
I may have been too good for him, a little too slick or something. He was more
into funk and I hadn’t discovered that wonderful word fully at that time. He
told me I was welcome to come back and sing some more. I guess it was about six
to nine months later when we had produced this record with Billy Lee and I went
in to have it mastered. Going back to the question about engineering. I don’t consider
myself an engineer. Engineers are the people that fixed that stuff all I did
was operate it. I was one of the first of a breed of musician types running the
control board. To me the console was a musical instrument and that echo thing
was a musical instrument that’s how I played it, I was playing the board like a
musical instrument of some sort.
And when did you start working at Sun Records.
I
already answered that a little while ago but I’ll answer it again! I started
working for Sun Records on June 15 1956. I remember that day because it was the
same day that I entered the Marine Corps and same day I was discharged - June
15 1948 and June 15 1952.
We often read about ‘The Legendary Sun Studio’ and the
‘Sun Sound’ what do you think made the studio so special.
It was magic,
that’s what it was, that’s the only way I can describe it. The studio was kinda
live to start with and we didn’t have baffles, partial walls you put around the
instruments, so everything just bounced off the walls. Problem with that, it
just bounced back into the microphones. We put the drums at one end of the room
and the vocal at the other.
The room wasn’t that large as I recall, only
twenty-five feet long, eighteen feet wide and twelve feet high with these
v-shaped things on the ceiling to deflect sound so that we wouldn’t have a parallel
surface between the ceiling and the floor. There was a lot of leakage, but it
was a nice leakage. In studios that are real dead leakage is not so good
because it sounds kinda muffled coming back into the mics. I discovered twenty-five
or so years later, working with U2 in that same room, what made it so neat.
There was no separation it just all went together and you got to blend it right
there in the room and bounce it off the walls. More than anything it was the
playing that went on in there, the frivolity of it, the whimsy of it. There was
young cats in there experimenting, learning how to pick, trying all this stuff
and Sam all the while telling us he was looking for something different. We’d
just go in the studio pick, sing, have fun, make tapes and then we’d go and eat
next door at Taylor’s Restaurant. Sam never had an office there until later on
when I built a room at the back but he didn’t use it. All the business took
place at Taylor’s Restaurant. Sam and Johnny Cash would go in there and talk.
Jerry Lee would drop by. What a great place. Best time I ever had, just a fun
thing and I’ll never forget it.
You discovered and recorded Jerry Lee Lewis and worked
with people like Roy Orbison. What were those early sessions like.
I
already had this record I had produced by Billy Riley so I got him and those
guys I had been working with into the studio and we started cutting some more
tapes with Billy Lee. And then Roy Orbison came to town and Sam let me start
working with him. Roy was just visiting at first but then a few months later he
moved there. I spent a lot of time with him. We never cut a really big hit but
we cut some nice records. I think my favourite was one called Sweet And Easy
Love. Then of course there was Jerry Lee. It was about August 1956 and I’d
been there since June. I was tinkering around in the studio and Sally Wilburn
came from out front and said ‘there’s this guy who says he plays piano like Chet
Atkins’. I said ‘I gotta hear that, send him on back.’ So Jerry came in and sat
down at the piano and he played Wildwood Flower and it sounded like Chet
Atkins playing the piano. It was nice you know. I said ‘do you sing, then sing
me something.’ He started singing a couple of George Jones songs, Seasons Of
My Heart and Window Up Above and it sounded wonderful. He was
playing the piano and singing and it just sounded great. But it was country and
we weren’t looking for country much in those days at Sun. Not the Nashville country,
we didn’t have the players or facilities to do that.
I told Jerry that I loved
that stuff but we needed some rock and roll. He went back home and I played the
tape for Sam and he loved it. A month later Jerry comes in, in fact he just
showed up and he’d come up with a version of an old Gene Autry song called You’re
The Only Star In My Blue Heaven which was a waltz. Then he’d written a song called End Of The
Road and that was good. That was on a Monday and I said come back Thursday
and I’ll have some guys here and we’ll cut some tapes. So we got in there and
recorded his first record which was Crazy Arms.
