What have you been doing during the COVID-19 Lockdown?

Binging on boxsets? Drinking too much? Self-medicating? Finding all your good clothes have shrunk from lack of wear?

All of the above?

George Miller spent his time lockdown making a set of beautiful marionettes featuring some of the biggest stars of rock ‘n’ roll, country, and R&B.

Miller is a Glasgow-based artist, singer, musician and iconic pop figure who’s better known as the front man to the legendary Kaisers and more recently the New Piccadillys. I’ve known Miller a long, long time. Well, since he dressed like a rocker in a black leather jacket and sported a quiff like a zeppelin, combed back like a barrel most surfers would die for. Something like that, though memory is fickle.

Since then, Miller sang and played guitar with the Styng-Rites (“We got on telly once, made the independent top 20 once, got in the music papers a bit, built a cult following and gigged ourselves to exhaustion.”); played guitar with Eugene Reynolds’ band Planet Pop; then gigged with the Revillos and Jayne County and the Electric Chairs.

In 1993, Miller formed the Kaisers:

“We ended up making six albums and a bunch of 45s, toured the USA twice, Japan once and gigged all over Europe. We did John Peel and Mark Radcliffe sessions amongst others and got on the telly a few times. I think we lasted about seven years and everything we earned just about covered the bar bill.”

Most recently, Miller was involved with the New Piccadillys, worked with Sharleen Spiteri, then toured and recorded with Los Straitjackets across America. About five years ago, the Kaisers reformed due to public demand and will be releasing a new album in the fall—more on that another time.
 

George Miller: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Band.
 
I reconnected with Miller through social media. Over the past few months, he would post a photograph of his latest marionette in progress. Sculpting heads of rock stars like Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly or country greats like Johnny Cash. They were beautiful, fabulous models, which were then dressed by Ursula Cleary and placed in boxes designed by Chris Taylor.

How did these marionettes come about?

George Miller: I’d been working on a BBC children’s drama for a few weeks (I’m a freelance Production Designer, gawd help me) and as lockdown was approaching, production stopped so I went from super busy to completely idle pretty much overnight.

I’d made some marionettes for a video a few years earlier and since then had been toying with the idea of making one of Link Wray but never seemed to have the time, so lockdown seemed the ideal opportunity. I liked the notion of spending time making something that had no ultimate purpose other than self amusement and no deadline for completion. With his outfit made by my partner Ursula, Link turned out pretty satisfactorily but after a few days I got the itch again, so I got to work on Bo Diddley, another guitar favorite of mine. Bo gave me a bit of trouble and the first attempt went in the bin. Realizing I’d tried to rush it, I reverted to lockdown pace, which I’ve employed ever since.
 

 
Why did you choose the classic rock ‘n’ roll, R’n'B icons?

GM: I wouldn’t call myself a musical luddite, but nothing has ever thrilled me more than a good rock ‘n’ roll record, so I decided to keep making favorites from the 1950s until my day job resumed. Although a couple of the subjects are still with us, the notion of “resurrecting” the others in some way appealed to me. I like seeing them bursting out of their “coffins.” It’s also a way of expressing my fascination with these people and the music they made. If I start to run out of subjects, I’ll move forward in time, but I doubt I’ll go past 1965 as the joy goes out of it a bit for me around then.

Maybe I’ll fast forward—Joey Ramone would be a good subject.
 

 
Where did the boxes for the marionettes come from?

GM: When I posted a photo of the Buddy Holly puppet, a Facebook friend by the name of Chris Taylor sent me a mock-up of a box label with a great illustration and excellent graphics. Chris got me thinking that this could be a “proper” project and we’ve been working together on ideas for an exhibition and a range of merchandise, as the marionettes have been developing a bit of a virtual fan base online. Chris’s illustrations have a great deal of style and though instantly recognizable, they have their own identity, which complements the puppets which are more rigidly representational. It reminds me of opening a box to find that the toy inside looks different to the illustration, something that always registered with me as a child. Chris’s work has definitely steered things in the direction of an art project, albeit with the (for now) all-important absence of deadline.

