Fact #140981

Lou Robin (manager, Johnny Cash) : I had been promoting concerts since 1957 – we were promoting jazz – Duke Ellington and Dave Brubeck and Stanley Kenton and then public mood changed to folk music in the early Sixties. We got tired of the craziness of promoting acid rock and we decided to get into promoting country music, so we met with Johnny’s manager, in 1968, which was about three months after the Walk The Line story actually ended. Our first concert series was promoted in California and Nevada in February of ‘69. Earlier John had called and asked me – I hadn’t even met him yet – if I would set up a concert at San Quentin prison as part of that tour. And I said, well I never promoted a concert in a prison, but it was easy to work out with the state of California because he had done a concert there previously.
So Columbia records wanted to record it and Granada Television wanted to film it. It got a little complicated to work out all those logistics and bring all those people inside the prison, but the prisoners appreciated him being there, and he’d had Folsom before. It was a wonderful experience. So we started promoting his concerts like Madison Square Garden in December of ‘69, so when his manager left in 1973 we asked to take over the management, which is what John and June agreed to. We held that post until they both passed away and now I coordinate a lot of the business affairs for the estate.

He was riding very high. He had just come from Vietnam when we did our first tour, and he was getting over pneumonia that he had caught there. I just found him to be a very honourable pleasant person, as June was as well. Very easy to get along with and they did a great show.

He had great business instincts. He knew what direction that he wanted to head in at all times with his music. Sometimes recordings weren’t publicly accepted sales wised in the later years, but I think every artist has to have a producer to work with and the producers that he worked with were provided by the record companies. They and John didn’t see eye to eye on philosophy and tunes so that was a problem.

(Source : interview in Uncut magazine, Feb 2009)

Johnny Cash : I didn't even know the lyrics (to A Boy Named Sue). I had to put the words on a music stand in front of me. I told 'em I want to sing a song called A Boy Named Sue. Well they laughed, you know, and I said, 'No, it's not what you think. Let me sing it to you.' I read the lyrics off the paper in front of me, and that was the record.

Johnny Cash : The guards were scared to death. All the convicts were standing up on the dining tables. They were out of control, really. During the second rendition of that song all I would have had to do was say "Break!" and they were gone, man. They were ready! I've got a book called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds that I've studied for years. I knew I had that prison audience where all I had to do was say, "Take over! Break!" and they would have. Those guards knew it, too. I was tempted. But I thought about June and the Carter Family-they were there with me, too~and I controlled myself. [laughs] 'Cause I was really ready for some excitement. I tried to cool things off by asking for the drink of water and thanking the guards and the warden for letting me be there, 'cause the convicts wanted me to do something like that. That's the way I felt about the prisons when I played them, though: "May you rot and burn in hell! " all you're doing is dealing misery. They're overcrowded, they don't have the money to hire proper officials and properly house prisoners. There's no rehabilitation. First of all, with a lot of them there was no rehabilitation in the first place.

Lou Robin : That was the first prison I ever went into with him. But when that third steel door slams behind you as you go in, you know you can’t turn and run. The mess hall – the food hall – that the concert took place in held over a thousand prisoners – they were all just sitting at the food tables there watching the show. And of course the most prominent prisoners in the pecking order sat in front in tailored uniforms. I remember seeing one prisoner light a cigarette for one of these people. It just gave you an idea that it’s like any other organisation. There are people at the top and there are people that aren’t. I think there’s even a picture of me standing in the back of the hall in the San Quentin album. At every concert I walk around the room as soon as it started to see if the sound level was ok. And at the back of the San Quentin hall where I was standing for a while, I looked up and there was a fork with food on it sticking in the soundproofing in the wall about six feet over my head, and I wondered how long it had been there. I said to the head of security, you know, there are only about 10 or 12 guards in this place. Is that enough? And he said, first of all, it’s enough. But secondly, if we had a hundred guards and these guys wanted to riot, what’s the difference? He said they police themselves. Now this was a time in American prisons where there weren’t gangs, and it was pretty much a homogeneous population so there was a lot more control of what was going on than maybe there would be now.
(Source : interview in Uncut magazine, Feb 2009)