Can you recall the first time you met Johnny Cash.
I
can’t recall exactly, I know it was a couple of weeks after I went to work for
Sun. He came in off the road and that’s where I met him. He probably came in to
record and Sam was engineering. I remember I liked him right off the bat. I was
already a fan because I loved I Walk The Line. His records prior to that
I appreciate a lot more now than I did then. But when he came out with I
Walk The Line he had me hooked. I was very glad to meet Johnny Cash and we
sort of clicked right off the bat and I particularly noticed that he had this
great sense of humour. He and I were similar in a lot of ways, around the same
age, although I was about ten months older than him. We grew up listening to
the same music, mostly out of radio stations around Memphis and some in
Arkansas. We were exposed to the same music, all the country music and a lot of
black gospel a bit of everything. It wasn’t long before he came in and started
singing some of my songs.
You first worked with him, as a producer, in December
1956. Up to that point Sam had been producing him, why the change.
Sam was
getting tired of running the board all the time. I was his first full-time
assistant. He’d been strapped to that board for years and I came along and he
seemed to like what I was doing. We agreed on most things although we didn’t have
to agree, he was the boss. I cut tapes and if he liked them he would put them
out. I done well, Jerry Lee started off real good. Johnny Cash and I were
getting along and so one day he let me start working with John. He was keeping John
to himself, he really liked him, liked working with him and admired him. I
guess he was busy one day and let me work with him. One of the first things we
cut was Home Of The Blues. It wasn’t a big hit but it did well.At that point
John’s sales were starting to flag a little, he was still selling good but he
wasn’t selling a million or so maybe one hundred or two hundred thousand.
You produced all of his remaining Sun sessions during
which he recorded some great material including Big River, Give My Love
To Rose and Country Boy. What was he like to work with.
Johnny
Cash was wonderful to work with. I guess he is my all-time favourite. He loved music
and he had a lot of energy for it, took it very seriously but he had this great
sense of humour. An ideal combination. As I said he and I grew up in the same
area listening to the same music, we were about the same age and we just liked
the same stuff. I’d feel free to play him oddball stuff that nobody else would
go for, things like Ballad Of A Teenage Queen, which we’ll get to later.
Sam always hated that. Big River, that was the back side of Ballad Of
A Teenage Queen, I played guitar on Big River and played bass drum
at the same time. With my right foot I was playing the bass drum and I was playing
the guitar on another microphone. Country Boy, I am not sure if I did
that, Sam might have done that one. Give My Love To Rose I think I did,
we did so many, I’m not sure about a couple of them, it’s been fifty years almost.
He also recorded two of your compositions, Guess
Things Happen That Way and Ballad Of A Teenage Queen, and they both
became major hits reaching #1 on the country charts. Can you tell us about the
writing and recording of these two songs.
I wrote Ballad Of A Teenage
Queen for me to sing myself and actually did a tape, it was going to be a
record and Sam was going to put it out. It was like a Johnny Cash record, it
had a vocal group on it and all those answer part. John came in and I played it
for him and he loved it and wanted to record it which kinda surprised me. I would
play him stuff not necessarily to record just because he might enjoy it. I
always did that and he always did it for me and you’d be amazed at the songs
Johnny Cash would sing that he never recorded like The Whiffenpoof Song,
a bunch of Ink Spots songs, Mills Brothers songs and we’d sing a lot of that
stuff together through the years.
