You might think you know music legend Johnny Cash from movies like Walk the Line and stage shows such as Million Dollar Quartet.
But Fluke Holland, who backed up the Man in Black as his drummer from 1960 to 1997, wants you to know, “None of that stuff happened.”
Fluke never saw the musician take drugs. He never saw him fall down, stoned and stupid, on stage in front of his band. And he knows Cash never went to prison, as so many people believe.
“I’m just happy to have known the way it actually happened,” said Fluke, who will be travelling to London Thursday to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Cash’s on-stage proposal to June Carter at the old London Gardens.
Fluke Holland
Called Engaged in a Fever, the event is sponsored by the Jack Richardson London Music Awards and takes place at the London Music Hall. Cash’s brother, Tommy, will also appear.
“I wish everybody could know Johnny Cash like I do, had been there when all this stuff happened. There’s no way to tell anybody about Johnny Cash. It was one of those things, you had to be there,” Holland, 82, added.
As for the actual moment Cash popped the question, Fluke draws a bit of a blank. It happened so quickly, the players in Cash’s band missed it.
“I doubt if anybody on the stage knew really what he had done,” the Tennessee percussionist said. “Everybody began to realize what he had done. I don’t know if it was funny. It was different. I don’t know if she said yes right there or no.”
There was no monitor equipment on stage or video camera to capture the moment, as would happen at a concert today.
Fluke credit’s Cash’s reputation, which continues to grow even years after this death in 2003, to the fact he was not afraid to be an individual and stick out from the crowd. “So he was unusual and different and great,” Holland said.
Did marriage change Cash at all? “He was the same old Johnny Cash the day I met him in 1955 as the day I went to the funeral,” Holland said.
June Carter Cash and Johnny Cash
Another major London connection to Cash is that his one-time manager, the late Saul Holiff, was a Forest City native and was managing the star at the time when he married Carter. Holiff managed Cash a total of 13 years.
Cash is known for numbers like Ring of Fire, Folsom Prison Blues and A Boy Named Sue, as well as covers later in his career of tunes such as Soundgarden’s Rusty Cage and Tom Petty’s Southern Accents.
Just don’t come to the show with any preconceptions about the original Man in Black. “Movie people, they write scripts the way they thought it was,” Holland said of 2005’s Walk the Line.
And the Broadway musical Million Dollar Quartet — which imagines the meeting between Cash, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins — didn’t get it right, either.
“There’s nothing from the beginning to the end of it that happened that night,” Holland said.
However, he does remember one thing: Being the drummer for that much-speculated-about session, he earned the historic sum of $11.
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IF YOU GO
What: Engaged in a Fever, a country music gala
Where: London Music Hall
When: Thursday, doors open 7 p.m., show starts 8 p.m.
Tickets: $55 at londonmusichall.com
This Article Was Originally Posted at www.einnews.com
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