Where can we buy these Kaiser George Marionettes?

GM: The marionettes are one-offs and aren’t for sale as they take so long to make. I wouldn’t want to sculpt any of them twice, though mould making could be an option. As someone commented on Facebook, it would be a bit like selling your children. Chris and I are working on a set of bubblegum cards which will be for sale and we’re unashamedly excited about it. Second childhood? Definitely.
 

KGM Trading Cards.
 
What other plans do you have for your rock ‘n’ roll children?

GM: When the “cast” of puppets grows to 20 or so, I’m planning on making a video showcasing their individual musical styles plus a series of short clips based on the photographs of Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran passing time in the dressing room of the Glasgow Empire theater. I quite like the idea of two marionettes in a small room not doing very much, just idle movements.

Now, if I was an enterprising businessman, I would certainly be thinking of investing in mass marketing these to-die-for Kaiser George Marionettes. You know you sure as hell want one. And damned if I wouldn’t be collecting all those trading cards too.
 

 
See more of George’s Marvellous Marionettes, after the jump…
 

Neil Diamond and Johnny Cash.
 
One of Brooklyn’s finest, Neil Diamond, was 29 when he joined one of his heroes, 38-year old Johnny Cash on Cash’s short-lived variety program The Johnny Cash Show, which aired on February 7th, 1970.

After leaving Brooklyn for a short stint (Diamond’s father Kieve was in the military), the family ended up in Cheyenne, Wyoming where Neil would discover “singing cowboy” movies, exposing the young Diamond to the genre of country music. Later when the family returned to Brooklyn, Neil’s folks gave him an inexpensive acoustic guitar for his birthday. Diamond was already performing with his high school chorus along with another Brooklyn native, Barbra Streisand. A talented fencer, Diamond’s swordplay (not with Babs) got him a college scholarship where he would enroll as a pre-med student. Though “Dr. Neil Diamond” has a nice ring to it, Diamond, already a rabid songwriter, succumbed to his passion for music and dropped out to make it as a musician.

When Diamond appeared on The Johnny Cash Show, he was basking in the glow of his success as a songwriter and a solo artist. In 1966 he penned the monster hit “I’m a Believer” for The Monkees and also had a smash of his own the same year with “Solitary Man.” Interesting Cash/Diamond side note; 34 years later, Johnny Cash would cover “Solitary Man” on his deeply moving album, American III: Solitary Man. For Cash’s show, Diamond chose to perform a gospel-inspired number called “Brother Love’s Travelling Salvation Show” from his 1969 album of the same name. The invigorating single irritated evangelical southerners, due to Diamond’s twist of recording and performing it in the style of a proselytizing evangelical preacher. At one point during the three-minute jam, Diamond does, in fact, deliver the song’s lyrics with some preacher-on-the-pulpit fire and brimstone. I’m sure at this point you may be wondering how this went over with Johnny, a religious man to say the least. Well, he loved Diamond and considered him, as we all should, one of the era’s greatest songwriters and performers.

I can’t imagine anyone not being a fan of Neil Diamond, and even if you think you aren’t, just try to NOT sing along to “Sweet Caroline” the next time you hear it. Diamond was recently diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and in January of this year, he announced he would be retiring from touring. This did not stop the 77-year-old Diamond from putting on a special show (which you can see here), this past Saturday for firefighters battling the horrific Lake Christine blaze in Colorado which has been burning for almost four weeks.

I’ve posted footage of Diamond’s appearance on The Johnny Cash Show below which includes a short interview segment between the pair of musical gods. Now, go turn on your heartlight, then turn this one up.
 

Neil Diamond and Johnny Cash chatting on the set of ‘The Johnny Cash Show’ in 1970.
 