He liked to be entertained and he liked something funny and Ballad Of A Teenage Queen was kinda funny, it was silly, it was a total fairytale. Sam hated it. He told me one time, a month or so before it was released, the more he listened to that the more he didn’t like it. Everybody around the studio liked it and Miss Taylor next door, and her daughter Rosemary liked it and Sam put it out and of course it was a big hit. But he
never did like it. I wanted to do a follow-up but I wasn’t thinking about
Johnny Cash again when I wrote Guess Things Happen That Way I was
thinking more like Dean Martin or somebody. My role model for that song was Memories
Are Made Of This and I heard the song as a sort of rumba rhythm. Anyway
Johnny Cash came in and did it his way and I loved it. Then we got a vocal group
in there. We had this barbershop quartet named The Confederates and a girl
singer. And Wally, the bass singer, started singing ‘ba-do ba-do, ba-do
ba-do’’ and I said let’s do that. So we did it and I wasn’t sure if Johnny
Cash was gonna like that. So I hurried up and got the record pressed before he
got back to town, but I think he liked it. I think Sam even liked that one. When
I recorded a new version of it for my new album it was different. It was more
like how I wrote the song. But I love the way Johnny Cash did the song and
still do.
By 1958 he was planning to leave Sun Records and move to
Columbia. Did this surprise you.
It did surprise me but he didn’t just
leave we knew about it eight months or so before he left. It surprised me,
because of all the people at Sun records Sam seemed to admire Johnny Cash the most.
He would always tell me how great Johnny was and the authority he had in his voice,
when he sang he got people’s attention. Just a powerful thing. He talked about
how easy he was to work with. How he would go out on the road and write some
songs, work them up with the Tennessee Two and come in and record them. He
really admired Johnny Cash, he was his fair-haired boy actually. I think what happened
Jerry Lee Lewis came along and John’s sales were dropping, still very good, but
he wasn’t selling millions at that time, until Teenage Queen. Jerry Lee
Lewis was taking off and Sam was putting all his energies into him. That was
one of Sam’s weaknesses, that he couldn’t really concentrate on more than one artist
at a time. There is something to be said for that. Johnny Cash came by one day
and wanted to go next door to Taylor’s Restaurant and talk to Sam. He was busy
talking to distributors and didn’t put him off but he was busy. Sam probably
thought Johnny Cash would understand that and didn’t think much about it. But I
think that little incident, maybe, is what sparked him leaving. And of course
by this time he was selling lots of records and getting offers from people in
Nashville, people who wanted to manage him and sign him to labels. He went over
and signed with Columbia before his contract was up with Sun. It wouldn’t go
into effect until his contract was over with Sun but in other words he didn’t
give Sam a chance to bid on it. I remember another thing, Sam was paying people
three per-cent which was honorable but not all that great. It was a starting royalty
and Cash was wanting four per-cent to re-sign and Sam argued about it. Well I
know Sam would have given him the four per-cent, certainly he would. But Cash
felt he didn’t need to argue about it, he had these people in Nashville wanting
to sign him, so he signed. And then, of course, Sam got really mad, talked about
suing him and CBS for contractual interference. Finally they agreed that John would
come in and sing a certain number of songs before he left. Sam dumped that job
on me. I had to talk John into coming in and cutting them songs, unwillingly.
John’s heart wasn’t really into recording that bunch of songs. I got everything
out of him I could. Some of them were pretty good and some of them were not so hot,
but that was my job. We got that done and he left.
At this time he was saving his best songs for his new
label and recorded other artists material including several tracks by Hank Williams.
Did this cause problems during his final few months with the label.
Yes it
did, but somehow it didn’t affect my friendship with Johnny Cash. We remained friends
forever and I never lost track of him. Although when he left Sun I didn’t see
or hear from him for a while but I could always get in touch with him, I could
always find him or get him on the phone. One day we were trying to get some
songs and he was in a hurry and there was this Hank Williams songbook on top of
the playback speaker out in the studio and I said sing me five Hank Williams
songs real quick. Just you and the boys and I’ll keep the band real low and you
sing them and I’ll get some people later to fix the music. I said we could do
them in forty-five minutes so that’s what we did. And he cut these five songs
and I kept Luther and Marshall back cause they weren’t that quick at learning
songs. I just wanted to get them down and I figured I’d get some other guys in
later and fix up the music. That’s exactly what I did. We couldn’t erase the
band we had to keep it and add stuff to it. They weren’t the greatest things
but they weren’t that bad. At least it was something. If we hadn’t recorded
that there would have been nothing. I think they finally made an album out of
it, Johnny Cash Sings Hank Williams.
