the thing about johnny cash's loop is that it's on the record. arrest reports, court dates, two autobiographies, a treatment-centre admission — you can date it. so it's a good one to look at if you've ever told yourself that a relapse means the clean years didn't count.
it started small and useful, the way it usually does. he signed to sun records in memphis in the mid-fifties and was touring constantly by the late fifties. pills to stay awake for back-to-back shows and long drives; pills to come down after. amphetamines and barbiturates. he shared a nashville apartment for a while with waylon jennings, who had the same habit, and they fed each other. tour, use, crash, repeat, city after city.
it went public in 1965. in may he was arrested in starkville, mississippi, for trespassing — picking flowers on someone's property, intoxicated — and spent a night in jail. in october he was stopped at the el paso border crossing. officers thought he was carrying heroin from mexico. what they found in his guitar case was 688 dexedrine capsules and 475 tranquillisers. because they were prescription drugs he got a suspended sentence. it was national news anyway. his first wife, vivian, filed for divorce the next year, citing the drinking and drugs among other things.
the cave
this next part is his story, told by him, thirty years later, in cash: the autobiography (1997). nobody can check it and his own tellings vary in the details. take it as what he chose to say about the bottom.
in 1967, high and by his own description suicidal, he drove to nickajack cave near chattanooga, tennessee, and walked in alone, meaning to keep going until he couldn't. he crawled until his flashlight died and it was completely dark. and then, he says, something plain arrived: "there in nickajack cave, i became conscious of a very clear, simple idea: i was not in charge of my destiny." and: "i was not in charge of my own death. i was going to die at god's time, not mine." he felt his way back out. his mother and june carter were waiting outside.
what's documented is what happened next. june, her mother maybelle and her stepfather ezra moved into his house to help him get off the pills. he took an altar call at a nashville church. he proposed to june onstage in london, ontario, in february 1968; they married in march. eleven months after the cave he recorded at folsom prison, live, in a california penitentiary — the record that made 'the man in black' mean something: a guy singing to prisoners and addicts as one of them. even then, his longtime bassist marshall grant said, he didn't fully stop until around 1970, when his son was born.
the bottom was a real place with a name. so was the way out. and it still wasn't the last time.
the ostrich
here's the part people leave out of the movie. he relapsed in 1977. and in 1983 it got badly worse in the most cash way possible: he was kicked and seriously injured by a pet ostrich on his farm, was prescribed painkillers for the injury, and got hooked again. he checked into the betty ford center that year. he stayed clean for a while, slipped again, and went through treatment twice more — nashville in 1989, california in 1992.
so: sober in 1970 after a cave. using again in 1977. treatment in 1983. more in 1989 and 1992. that's roughly thirty years of a loop, in a famous man, with every resource on earth. and every time, he went back in.
the last act is the one you probably know — the stripped-down american recordings albums with rick rubin, starting 1994, and in 2002 his version of 'hurt'. quick fact: he didn't write it. trent reznor of nine inch nails did. what cash brought was a face and a voice that had been through all of the above, filmed months before he died. june died in may 2003. he followed her in september, at 71.
the honest ledger
the cave is his own account. 'hurt' is a cover. the line 'i am the walking contradiction' is kris kristofferson's lyric, not cash's. and none of this is a treatment plan — the thing that worked for him, more than once, was other people moving in and a hospital, not willpower.
but for the loop, the ledger reads plain: a relapse after years clean doesn't erase the years. it's a lap. he kept turning up for the next one. what would turning up look like for you, this time?