Neil Diamond joins Johnny Cash on ‘The Johnny Cash Show.’ The show originally aired on February 7th, 1970.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘Thunderball’ opening credits with the theme song that Johnny Cash submitted
How Johnny Cash was nearly killed by an ostrich in 1981
New black tarantula spider species discovered near Folsom Prison is named after Johnny Cash
‘The Pot Smoker’s Song’: Neil Diamond’s terrible anti-weed anthem
Neil Diamond fans, this excellent BBC ‘In Concert’ show from 1971 is a must-see

Johnny Cash is all of us this holiday season. Drunk, hiding in the bushes and eating cake.
 
On average, people gain anywhere between seven to ten pounds over the holiday season. The annual feeding frenzy is now in full swing ready to send our cholesterol into outer space while we simultaneously pour all kinds of delicious booze all over our livers. While I love pie and bourbon just as much as anyone else, I also like to cook so I thought it would be fun to share some fun celebrity recipes from yesteryear.

Most of the recipes below were published in the 1978 charity cookbook, Habilitat’s Celebrity Cookbook, 1930’s What Actors Eat When They Eat, and 1981’s Celebrity Cookbook. I’ve included a nice selection of recipes shared by icons such as Cary Grant’s barbequed chicken, Boris Karloff’s guacamole (which calls for sherry mind you), and Johnny Cash’s “Old Iron Pot” family style chili. The majority of the recipes are of the traditional variety—such as beef stew and meatloaf, though there are a few curve balls. Like Bette Davis’ “Mustard Gelatin Ring” which sounds about as appetizing as the rat she served to Joan Crawford in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), and actress Bea Arthur’s fancy-sounding “Avocado with Jellied Madrilene.” For those of you who lack Arthur’s gastronomical refinement, madrilene is a cold tomato consommé. Check them all out below!
 

 

 

 
Many more after the jump…

‘Door-to-Door Maniac’ poster for sale at Westgate Gallery
 
The Man in Black’s acting debut came when he portrayed the deranged, practically foaming at the mouth cop killer “Johnny Cabot” in the 1961 film noir, Five Minutes to Live. Johnny, along with his partner (Vic Tayback, “Mel” from the 70s sitcom Alice) plot a unique bank robbery. Johnny knocks on the door of a housewife (Cay Forester, who wrote the script) offering to give her guitar lessons and then takes her hostage. Her husband (Donald Woods) a bank manager is told that she will be murdered unless Tayback’s character walks out of his bank with $70,000.

Their plans go wildly awry when the banker calmly informs the dumb duo that they’d be doing him a big favor by killing his wife so he can run off to Las Vegas with his mistress! Then their son (a young Ron Howard) comes home from school, throwing another wrench into the works.
 

 
The weirdest part of the film is the way they shoehorned in a Johnny Cash performance (albeit a completely twisted one) when “Johnny Cabot” decides to sing a murder ballad to his terrified hostage about her own impending death. You can skip directly to 36:10 to watch Cash-as-psychopath terrorize her with his guitar, performing “Five Minutes to Live.”

He’s not exactly “Frank Booth” from Blue Velvet, but he’s still pretty fucking creepy. On the movie poster Cash was described as “a lusty romantic guitar singing powerhouse.”

Five Minutes to Live was re-titled Door-to-Door Maniac for a 1966 re-release. Country great Merle Travis makes a cameo appearance.
 

 
Last night I saw a concert by Billy Bragg, whose socialistic music and entire socialistic steez has taken on new ultra-relevance in an era in which Donald Trump is the President of the United States of America. Bragg was suitably fired up, and you can be sure he whipped the audience at Cleveland’s Music Box Supper Club into a righteous frenzy before the night was out.

Opening was the venerable Jon Langford of the Mekons, and he told an amusing story from the stage involving Johnny Cash. The starting point was the ‘Til Things Are Brighter project, which Langford and former Fall member and later BBC deejay Marc Riley spearheaded as a way to pay homage to Cash. This was the late 1980s—seven years after Cash was nearly killed by an ostrich in 1981—and Cash’s stock was at a relative nadir. As Langford explained, Cash was a bit dejected because it looked for all the world like his productive career was over and he had little to look forward to beyond a lengthy dotage and an inevitable slide to obscurity.

