ENCORE: W.S. Holland JCI Exclusive Interview, 2015
On December 30th, 2014 and January 2nd, 2015, I got to chat with W.S. Holland. As Cash’s only drummer, he had quite a lot to tell. His tales about Cash are candid and filled with humor. A special thanks to Ron Haney who helped arrange the interview. This legacy interview is reposted with love as a tribute to the late W.S. “Fluke” Holland.
W.S. Holland interview with Jeff Emond
Let’s start at the beginning; what inspired you to be a musician?
[Laughs] Oh, me! You know the answer to that question is: nothing inspired me. It all happened so strangely. I think that’s one reason I acquired the name “Fluke,” nearly everything I was involved in was kind of a fluke.
Here’s what happened: I went to J.B. Young High School in a little town in Bemis, TN, close to Jackson, TN. During my summer vacations, I worked at a coal company here, and later an air conditioning company. But during all my days of school, and even after high school, playing music never crossed my mind. The grammar school and high school I went to didn’t have bands. I was more mechanically minded--I was going to be a mechanic of some kind. My dad was a mechanic and a farmer. As far as anybody influencing me to be in the music business–it didn’t happen. What did happen: once I was out of high school I met Carl Perkins’ brother Clayton in Bemis. We just became friends. At this point, it’s early ‘54. Carl and his two brothers had their band, and I started going to some of the places they were playing, but not to play. I never even thought about playing any kind of instrument. But for some reason–this is one of the fluke things that’s so weird to look back at–I would go on some songs–Carl was mostly doing Hank Williams songs, he didn’t write any songs yet–and walk up beside Clayton, who played the big upright bass, and on some of the up tempo Hank Williams songs, I would just keep time on the coverture of that bass. I don’t know why I did that! Nobody thought anything about it!
One night I was still there when [the band] was loading up. It was on a Saturday night. Carl told me, “We have a meeting with Sam Phillips at Sun Records Thursday morning. Borrow some drums and go with us.” I said, “Man, what would I do with a drum if I borrowed it?” Carl said, “You can keep time with your hands on that bass–you can play drums.” Now, this is another weird thing: the next day I went to a friend of mine, and told him I wanted a drum. He said, “W.S., you can’t play!” I told him, “If you let me borrow your drums, I’ll be playing by Thursday!” He let me have ‘em. I went to my mom’s house, and set up my drums. I didn’t know how to set them up. I set the hi-hat over on the right side because I was going to play it with my right hand. Most people think it’s backwards. If you notice drummers, nearly all of them have the hi-hat set up on the left side.
Another weird thing: Carl’s band and I get in my car on Thursday morning and drive over to Memphis and Sun Records. We played the only thing we knew how to play, and Sam Phillips liked what he heard. The first record we made was a song called “Movie Magg.” Of all things, we got a recording contract that day! On the way home we laughed about it. That was in late ‘54, and I started playing with Carl then. The rest of the Sun group came in ‘55. Sam Phillips and Bob Neal started a booking agency called Stars Incorporated that booked all the guys on Sun, like John, Elvis, Jerry Lee, Roy Orbison, Warren Smith, Sonny Burgess . . . the whole group. We all played together in a 100 mile radius of Memphis. At that time if you made a record and you made a record and took it up to Dewey Phillips’ radio show, he played it a couple of times, and you were a star! That’s how we all met.
Then, we went back [to Sun] and recorded “Blue Suede Shoes.” We recorded it in late ‘55. It came out in early ‘56, and I had to make a decision to keep working at the air conditioning company or play in a band. It seemed to me like playing in a band was cooler than working on air conditioners. [Laughs] I played regular until 1960, and I was gonna retire. I figured I did all I was gonna do. I played on the “Blue Suede Shoes” record, I played on the Million Dollar quartet session, I had been in a movie or two–and it seemed that it was all over at Sun Records. Sam Phillips had made all the money he wanted to make. I had done the “Mona Lisa” record with Carl Mann. And, I had spent all my money, driving around Jackson in a big long Cadillac that was three payments behind. Then I met Joyce, and she had a good job, a car paid for, a house paid for–and she finally talked me into marrying her! [Laughs] That was in 1960, and I was gonna retire. Just as I was getting ready to get a real job so I would have a pay day every Friday, Johnny Cash called.
He had a big engagement up in New York, and he thought a drummer might make more noise. He had seen me play, and I went with him for those two weeks. And it lasted until ‘97. Now, that’s a long answer to your question. [Laughs]
That’s fine! If becoming a drummer was sort of a “fluke,” how did you develop the train sound? There are so many train songs Johnny recorded and you keep such a signature beat on them.
