Bob Dylan Had Johnny Cash Do His Dirty Work and Shut Down a Reporter
Bob Dylan grew up listening to Johnny Cash and had the unique pleasure of not only meeting one of his idols but discovering that admiration went both ways. Dylan and Cash exchanged letters back and forth before they met. Eventually, after much insistence on Cash’s part, Dylan agreed to appear on The Johnny Cash Show. While there, Cash passed on messages from Dylan to a journalist. Dylan could have been rude. He wasn’t though, which was proof of Dylan’s friendship with Cash.
Johnny Cash insisted that Bob Dylan appeared on his show
In 1969, The Johnny Cash Show premiered after some hesitation on Cash’s part.
“I said, ‘I don’t want to do that, it’s too confining, it’s awful hard.’ You gotta give your life to that camera,” Cash said, per the book Cash on Cash: Interviews and Encounters With Johnny Cash. “So they kept after me. They kept begging, calling meetings, and they would come down here from New York and I would have meetings with them, and finally I said, ‘June [Carter Cash] and I have been talking about it and we’ll give it a try if we can have the guests that we want on the show.'”
Executives agreed, but Cash admitted that the show would never have made it to air without Dylan.
“‘But the musical guest I want on the first show is Bob Dylan,’ and they looked at each other again and said, ‘Bob Dylan?'” Cash recalled. “I said, ‘Yeah. If I can’t have him, I don’t want to do a show.’ So they said, ‘OK we’ll try to get him . . .’ I said, ‘No, you don’t have to. I’ll ask him myself.’ I was trying to keep him from going through that hassle, with the agents and the deals and all that. They did get involved, of course, but I asked him myself first. He said he didn’t do TV, but he’d do it for me.”
Bob Dylan had Johnny Cash pass on messages for him
Dylan asked Cash to make sure he was protected from any journalists backstage. When a journalist, Red O’Donnell, called Cash asking for an interview with Dylan, Cash refused.
“And he said, ‘Will you ask him?’ and I said, ‘No, he’s already said he won’t talk to press . . .’ and he said, ‘Just ask him for me,’ and I said, ‘I’ll mention to him that you called.’ So at rehearsal on Wednesday I asked Bob, ‘Red O’Donnell is the number-one man in the music column in town on the newspaper, you want to talk to him?’ and he said, ‘No.'”
Cash went back and forth between O’Donnell and Dylan several more times. Eventually, O’Donnell requested to ask Dylan just one question.
“So I went to Bob and said, ‘Will you answer one question that this reporter wants to ask you?'” he said. “He said, ‘What’s the question?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ He said, ‘Ask him what the question is …’ So Red had his foot in the door.”
O’Donnell arrived backstage during a rehearsal, and Dylan completely ignored him. According to Cash, Dylan walked to the other side of the room whenever O’Donnell approached him. Eventually, the reporter left.
“And I started laughing,” Cash said. “I couldn’t help it. But Bob wasn’t laughing, he wasn’t happy. I said, ‘I’m sorry about that — I had nothing to do with him getting in here. I don’t know how he did it.’ And Bob said, ‘I would’ve talked to him except for one thing.’ I said, ‘What’s that?’ He said, ‘He wouldn’t take off his sunglasses.’ I said, ‘I don’t blame you.’ [Laughs.]”
This was proof of their friendship
Though it may seem that Dylan behaved childishly in ignoring O’Donnell, it could have been worse. According to Joan Baez, Dylan’s stage fright manifested as raging outbursts over unrelated problems.
“One night we showed up backstage — I guess we must have left for a while and gone back to the dressing room — and his jacket was gone,” Baez told Rolling Stone in 1972. “And he had a tantrum, I mean like a five-year-old, and he screamed at the policeman and the policeman scurried out, and he screamed at who else was there and they all scurried out.”
A problem ahead of his performance — like a persistent reporter — could easily have led Dylan to throw a tantrum. This would have set a terrible tone for the first-ever episode of Cash’s show, though. Dylan’s choice to avoid O’Donnell and move on is evidence of his deep respect for the older musician.