Can you tell us about some of the other artists you
worked with at Sun.
I did a session or two with Carl Perkins but he left
after I’d been there about a year. I did lots of stuff with Charlie Rich and
Barbara Pittman.
You left the label in 1959 and moved to Nashville. Why
did you leave and when you arrived in Nashville what did you do.
I didn’t
move to Nashville in 1959 I stayed in Memphis and started a record label,
Summer Records. I never really got it off the ground. I put out a release or
two. Fortunately I had some money coming in from Sun Records so I was living on
that. Several years prior to that Chet Atkins had expressed an interest in me
working for him in Nashville. I called him up and asked him if he would still
like me to do that and he said yes so I worked for him for about a year and a
half. But I didn’t move to Nashville I commuted from Memphis. I drove to
Nashville about once a week for two or three days and I would work with
different artists, people Chet didn’t want to fool with. After a year or so
that wasn’t really going anywhere and I was tired of Memphis and Nashville and
I wanted to go some other place and cut some different kind of music, some
reasonable music. I wound up going to Beaumont, Texas. I went there in 1961 and
during that time built a studio in Beaumont and recorded a million seller, Patches
by Dickie Lee.
Over the years you have opened several studios in
Nashville. Do you have a favourite of all the ones you owned and worked in.
I’ve
built other studios, two in Memphis, one in Beaumont, Texas and I built four
here in Nashville. I started recording in my house about twenty-five years ago
but I built a place called Sound Emporium, it was known as Jack Clement
Recording Studio back then, and it’s still there. Two studios, Studio Aand B,
both are still in operation and I think Studio A is probably one of my favourite
of the ones I built. We had a couple of really good echo chambers there, it was
big enough and it was a nice looking studio. It was the first 16-track studio
in town, it looked good and didn’t look like all the other studios. I built a
third studio called Jack’s Tracks which is still in operation. I sold it to Allen
Reynolds who produced all the Garth Brook’s records there. I think my favourite
is the one in my attic, because I’ve got all the stuff to go with it, guitars,
pianos and microphones.
You broke the colour barrier in country music by
convincing Chet Atkins to sign Charley Pride and then went on to produce many
of his albums. Was it difficult to get a black country artist on country radio.
At that time nobody had tried to get a black artist on country radio. Back
when I was at Sun I used to joke about it. Sam had a white guy that sounded
black so let’s get a black guy to sing country. I did try it but it just didn’t
work. It wasn’t something I dwelled upon much. But when Charley Pride came
along and I heard his voice I realised I didn’t have to teach him how to sing
country he already knew how, he grew up singing country. He grew up in
Mississippi and his whole family would listen to the Grand Ole Opry on saturday
night. He loved Hank Williams and he was for real. There was nothing affected
about Charley Pride he was natural, totally real and honest. I loved his voice,
it was a wonderful recording voice. It had this great big sound to it.
Something you could put a real fine country band to. So I agreed to produce his
first record and pay for it. I rented RCA studio and hired a band and we went
in and cut two tracks. There was Snakes Crawl At Night and The
Atlantic Coastal Line. Well I told Chet, we were still big buddies, what I
was going to do and that I would let him have first crack at it. He liked it a
lot but two or three weeks later he said he didn’t know what they would do with
it. I set out to get it on somebody’s label and after a while, not being
successful, decided to press it up and put it out myself. I happened to run
into Chet one day down at the RCA building and he asked me what I had done with
that coloured boy. I said I hadn’t done anything yet but was thinking of
pressing it up myself. He said he been thinking about that and we might be passing
up another Elvis Presley. He was going to this big A&R meeting in LA and if
I made him another dub of the thing he would take it out and play it for them.
