Johnny Cash: The Life by Robert Hilburn

Phillips also noticed that Cash, like Elvis, had a charisma about him. He was tall and commanding—he looked like a star. Phillips asked about his band. Actually, Cash replied, it was just three guys, and they weren’t real experienced. Looking back, Phillips recalled that it wasn’t clear if Cash was auditioning for himself or for the group. No matter, Phillips said; he’d like to meet the other musicians. Sam wasn’t big on polish. He was into feeling. He told Cash that if he could find the right song, he might be interested in recording him.
    Cash got into his car and drove the four blocks to Automobile Sales, where he told Marshall, Luther, and Red about meeting Sam. In hopes of catching Phillips before he left town again, the four of them went back to Sun the next morning. “It was just to say hello,” Grant recalled. “We didn’t even bring our instruments, but we could see that he liked John and we all got along pretty good.” Once again, Phillips invited Cash to come back if he came up with a good song.
      
    Feeling they had a mandate, the foursome went back to work on “I Was There When It Happened,” the song they thought best showcased them. Cash knew Sam didn’t want gospel music, but figured maybe he could change his mind if the song was good enough. The musicians spent a couple of weeks rehearsing and then went back for an informal audition. As Phillips set up microphones in the studio, the musicians began tuning their instruments. Suddenly, Kernodle started shaking so badly he couldn’t tune the pegs on the steel guitar. He kept going over or under the desired marks. This in turn made everyone else more nervous. After a few minutes of this, he stood up, walked over to Marshall, and whispered, “Grant, I can’t do anything but hold y’all back.” With that he left.
    Embarrassed, Cash took Phillips into the control booth, where he explained what had happened. “John apologized to me for not having a professional band, but I said that he should let me hear what they could do and I would be able to tell whether they had a style I would be able to work with,” Phillips recalled.
    At Phillips’s signal, John, Marshall, and Luther started playing “I Was There When It Happened,” but they were so ragged—Marshall swore that John was shaking almost as badly as Red had been, perspiration pouring down his face—that they feared the worst.
    Sam came back into the studio and adjusted the microphones again to improve the sound balance. He then asked them to play the song again. This time they were more relaxed. and the music came together nicely. They felt they had nailed it.
    Marshall didn’t know what to make of it when Sam’s first words to them as he walked out of the control booth were “There’s something really squirrely about you guys.”
    Squirrely?
    What he meant, it turned out, was that there was something different about them—which was high praise in the Sun owner’s mind.
    “I’ve never heard anything like it before, it’s different,” he told them. “I like that. But I’m not going to record a gospel song. I can’t sell ’em. I’ve tried and it didn’t work.”
    Though he didn’t spell it out for them, Phillips was fond of the trio’s spare but insistent rhythm, and he especially liked the understated force in Cash’s voice. When listening to most want-to-be singers, Phillips could tell exactly who they were trying to sound like—in most cases recently, Elvis Presley.
    When Cash sang, the only person Phillips heard was Cash himself. Not only was he different from Elvis; he was different from the Nashville singers. Phillips was privately pleased, too, that the steel guitarist had left. He felt that the instrument would have taken away from the trio’s uniqueness; it would have made the music sound too much like all those conventional country records coming out of Nashville.
    At the end of the audition Phillips told Cash, “If you come up with something original,