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1 " In future years when overwhelmed by drugs and other pressures, he would often isolate himself and turn to music as a refuge; the purity of music was a place of comfort and affirmation. "
― , Johnny Cash: The Life
2 " He liked his solitude. "
3 " Cash said he was someone “made up of bad parts but was trying to do good. "
4 " Cash said in return, “I’m a songwriter. I use my imagination. The important thing is the message of the song, not the imagery. "
5 " know everyone will say I’ve got to be out of my skull, but I feel like my recording career has just begun,” Cash told a reporter. “You know, my dreams and ambitions after all these years are pretty much the same as they were at the beginning. I still just want to make records and sing on the radio. After I finally got on the radio I just wanted to make better records and that’s still what I want to do. "
6 " It was just a week after the Columbia decision that Cash's life would take another seismic shift: he would take his first amphetamine. "
7 " Love with everything you have because it all passes like the blink of an eye. "
8 " He and June would eventually testify at nearly three dozen Crusades in front of nearly 2 million people. "
9 " Bono and Clayton had such a great time that the band paid homage to Cash in their Rattle and Hum album package with a huge photo of them in the Sun studio just beneath a framed photo of Phillips and Cash. In the early weeks of 1993, Bono was working "
10 " But Cash was not a man for moderation. He was soon craving more pills, and to his delight, he found them easy to get. "
11 " There in Nickajack Cave I became conscious of a very clear, simple idea: I was going to die at God’s time, not mine. I hadn’t prayed over my decision to seek death in the cave, but that hadn’t stopped God from intervening. "
12 " All this further convinced Phillips that the country music old guard in Nashville was vulnerable. Pierce was only thirty-four, but the young artists from Sun had made him look fifty. "
13 " Why did you sign Johnny Cash? Don’t you think he’s had his better days?’ I looked at him and said, ‘I’ve got news for you, young man. If Johnny Cash is over, country music is over. "
14 " Marshall remembered Vivian’s being a bit overwhelmed by all the screaming young girls at the shows, even if they were mostly going crazy over Elvis. This wasn’t the fun-loving, relatively tame family crowd she had seen at country shows in San Antonio. This was something much more intense and sexual. "
15 " As he sat by the radio, J.R. was fascinated to see how Roy listened to the country singers with the same devotion that his mother showed toward her gospel singers. "
16 " I could see the momentum already there,” Marshall said. “John was becoming popular, with that little different sound we had. His big gigantic voice was cutting through something fierce. You could see it grow day by day. "
17 " I kept thinking, ‘I’m not what they think I am. I don’t have all the answers. I’m not magic.’ But then you grow with it and you learn that it really doesn’t matter what other people think of you. You’re just one human being, and you’re doing the best you can. "
18 " Cash’s reputation as a maverick who’d done jail time, and the El Paso drug bust, too, strengthened his link to rock ’n’ roll; it was his music as well as his image that paved the way for the country-rock coalition that Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings would tap into with their outlaw movement in the late 1970s. "
19 " the freakish arrangement on another novelty, Chris Gantry’s “Allegheny,” that featured June squawking like an injured hawk. Grant thought it was downright embarrassing. "
20 " The importance of the Hayride wasn’t its pay scale. Most of the performers were paid union scale, $12 a night, which barely covered their gas and food. The value was the exposure. With its potent fifty-thousand-watt station, KWKH’s signal alone provided invaluable reach, but the Hayride show was also carried by some two hundred other stations, from as far west as El Paso, north to St. Louis, east to Jacksonville, and down the coast to Miami. That meant a lot of potential record buyers. "