The roster of musicians is rather eye-popping. The album opens with Michelle Shocked, whose breakthrough album Short Sharp Shocked came out the same year, doing “One Piece At A Time.” Pete Shelley of the Buzzcocks covered “Straight A’s In Love” while Cabaret Voltaire‘s Steven Mallinder took on “I Walk the Line.” The Triffids’ David McComb gave “Country Boy” his best while Langford’s Mekons and Riley played “Folsom Prison Blues” and “Wanted Man,” respectively.

All thirteen backing tracks were recorded by Langford and Riley and their house band in one day at RikRak Studio in Leeds, and the vocal tracks were picked up as various opportunities arose over the next several weeks. As the Guardian’s Graeme Thomson wrote in 2011,
 

Langford recalls that Marc Almond, the one “proper” pop star taking part, came in and “told me I’d cut “Man in Black” in the wrong key. He had a horrible fit in the studio. Sally [Timms, from the Mekons] talked him down and coaxed this fantastic performance out of him, but I think he was a bit nervous. It was maybe a bit odd for him to be doing Johnny Cash songs.”

 
Odd perhaps, but Timms did some good work there—Almond’s vocal track is arguably the best thing on the album.

One of Langford and Riley’s clever ideas was to have Mary Mary, the (male) singer of the Grebo band Gaye Bykers on Acid execute a cover of Cash’s classic song “A Boy Named Sue.” They were concerned that Cash might not be enthusiastic being covered by anybody associated with a band of that name, but not a bit of it, he was totally open to it and found the idea entirely amusing.

Keep reading after the jump…

Johnny Cash’s California driver’s license issued in 1964.
 
Back in 2013 my Dangerous Minds colleague Tara McGinley put together a post containing images of passports once used by David Bowie, Johnny Cash and Janis Joplin (among others) which I found very entertaining. Mostly because the celebrity subjects look less than thrilled to in their photos—with the exception of Joplin who is grinning from ear to ear. Perhaps the result of an unplanned acid flashback, who can say? At any rate, while conducting my ongoing “research” for my “job” here at DM I came across one of Cash’s old driver licenses from 1964 and that discovery led me down a rather intriguing rabbit hole that was full of other vintage driver’s licenses—some with equally intriguing backstories to go with them.
 

Robert De Niro’s taxicab licence from 1976.
 
Cash’s California state driver’s license (pictured at the top of this post) was sold in an auction in 2014 for $4,480 and even made an appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman along with the man who had acquired it, Rick Harrison (the star of the reality television show Pawn Stars) who purchased it from an individual who brought it into his store in Las Vegas. Not one to be outdone by the Man in Black, a license once belonging to Alfred Hitchcock (which you can see below) sold at an auction for the tidy sum of for $8,125. Whoa. 

Then there’s the coolest one in the lot I dug up belonging to a 33-year-old Robert De Niro (pictured above) issued by the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission in 1976. Known for his commitment to getting as “method” as possible when it came to his acting roles, De Niro prepped for his role as Travis Bickle the aspiring vigilante about to go off the rails in Taxi Driver by spending a number of weeks driving a New York City yellow cab. According to folklore associated with De Niro’s time behind the wheel, when he was recognized by one of his passengers they actually believed that De Niro was still working as a taxi driver after winning an Oscar for Best Actor in a Supporting Role in The Godfather II for his impeccable portrayal of young Vito Corleone. Who knew?

