Johnny Cash & Waylon Jennings Used To Play With Dynamite For Fun During Their Early Days In Nashville

Just a completely different time…

It’s no secret that both he and his friend Johnny Cash had severe drug problems in their younger years, and it was compounded by the fact that they lived together, and encouraged those bad habits. I mean, they’ve admitted to spending $1,000 a day on drugs at the peak of their addiction.

During those early years in Nashville, they were barely getting by in a dingy apartment where most of their days were a haze of drug-fueled madness, where they wrote the occasional song, and in the 2024 book by Brian Fairbanks called Willie, Waylon, and the Boys: How Nashville Outsiders Changed Country Music Forever, he revealed that they had an incredibly, um, unique way of entertaining themselves…

They would apparently “blow up balls of black gunpowder with sticks of dynamite for amusement,” in addition to many other activities that I’m sure they did not come up with when they were in their right minds, so to speak.

It’s sounds unbelievable, and I don’t know if I’d even believe it if it wasn’t for the fact hat it was Johnny and Waylon, which actually makes it pretty easy to believe. It sounds like something you’d read about in a make believe book or movie, but that’s how they lived then and it certainly shaped their respective outlaw images and reputations:

“There they were, blowing up balls of black gunpowder with sticks of dynamite for amusement, kicking down the door when one of them, home alone, latched it shut and passed out, and using amphetamine, an upper producing an effect equivalent to a half-dozen cups of coffee, all while trying to write songs and get some money in the bank.

They alternately complained about their respective loves and claimed a reunion was just around the corner, with Cash later admitting: ‘The only woman who would talk to me is Betty Ford.’ Their lovers—Barbara, Jennings’s third wife, and June Carter, Cash’s girlfriend—moved into separate apartments downstairs and tried to keep the men’s place tidy.

They were essential. ‘Man, you’re the worst housekeeper I ever saw,’ Jennings had told Cash on move-in day. ‘What have you been doing in the kitchen, fighting?’ ‘I cooked biscuits and gravy.’ ‘Do me a favor,’ said Jennings, ‘and don’t ever cook me any.'”

They’re better woman than I am… I can’t imagine trying to even keep those two in line just a little bit.

The two young country artists, and future legends, lived hard, to put it lightly, and the book also explains some of their other antics when it came to women and drugs:

“Carter would show up periodically to do the dusting and mopping the place needed practically at the top of every hour. Mysteriously, Cash’s amphetamines always managed to spill into the toilet. Once, while enjoying a visit from Bob Dylan, Cash hid in a closet when June came to the door.

But Johnny would neither return to his estranged wife nor give up on June Carter, who repeatedly declined to marry him, even once breaking things off for five minutes, just long enough to discover he had stolen her clothes and hidden them in his hotel room to keep her from leaving. Within weeks, Waylon’s drug intake skyrocketed.

‘Twenty amphetamines a day was normal, and thirty wasn’t unusual. I’d hit the ground running; I never had a hangover because I never gave myself a chance.’ At true low points, John, down from 200 to 140 pounds, would become ‘Cash,’ a Mr. Hyde to Johnny’s Dr. Jekyll, as when the Man in Black cut all the legs off the furniture for no reason or tore apart his roommate’s car looking for his hidden stash, and then lied about it.

One time, Cash hallucinated he ‘was an Indian flyin’ through the woods,’ only snapping out of it when he discovered he was barefoot in a murky puddle. ‘That Waylon,’ said the Man in Black, deflecting. ‘He’ll take a doorknob down if he thought it would taste good.'”

It’s really a wonder they made it out of their 20’s in one piece, though their respective drug issues weren’t something they really ever talked about.

In a video from sometime in the late ’80s or early ’90s, where Waylon admits that they “kicked the doors down a lot” because of the nature of their aforementioned drug intake, though they never encouraged each other to take anything or shared anything with one another in terms of substances:

“We kicked the door down a lot… you know what’s fun about me and him, though? In those days, we were both pretty well hooked on pills, but we can honestly say we never gave each other drugs.”

Johnny added:

“Never. We hid it… we thought we were hiding it from each other, but we never did.”

Waylon also joked that they tried to hide the drugs because they were trying to protect each other, but it was really no big secret:

“See I knew he couldn’t handle it, so I had to protect him… I think he thinking about the same thing.”

Ultimately, both men were (thankfully) able to successfully kick their bad habits as they got older, and in the interview below, Johnny goes onto say that he was a very fine biscuit maker, which Waylon agreed with, though he did point out that he got the bad end of the deal in terms of their roles in the apartment. Waylon was supposed to be the maid and clean everything, while Johnny was the chef… but they only ate “about every two weeks”:

“See, my job was cleaning up the apartment, and his job was to cook. Well he got the best deal ‘cuz we didn’t eat but about every two weeks.”

Classic…

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