Johnny Cash once ‘smashed down hotel wall with a metal chair’ so he could speak with Carl Perkins | Cult Following

A hotel room wall was smashed down by Johnny Cash so he could speak with fellow musician Carl Perkins.

Johnny Western, the American singer-songwriter who worked with Cash, says the Man in Black had taken a metal chair to the wall of his hotel room and knocked a hole through so he could speak with the Once Piece at a Time singer. It was not out of the ordinary for Cash at the time, according to Western, who says the veteran performer, while “fun to be around”, had “almost wrecked my car”. But addiction took hold of Cash, and there were a few close calls, according to Western. He says a B12 shot was administered by a doctor on one occasion, while Cash would “disappear” when using pills.

Western, speaking to Uncut, said: “A couple of times he missed the matinee shows, but even on the worst of occasions, he made the night show. He might go weeks and be fairly straight and be so much fun to be around, then these pills would just hit and he would disappear.”

Those moments on the road were wild, and it left Western, Cash, and the touring crew with fewer and fewer hotel options to choose from on return trips. Marshall Grant reportedly brought a circular saw with him to a hotel room and began slicing up the furniture, while Cash, wanting to speak with Perkins, hit a hole through the wall.

Western said: “When Johnny was really pilled up once, in one big motel, Carl Perkins was staying in the next room, but there was no dividing door between the rooms, so he took a metal chair and smashed the wall down so they could walk back and forth.

“That cost a couple of thousand dollars. We were doing stuff that Mick Jagger and those guys picked up on later on. It was just that kind of a lifestyle.” Those encounters in hotel rooms, Western says, are because of the pills Cash was taking at the time. The sheer volume of pills taken by Cash, he says, would have “killed” the average person.

He added: “You gotta realise he was taking up to 100 pills a day. The body resistance had been built up. Had anybody else attempted to take even half that, it woulda killed ’em. It woulda knocked ’em straight to their knees and killed ’em. But his body had been absorbing all these tablets for so long, the tolerance level was just incredible.”

Western says Cash was “really out of it” on more than one occasion, but noted a time when Cash took his car and left it at a twenty-four hour farmer’s market. He recalled: “He called me sheepishly when he sobered up and said, ‘Johnny, I lost your car. I was just going to borrow it for two or three hours and I think I left it down at the Farmer’s Market but I can’t remember.'”