So I did that and he played it for them and they liked it. He came back and
said we got a deal. So that’s when Charley Pride went on RCA. I went on to produce
twenty albums with Charley. We did that over a span of about six and half
years. Back then you would normally do between two or four albums a year with
an artist. Nowadays they do an album every two to three years, or in my case I
try to do one every twenty-five years!
In 1978 you finally released your debut album All I
Want To Do In Life. Why did it take so long.
My first album took about
two and half years to do. I started off saying you can cut a hit record in
three minutes so why can’t I cut an album in thirty. So it took me two and a
half years! Then twenty-six years later I’ve got my second album out.
Around this time you started working with John, as a
musician, on his Gone Girl and A Believer Sings The Truth albums.
Was this the first time you had met him since 1958 when he left Sun Records.
I
never really lost touch with Johnny Cash. In about 1958 I was in Nashville and
he had me play guitar on a lot of his sessions. I’ve played on a lot of his
records all the way up to a couple of weeks before he passed. He wound up with
a studio on his property in Hendersonville and I’d go out there and record,
either playing dobro or rhythm guitar. We did a lot of that for the last six years.
I wasn’t producing them but he just hired me to play guitar and of course I
enjoyed it and enjoyed being around him. Like I say I never lost touch with
Johnny Cash.
Then in 1980 you were back producing John, first on his Rockabilly
Blues album, with Earl Poole Ball, and then The Adventures Of Johnny
Cash. Compared to the fifties what was it like producing him again.
It
was fun and the stuff I did on that first album with Earl, Rockabilly Blues,
we did those here in my studio and The Adventures Of Johnny Cash was
recorded here also although we finished them at Glaser Brother Studios because
I didn’t have all the gear at the time that I needed.
So we cut the tracks here
at the house and finished them at Tompall Glasers studio. It was an adventure,
a lot of hard work and I made him sing them over and over a lot of times but he
would do it, he had energy for it, he might complain a bit but he’d do it, he
was a real trooper. A wonderful, wonderful man and I miss him everyday.
You have written several songs that John recorded
including Gone Girl, I’ve Got A Thing About Trains and two
humorous compositions Flushed From The Bathroom Of Your Heart and Dirty
Old Egg-Sucking Dog. Did you offer him any other songs.
He recorded a
lot of my songs - It’s Just About Time, Life Goes On, Down The
Street To 301 and a whole bunch of other stuff. I would play him songs,
sometimes just to entertain him because he liked to hear a good song whether he
was going to record it or not. I always felt free just playing anything I
wanted to, however silly it was, and just let him pick what he liked. Amazingly
he liked a lot of it.
Throughout the mid-eighties you worked on most of his
Mercury albums. I always felt this period of his career never received the critical
acclaim it deserved. What did you think of the material he was recording at
this time and why do you think it was overlooked by the critics and country
music radio.
That was kinda the dark ages of music in a way. It was a time
when they wanted to hear young artists and the kids weren’t getting exposed to Johnny
Cash. Mercury was not that hot a label at that time, they didn’t have the
mechanism or the power within the organisation or the will to promote him. They
acted like they were but nobody at Mercury, other than Steve Popovich, was
championing Johnny Cash. I think it was some of the best stuff we ever did
during that period of time.
You have also worked with Waylon Jennings and produced
his Dreaming My Dreams album, one of the best Waylon albums released.
How did you meet him and what was he like to work with.
I first met Waylon
Jennings in Nashville but I had heard a tape by him that Bobby Bare was playing
everybody in town. Waylon was living in Arizona at that time and Bobby had
heard him and played the tape to me. I loved it and he played it for Chet, he
loved it but it took him a while to come around, but he finally did sign Waylon
and he moved to Nashville. I think the first time I met him was at a Johnny
Cash session. I liked him immediately, always liked his work and we became
buddies. Later on I married Jessi Colter’s sister so we were brothers-in-law
for a little while. Waylon was a monumental talent and should have been a super
superstar he should have been king of the cowboys in my opinion.