When it comes to the story behind Manson’s alleged driver’s license things are a little sketchy. In the 1971 book The Family author Ed Sanders was able to substantiate that Mason lived at the address noted on the license in Santa Barbara—705 Bath Street—along with Lynn “Squeaky” Fromme and Manson Family member Mary Brunner (the mother of Manson’s son Valentine) sometime during 1967—two years prior to his participation in the brutal slayings of director Roman Polanski’s pregnant wife Sharon Tate and four others at Polanski’s home in Benedict Canyon. The license notes Manson’s date of birth as November 11th—which is a point of contention between historians and criminologists alike as Manson’s date of birth has also been said to fall on November 12th. So while the jury is still out on the actual authenticity of this creepy artifact, it’s still nothing short of chilling to actually see a mundane personal document belonging to the one of the most notorious criminals in history.

You can see Manson’s maybe driver’s license as well as others that once belonged to Davy Jones of the Monkees (RIP), Joe Strummer, Dean Martin and a beaming James Brown all of whom look about as happy as we all do (with the exception of Brown of course because, cocaine) in our DMV photos which proves that the DMV does in fact hate everyone.
 

California driver’s license allegedly issued to Charles Manson in 1967.
 

Back in 2008 this driver’s license once belonging to Alfred Hitchcock sold at an auction for $8,125.
 
More after the jump…

 
In 2010 and 2011 the English artist Neal Fox executed an utterly gorgeous series of stained-glass windows in imitation of the iconography of saints found in cathedrals all over Europe. The series included Johnny Cash, J.G. Ballard, Hunter S. Thompson, Albert Hofmann, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Serge Gainsbourg, Aleister Crowley, William S. Burroughs, Billie Holiday, and Francis Bacon.

Now, it’s perfectly possible that you will see these images and think, “Wow, those paintings in the stained-glass style are awesome.” So it’s important to emphasize that these are not paintings, Fox actually created the stained-glass windows themselves—in fact, he worked with traditional methods “at the renowned Franz Mayer of Munich manufacturer” in order to produce a dozen windows, each using leaded stained glass in a steel frame and standing 2.5 meters tall.

Put them all together in a room, as the Daniel Blau gallery in London did in 2011, and you have “an alternative church of alternative saints.” Here is what that room looked like:
 

 
The Daniel Blau show was called “Beware of the God.” Alongside the well-known provocateurs and trouble-makers like Crowley and Hawkins is a figure that might challenge even the most astute student of antiheroes, a man named John Watson. Far from the complacent invention of Arthur Conan Doyle, this John Watson is the artist’s grandfather, described by his loving grandson as a “hell raiser” and “a World War II bomber pilot, chat show host, writer and publisher, who in his post war years sought solace in Soho’s bohemian watering holes.”

Quoting the Daniel Blau exhibition notes:
 

As traditional church windows show the iconography of saints, through representations of events in their lives, instruments of martyrdom and iconic motifs, Fox plays with the symbolism of each character’s cult of personality; Albert Hoffman takes a psychedelic bicycle ride above the LSD molecule, J G Ballard dissects the world, surrounded by 20th Century imagery and the eroticism of the car crash, and Johnny Cash holds his inner demon in chains after a religious experience in Nickerjack cave.

 
You can order prints of some of these images for £150 each (about $214).
 

 

 
Many more after the jump…

Johnny Cash and his eight-legged namesake tarantula spider, Aphonopelma johnnycashi

Aphonopelma johnnycashi is a new species of black tarantula spider that was just discovered roaming the hills near Folsom State Prison. The lockdown, near Sacramento, CA, is where Johnny Cash performed two historic shows inside the walls of the still operational correctional facility in 1968, captured on the iconic album, At Folsom Prison.
 

Aphonopelma johnnycashi
 
According to Biologist Chris Hamilton of the Florida Museum of Natural History, Aphonopelma johnnycashi was one of fourteen new tarantula species that were discovered in and around western Sierra Nevada mountains. The males of the species are predominately black and while there is no word on how big Cash’s eight-legged namesake is, Hamilton (who also sports a Johnny Cash tattoo, because science), had this to say about the newest arachnid to be named after rock and roll royalty:

Then once we looked at the genomics and looked at some of the ecological constraints, we could see this species was pretty unique and independent from the others that it’s closely related to.

