The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [43]
Andy: “Did you have a good time on the tour?”
Truman: Yes. I did. Because I’m a highly curious person. It was a new world—the mechanics of it. The frantic atmosphere in which it was conducted. I really enjoyed it. I wasn’t bored. I had a good time.
Andy: Did you feel guilty about not finishing the article?
Truman: Not in the least. When I make up my mind about something, I never feel guilty. That’s it. No artist should feel guilty. If you start a painting and you don’t like it, you don’t finish it.
Andy: Why did you take so long to tell him?
Truman: Well, because I hadn’t really made up my mind. I had all of the material there, and it was sitting there, and it was bothering me, and I kept thinking, “Well, it would be so easy, really, to do it.” Finally, the time came that I just made up my mind that I wasn’t going to do it. And I just told him. They voted me Rookie Reporter of the Year [laughs].
I just have my own ideas about things, like anybody else. . . . It wasn’t something that I really wanted to do, and there were other things that I really wanted to do, which I really wanted to pull together. Which I have since pulled together, so. . . .
A Lady: Excuse me, Mr. Capote. The next time you have a party, have your friends wear these.
Truman: Oh, aren’t you sweet. . . .
Andy: What’s that?
Truman: Who knows?
JOHNNY CASH
by Robert Hilburn
March 1, 1973
Music seems to have been an important part of your life from the beginning. What was the first time you remember listening to music?
The first I remember was my mother playing the guitar. Before I started school. I was four or five years old, but I remember singing with her. Carter family songs, a lot of them. I don’t remember any of them in particular, but I know they were gospel songs, church songs.
Besides listening to music you had to work on the farm when you were a kid. Was that an important part of your character building?
Hard work? I don’t know. Chopping cotton and picking cotton is drudgery. I don’t know how much good it ever did me. I don’t know how much good drudgery does anybody.
But I get the feeling, though, that you have empathy with people who work hard, that you want to reassure them in your music that their life has meaning.
Yeah. I got a lot of respect for a man that’s not afraid to work. I don’t think a man can be happy unless he’s working. And I work hard on my music. I put in a lot of thought. I lose a lot of sleep, a lot of nights, because I’m laying awake thinking about my songs and about what’s right and wrong with my music. I worry about whether that last record was worth releasing, whether I could have done it better. Sometimes I feel that the last record was exactly like the one I released fourteen years ago. I wonder if I’m just spinning my wheels sometimes. I wonder if I’m progressing, if I’m growing musically, artistically. I guess I’ve quoted Bob Dylan a million times, his line, “He who is not busy being born is busy dying.” I’ve always believed that.
Going back to your childhood, what was the next step—musically?
I started writing songs myself when I was about twelve. I started writing some poems and then made some music up to go along with them. They were love songs, sad songs. I think the death of my brother Jack, when I was twelve, had a lot to do with it. My poems were awfully sad at the time. My brother and I were very, very close.
Did you sing the songs to your family? What was the reaction?
Oh well, you know how families are. My dad would pat me on the head and say that was pretty good, but you’d better think about something that will buy you something to eat someday. My mother was a hundred percent for my music. When I was sixteen she wanted me to take piano and voice lessons. She even took in washing to get the money. I think I had one voice lesson. The teacher told me not to take any more because it might affect my delivery.
What was