We worked real
hard on Dreaming My Dreams, we were trying to do something different. He
had been fighting with RCA but they finally let him produce his own records
which means he could get a producer, so he got me. We did that at Tompall’s
studio. It took a few months but we got it done and he always told me he
thought it was his best album and it is certainly one of the favourite albums I
have produced. That song Dreaming My Dreams, I have always loved it and
I sing it on my new album.
Twenty-six years after your first album you have finally
issued a follow-up. Can you tell us about the track selection and recording of the
album.
No Expectations, that’s something we recorded about fifteen
years ago. It was just a fun take we done one day, kind of a warm-up thing. It
was always a good song to warm the band up with if we did it at that tempo.
It’s a Rolling Stones song but I don’t do it anything like them I do it like a
guy named Jim Rooney. He used to play in my band and he had this version pretty
much like what’s on my album. When I got ready to put it on this album all I
did was re-sing it and mix it. Ballad Of A Teenage Queen we recorded back
in 1981. I was trying to do another album so it was my session and Johnny Cash
was singing with me on it. Those are the original vocals. The only thing I
added before we released it was another ukelele and little bit of drum by Kenny
Malone. The rest of the stuff we did over three months starting back in January
2004. I tried to do a variety of things, to be different, like a musical
adventure by going from a waltz to a polka. We do have one polka in there and
it’s called Drinking Carrot Juice. I just love polkas and I know a lot
about the style. I like accordions and I happen to know the best accordion
player in the world and he lives close by. Recently I had him here adding some accordion
to an Eddy Arnold album I’m recording. Eddy is eighty-six now but he’s decided
to come out of retirement and do an album. We’ve been working on that for a few
months.
The album features ‘Cowboys Ragtime Band’ a reference to
the players you have known for years. Can you tell us about some of the
musicians who appear on the album.
‘Cowboys Ragtime Band’ consists of Kenny
Malone, my drummer. I’ve been working with him since around 1972/73. Then
there’s Bobby Wood playing piano and keyboards and I’ve known him since about
1959 in Memphis. Since then he’s become one of the ace session players around
town, played on all kinds of hit records. He played on a lot of Elvis’ stuff he
did in Memphis. He is a wonderful player and can play anything and he loves to
do it. There is a wonderful bass player called Dave Roe who has been in the
band for a couple of years. He played with Johnny Cash and can play just about
anything. Very versatile and he don’t mind ‘slapping.’ Some bass players don’t
like to ‘slap’ it anymore but I like a bass player who likes to ‘slap’ it when
you need too. Then there’s Shawn Camp who’s a very talented artists in his own
right. Billy Burnette, who is the son of Dorsey Burnette who was a very famous
rock and roll singer and songwriter. Billy has spent a long time in Memphis and
LA and he’s a very good musician and singer. He was on the road with Fleetwood
Mac for about eight and a half years. Then we’ve got Jay Patten who plays saxophone,
clarinet, guitar and mandolin. Steel player on this album is a guy named Al
Angelo. He does the engineering at the Ford Theater. Most of the album was done
with this band. We do everything from No Expectations to Brazil, we
do Tennessee Waltz to Dreaming My Dreams, Drinking Carrot
Juice and a few other polkas. Steel Guitar Rag, just a lot of fun
stuff. (not all these tracks appear on the album-ed). We do have the
Jordanaires singing along on some stuff and a couple of girls.
There are two tracks recorded with John - Guess Things
Happen That Way and Ballad Of A Teenage Queen. When and where were these
recorded.
Guess Things Happen That Way was recorded here in my
studio about two years ago, about six months before he passed away. Ballad
Of A Teenage Queen we did that here about 1981.
I believe you have finally recorded Guess Things
Happen That Way the way you originally intended is that correct.
Pretty
much like I wrote it. It’s sort of a rumba. I patterned it on Dean Martin’s Memories
Are Made Of This and that’s sort of the sound I had in mind when I wrote
it. Cash had his interpretation of it which was super duper and it was a big
hit. I pretty much do it how I originally wrote it.