Which fittingly sounds very much much like the Man in Black himself.

After the jump,Johnny Cash sings “Folsom Prison Blues”...

 
Wear Dinner, the apparel purveyors who gave the world that wonderful Black Sabbath/Minor Threat mash-up we told you about last summer, have upped the I-want-one stakes with their new Bernie Cash shirt, which plops the face of encouragingly popular left-wing insurgent presidential candidate Bernie Sanders onto Jim Marshall’s indelible image of Johnny Cash flipping the bird at San Quentin prison in 1969, a juxtaposition that aptly captures a lot of the anti-establishment hostility expressed by some of the candidate’s backers.
 

 
The shirts are available only in black because duh. $5 from each shirt sold will benefit the Sanders campaign.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
We kinda totally love these Bernie Sanders punk rock t-shirts
‘Berned in D.C.’: Images of Bernie Sanders with hilarious fake punk rock quotes

 
When the amusing podcast James Bonding, hosted by Matt Gourley and Matt Mira, got around to dealing with the ultra-boring, ultra-rapey (this is according to them, mind you) fourth installment of the James Bond franchise, Thunderball, things livened up considerably when they discussed the story behind the theme song.

Briefly, the theme song in the movie is sung by Tom Jones, who, legend has it, fainted upon completing the titanic final note of the song. That song had replaced a different song, sung by Shirley Bassey and, much later, by Dionne Warwick, which had the pretty unbeatable title of “Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.” Albert Broccoli didn’t like that the song didn’t mention the name of the movie, so he shitcanned it.

But at some point Johnny Cash submitted a version, which would have been much more suitable for a spaghetti western and is, frankly, awesome. I’m prepared based on very little actual knowledge to assert that it’s better than any existing James Bond theme, and that includes the one from you-know-who and “this ever-changing world in which we’re living.” Sure, Cash’s version is a teensy bit stupid, but when you kick into that sweeping Morricone vibe, you can lead me just about anywhere.

A month later, according to Robert Hilburn’s Johnny Cash: The Life, Cash wrote a pretty similar song for the John Wayne movie The Sons of Katie Elder, and in all honesty it’s a little better.

You can find Cash’s “Thunderball” on the 2011 compilation Bootleg, Vol. 2: From Memphis to Hollywood.
 

 
1968’s Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison is surely one of the greatest live albums of all time, but just about a year later, Cash recorded another stellar live album for an audience of prisoners, At San Quentin. I don’t think this is a terribly controversial opinion: for my money, San Quentin is the better of the two. Cash’s longtime guitarist Luther Perkins passed away in a tragic house fire in between the two recordings, and absent that familiar mooring, Cash’s sound feels wild, like the band’s ever teetering on the edge of coming unglued on San Quentin. With new guitarist Bob Wootten, Cash is energetic, loose, gnarly, and just much closer to primal rock than he’d been on the preceding LP. The version of “Wanted Man” on that album just goddamn flattens me every time I hear it, and it’s impossible to deny the classic status of “A Boy Named Sue.” But whichever prison album you prefer, this much is surely true: those two concerts probably saw the most raucous upswells of cheering and applause at the line “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die” that Cash ever got out of any of his audiences.

That San Quentin performance was filmed by England’s Grenada television, and ten never before seen B&W still photos from the production have just been released by ITV. Prints are available for sale via Sonic Editions.
 

 

 

 

 
More after the jump…

You are in no position to give health advice, Mr. Johnny Cash!
 
Johnny Cash certainly lived his paradoxes—a champion of the rebel, yet oddly reverent of the powerful. He sympathized publicly with the margins of society while simultaneously invoking a kind of nostalgic, rural wholesomeness. That in mind, it makes total sense that he’d do a public service announcement on physical fitness for Richard Nixon.

