ME AND JOHNNY CASH

Published by Rick on Tagged Uncategorized

The title may be a bit misleading, so for the record, no, I never met him. Saw him live in 1976, so the closest I ever got to him was about 30 feet away. What Johnny Cash and I have in common is we both played two of the most notorious federal prisons in the US, Folsom and San Quentin. Rick and Ruby played Folsom in 1979, San Quentin happened a year later.

We actually played four penitentiaries in a two-year period under the auspices of a non profit organisation known as Bread and Roses, still in operation after nearly 50 years. Their main goal is to entertain people of all ages who have been disadvantaged or otherwise isolated, and most often institutionalised. Based in Corte Madera, California, about 30 miles north of San Francisco, they booked us at Marin County juvenile and state prisons in addition to the big two. The artists, some of them major names, all waived their performance fees. So did we.

Both the Folsom and San Quentin gigs had their hitches, but we did manage to play. For Folsom, we rode a bus from the Bay Area along with another band we had worked with before. We left from Marin County at around 9:00, arriving at the gates of Folsom around noon. The show was set to start at 1:00, with us going up first. Except that we went through major security checks at the entrance, where it was revealed that one of the other band had some type of contraband in one of their bags, thus the entire band were not allowed inside and had to wait in the bus the entire time. We finally got to the stage area at around 1:30, on the prison yard in the middle of summer. The outside temperature was probably around 100 degrees, but all those factors didn’t seem to upset the inmates, who waited patiently while we set up and sound checked. One of the most dangerous looking of all the inmates said in our direction, “Hey, man, take all the time you want. I got 99 years!”

The performance went well, even though we started approximately an hour late, did maybe 30 minutes total, and were the only act. In fact, the only scary time was after we had finished and our gear had already been loaded back on the bus, where the poor other band had been waiting. We had to walk across the prison yard unescorted and in full view of the inmates, who were now back in their cells. The chorus of catcalls we got from them was near deafening, and though we couldn’t exactly determine what was being said, it was clear they weren’t inviting us to tea. That chorus went unabated until we actually got inside the bus.

By the time we did San Quentin in 1980, opening for hippie rocker and Woodstock veteran Country Joe McDonald, we were in our fourth venture on the prison circuit, and thought we had everything figured out. Ah, but I would make a near fatal mistake of showing up at the entrance to the prison wearing blue jeans. This was a no-no, as all the inmates wore denim jeans as well. It was mostly to protect me from being mistaken for an inmate that I was advised to wear anything but denim, but I somehow never got the memo. Security was telling me I couldn’t enter the grounds, but fortunately, I had black trousers in our prop bag that I was intending to wear in performance. It just meant I had to change into them right then and there, and I was safe.

Unlike Folsom, we actually did interact one on one with some of the inmates, which proved the more insightful, since more than half of them were murderers. One that I talked to at length looked rather scholarly, and had actually gotten his law degree while serving his life term. He claimed to have been at the wrong place at the wrong time when someone was killed over a drug deal gone wrong. His defence attorneys had done such a terrible job in court that even without any previous convictions, he was given a life sentence. That was part of his motivation to get the degree. By the time I had met him, he had served about seven years, with about 15 to go before he would be considered for parole, but the powers that be decided that getting his law degree made him more dangerous, so they kept adding time to his sentence. He may well still be incarcerated.

The other one I interacted with was the Talent Coordinator for the prison’s Arts Program. It may have been a meaningless title, but he was allowed to hang out behind the stage with us, though there were plenty of guards around just in case. I sat and talked to this scary-looking yet kind man for a good 15 minutes, and most revealing was when I asked what he was in for. He replied matter-of-factly, “Well, they have a law in this country that says you can’t take another person’s life, and I did that, I just didn’t think I’d get caught!” He thought he had covered all the bases, in that he had chopped the victim’s body into multiple parts, and buried them all over California. Unfortunately, his near-perfect crime was exposed by a guy racing his dune buggy in the Mojave Desert, where his tire had kicked up a buried shoe that still had a foot in it! DNA testing was new at that time, but effective enough that the feds were able to connect the severed foot to the man I was sitting next to. No idea whether he is still among us.

San Quentin was Rick and Ruby’s last gig in a prison, but I added on a solo gig at a school for troubled teens in Central LA in the early 90’s. The line that usually goes with those gigs is “captive audience,” and it’s old but it applies. They’re grateful for anything that takes them away from their unfortunate lives. It always made me feel good making them laugh.

Oh by the way, VOTE, goddammit!

November 6th, 2022



Leave a Comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.