You also covered tracks that you either originally
produced or were recorded by other artists you had worked with. I am thinking
of both It’ll Be Me and Dreaming My Dreams by Jerry Lee and
Waylon respectively. Had you considered any others.
When I was putting the
album together I considered a lot of things but I settled on It’ll Be Me.
I’d been fooling with the song ever since I wrote it and could never get it to
feel exactly how I wanted it. One day when we were doing the album we were
messing around with it and Bobby (Wood) came up with this swing beat that I
kinda liked and I thought that was it. I was never completely happy with Jerry
Lee’s version of it because I thought when he recorded it he didn’t know the
song well enough. Even though we recorded it a couple of times we never quite
got the beat that we could have got although it was a good record. That song
was the back side to Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On. Sam thought it was
going to be the a-side. For me it was free ride, the single sold a million or more
and it is one of my better known songs in Europe, Australia and other places
around the world. Dreaming My Dreams, I always loved that song and I
guess I was one of the first to sing it to Waylon. I produced it with him. I
still sing it the way I hear it.
The not so serious side shows through on tracks like Drinking
Carrot Juice. In the sleeve-notes you describe the song as “a love song
about carrots.” Is there a story behind the song.
Well the story behind the
song is that I was drinking a lot of carrot juice at the time. Somebody
convinced me that was the thing to do. It was a lot of trouble though, you had
to buy carrots and you leave the skins on them, so you have to scrub them down
good and run them through this grinder. Then you had to clean the thing. It was
a pain in the neck and I was getting my wife to do it and she hated it. I wrote
a song about it and then I think she hated me.
I’d like to go back to John and ask about your
involvement on American IV: The Man Comes Around. You played dobro on
the closing track We’ll Meet Again. Did John ask you to play on this
track.
I played the dobro on one cut on that album, American IV: The Man
Comes Around, John asked me to play on it, in fact he recorded that one
song here in my studio. He was doing most of his stuff in his studio out in
Hendersonville but he came over one day and recorded that. He then asked me to
put the dobro on it and I did.
Was this the last time you saw John.
I saw John a lot
after that, like I said I was recording with him fairly regularly at his studio
right up to a couple of weeks before he passed away.
Although he had been ill for some time his death was
still a shock. How did it affect you.
When Johnny Cash passed away I wasn’t
really surprised because he’d been in the hospital for a week or so I think.
What surprised me was that he was in the hospital in the first place. Last time
I had seen him, which was a couple of weeks prior to that, I’d been out to
record with him and he looked great. I couldn’t get over how good he looked,
he’d looked pretty sick prior to that but he looked good and sounded great and
I thought he was going to make a full recovery. Then a couple of weeks later I
get the news that he is back in the hospital and that surprised me. But when he
actually passed by that time we were all pretty well aware that it was going to
happen. It was a big loss for me because of all the people I have ever known
that man was as good a friend as I ever had and I miss him everyday.
You appeared at the Memorial Show in November 2003 and
performed Guess Things Happen That Way. I was fortunate to be invited to
the show which was an emotional event, especially at the end when all the family
came on stage and sang We’ll Meet Again. Was it easy choosing which song
to perform.
Well I also sang Ballad Of A Teenage Queen and told the
audience that Sam Phillips always hated it. But it wasn’t easy to pick which
songs to sing at that event. I read some quotes from an unfinished book that
caused me to get a little misty.
You have been a major part of John’s career for so many
years and I want to ask if you have a special memory or story you could share
with us.
Every memory I have of Johnny Cash is special. There are little
funny things like one day at Sun when I first noticed he had this wonderful
sense of humour. We were talking about going next door and getting some coffee
but he didn’t say that he stands up and says “I think I got a little too much
blood in my coffee system.’ I remember funny little things, the whole lifetime experience
is what I remember.
I’d like to thank you Jack for taking time to talk to us
and good luck with the new album.
Well thank you and thanks for having me. It’s
been a pleasure, I’ve enjoyed it and hope I didn’t ramble too much.