It’s not totally without its charms, either! The tune is catchy. “The man I used to be” is a pretty clever euphemism for “I got fat,” and the whole thing lends itself to that wistful reminiscing you want from a Johnny Cash. This was recorded only one year in of a seven-year period of sobriety. Before 1970 he was still doing insane amounts of pills, and engaging in super-wholesome activities like driving out to the wilderness all cranked up and accidentally setting fire to 508 acres of California National Forest.

I guess Nixon thought America needed a fitness spokesman who wouldn’t make us all feel bad about ourselves?
 

 
Richard Nixon’s presidency was marked by a legendarily thick air of paranoia. Dick feared the Democrats—sure, but he also feared Jews, intellectuals, black people, Mexicans and a lot of run-of-the-mill, unremarkable whites, too. In fact, Nixon’s adviser Murray Chotiner (ironically, a Jew and former Democrat), felt that Johnny Cash might upset the Republican masterplan, and hoped Nixon would set him straight at a White House event.
 

 
The fear was that Cash would carry water for Tex Ritter, a colleague and country music legend who was then running for Tennessee’s Senate Republican primary. Predictably, Cash never actually endorsed Ritter, who eventually lost by a landslide. Two years later, Johnny would visit Nixon again to discuss prison reform. The story goes that Nixon requested “Okie from Muskogee,” a Merle Haggard song satirizing reactionary “good ole boys” that Nixon most likely went over Nixon’s head. It’s said that Cash snidely responded by playing a decidedly bleeding heart, anti-war set of “What Is Truth?” “The Man in Black,” and “The Ballad of Ira Hayes.”

I’d argue that Johnny Cash is a complex and powerful figure, and that it’s tempting to ascribe political dissidence to a man who was ultimately kind of a simple guy with a few very meaningful pet projects. Regardless, it’s fun to contemplate Nixon being concerned about Johnny Cash being a potential thorn in his side, even if the threat was only imagined. You can see footage and hear clips of the 1972 visit below, from the Nixon tapes. June even says that they’re praying for him.
 

 
Via Retronaut

 
In which one towering figure of 20th century American music good-naturedly ribs another…

“You know at just about all of our shows, and wherever we go, we usually do an impersonation… and we had a request here tonight to do an impersonation of a rock and roll singer…”

This is funnier than you think it’s going to be.

Interesting historical footnote to this, it was Elvis who first “introduced” Johnny Cash to June Carter. In her own words:

He was stooped down on one knee and grasping a guitar trying to tune it to somewhere near the correct pitch to make a correct cord ring - ‘Everybody knows where you go when the sun goes down, Ah-ummm - A - ummm’ and he’d strike the guitar again. Plink: plunk: ‘A-ummm ...’ What are you trying to do, I asked. ‘I’m trying to tune this blame guitar, honey, and I’m trying to sing like Johnny Cash’. Who is Johnny Cash I asked Elvis Presley, and I grabbed the guitar away from him. Mother Maybelle would never let me or Elvis go on the stage with a guitar that was that far out of tune! What’s the a-um-a-um for? ‘That’s what drives the girls crazy’ Elvis said. ‘Cash don’t have to move a muscle, he just sings and stands there’. I don’t know this Johnny Cash I said, and Elvis said: ‘Oh you’ll know Cash. The whole world will know Johnny Cash. He’s a friend of mine’. So the whole tour, my first with Elvis, we went into small cafes all throughout the south and Elvis played Johnny Cash on the jukebox while I fought off the girls trying to get through Scotty, Bill and I to Elvis. And the thing I remember the very best was the voice of Johnny Cash singing ‘You’re gonna cry, cry, cry and you’ll cry alone!’. Somehow this low voice just penetrated my heart and spoke to my loneliness, for I had no lover in my life and there was a terrific loneliness in my soul. I had visions of myself screaming ‘Hey Porter’ and riding a lonesome train home.

I had been working at the Grand Ole Opry since 1950 with my mother Maybelle and sisters, Helen, Anita and Chester Atkins. I would rush home from a tour on Saturday nights back to the same routine of loneliness and this particular night, I found myself backstage trying to tune my guitar humming Ah-ummm Ah-Ummm, when all of a sudden, there he was! The voice was the same. Johnny Cash took me by the hand and said, ‘I’ve always wanted to meet you’. The strangest feeling came over me. I was afraid to look him in the eyes. It was one of the things I did best. I never stammered and still found myself not able to say much of anything. I think I finally blurted out - I feel like I know you already. Elvis plays you on the jukebox all the time and he can’t tune his guitar without humming ‘Cry, Cry, Cry’ Now he’s got me doing it.

‘Why don’t you work with me on the road sometime?’ I’d like to I said. Hey, bring me one of your records. I’ve become a real fan.

I can’t remember anything else we talked about, except his eyes. Those black eyes that shone like agates. I only glanced into them because I believed that I would be drawn into his soul and I would never have been able to walk away, had he asked me to go with him. I felt that he was the most handsome man I’d ever met. I saw him take six encores that night. He had a command of his performance that I had never seen before. Just a guitar and a base and a gentle kind of presence that made not only me, but whole audiences become his followers. I walked away from him that evening.

The next time I saw Johnny Cash, he brought me his new record and we did find the time to talk together. Both of us afraid to look, and both afraid to see the lost and lonely souls that we were. For the next few years, I never saw him where I did not remember when, where and who he was with. John told me that after seeing him on stage that very first time in Nashville, he knew he was going to marry me. I guess neither of us ever forgot that. We walked away from each other and we both made some bad choices in our travels. I wondered if he has as hard a time with my blue eyes as I had with his, and after he wrote ‘I Still Miss Someone’ I think he might have really looked.

It took such a long time of praying and of walking away when I knew from first looking at him that his hurt was as great as mine, and from the depths of my despair, I stepped up to feel the fire and there is no way to be in that kind of hell, no way to extinguish a flame that burns, burns, burns. And so came the idea for the song ‘Ring Of Fire’. I was ashamed to tell John that I had always cared, that I couldn’t get him off my mind. Out of the loneliness came one song after another. There was so much hurt for both of us. And hurt for those we loved that only God could have pulled us out of that ‘Ring Of Fire’. For the last 35 years, I have been able to look into those black steel eyes and feel his love, and realize he always cared.

—from the liner notes for the Johnny Cash CD, Love.
 

 
Eat the Document was intended to be a TV documentary on Bob Dylan’s 1966 European tour, produced for ABC Stage 67, a prestigious showcase for musicals, documentaries, original teleplays and short films (everything from a rock musical scored by Burt Bacharach and Hal David to a doc on Masters and Johnson to “Skaterdater”), but the network rejected it for being “incomprehensible.” The film captures the madness of that tour and was shot by D. A. Pennebaker, who’d also made Don’t Look Back, the documentary of Dylan’s 1965 tour. Pennebaker’s version was called “Something Is Happening.” The retitled Eat the Document was cut by Dylan himself with Howard Alk, but the network still didn’t want it.

Eat the Document wasn’t seen at all until the early 70s when it was screened at New York’s Academy of Music and the Whitney Museum. Shitty bootleg copies have floated around for decades (I had one that was barely watchable) but in recent years a super clean digital copy has been seen on torrent trackers, and occasionally on YouTube. Dylan was, and is, alleged to hate it, which is why you should probably watch this sooner rather than later. There’s always a bit of Whac-A-Mole going on with Eat the Document there, I’ve noticed.
 

 
In the film we see Dylan tired, jamming with Johnny Cash, onstage with The Band (then still called The Hawks) writing songs with Robbie Robertson and wearily dealing with members of the media. Some of the infamous footage of Dylan riding around in a limo with John Lennon (Lennon claimed Dylan had gotten him high on heroin beforehand) is also seen in the film.
 

 
Thank you Glen E. Friedman of New York City!