[Laughs] That’s another strange thing! Nearly everything I did–and still do–is almost backwards from what a “real drum player” does. If you listen to every train sound a drummer makes, they will accent the beat on the one and the three. For some reason I did that right backwards. I didn’t know at the time what I was doing. But a “double rudiment” is right-right, left-left, right-right, left-left. I accented that backwards from what any drummer would play. The only reason I started doing that is because when we did “Orange Blossom Special” on a show–back then we did shows, now they’re called concerts–it was seven or eight minutes long. To play the song the way it’s supposed to be done, it would make you tired! At the end we got really fast. The way I did it was easier for me to do than to do it the right way. It all comes back to the fluke thing. I’m really glad it happened now. [Laughs] Because of me not knowing what I was doing, I get to be here today talking with you about it!
Do you have any funny memories of Johnny Cash that stick out?
Oh, there’s so many! One thing I wish everybody would know about Johnny Cash is his humor. Everybody knows about Johnny Cash from what they saw on stage, or read. But he liked to do fun things, and cut up. One time, we got a curtain weight off stage. Now, a curtain weight is a big, heavy piece of metal about the size of a brick. We’d wrap it up in gift paper. It was hard to hold. He’d walk into a restaurant with it and a waitress would come up. He’d say, “I need you to hold my package for me,” and she would drop it. And it would tickle him to death.
And he liked to shoot guns. We were driving down the road one day in a new Cadillac. Luther [Perkins] was in the back asleep. I’m sitting on the other side of Luther in the back, Marshal [Grant] is driving. John’s in the passenger seat, and he just comes over the back of the front seat with a .44 pistol and shoots it straight down through the floorboard of the car, just to watch Luther wake up scared. He would do things like that. That particular thing backfired, because he shot a hole in the muffler on the car, and we had to get a new muffler put on the next day.
He was a character in so many different ways. A couple of strange things he did with me: we used to have a birthday party for whoever was having a birthday on the road. In 1976, for my birthday party, he gave me, not a new watch, but a watch off of his arm. I didn’t even realize at the time it was a Patek Philippe watch. The next year, he gave me a new Bill Blass Lincoln Continental Mark VII. The next year, he gave me a picture of Abraham Lincoln. Now here’s the strange part: never again did he mention my birthday. I thought that was kinda strange, but he was the most unusual person anyone could ever be around. Besides being the great writer and entertainer he was, he was sometimes just a plain ol’ Arkansas country boy.
What good stories! I’ve never heard them before, and it seems like there are always new Johnny Cash stories to hear.
Well, people keep doing biographies about him. I just went to Nashville a couple of weeks ago and did an interview with people out in Canada who are doing another Johnny Cash biography. I keep telling Ron [Haney] now that we have our band going, we have to do these interviews and talk about Johnny all we can. We gotta keep Johnny hot so we can keep working! [Laughs] Where are you from?
Near Hammond, Indiana, if you’ve been there.
Hammond, Indiana . . . we’ve played many, many shows there. The promoters would have an afternoon show and a night show. I’ll tell you a funny story about what happened there one night. There was a time when a band that played on a show with us got in trouble with us on the way home. We used to think it was smart . . . we had little slingshots. We had little balls that we called torpedoes–they looked like tin foil–and you could throw them or stomp on them and they’d pop. We started shooting them from slingshots against the wall just to scare people. Then we graduated up to getting some marbles. At a show in Hammond, Indiana, we were out between shoes on a back patio. Across the street was a really old building that people had moved out of, and half the windows were knocked out and the house was about to fall. We were shooting our slingshots with marbles across the street knocking out old windows.
Don Gibson and his band were on our show. They liked the slingshots, and thought it was fun. About two days later we heard about it: [Gibson and his boys] on their way home from Hammond got some slingshots and marbles, and got really carried away. They shot windows out of some business places, and they got caught. And they had to go to jail. I knew the boys, the bass player and steel guitar player. Roy Acuff got into it with the law officers and judges and got them out. But because of John and the rest of us doing things that were foolish, that we thought were fun, we got those boys in trouble! You probably never heard about that. I felt bad about it, but we thought it was fun at the time.
Thank you for the hometown story. Was it Johnny Cash who first called you the father of the drums?
It was. He started saying that when I was young! [Laughs] Now, golly, I guess he would call me the grandfather or great-grandfather, I don’t know. That was over 25 years ago. Next year it will be 61 years on the road.
Back to my retirement in 1997, when John didn’t want to work anymore. I was gonna retire again, but I still liked to play. At my age now, I can still do anything as good as I ever could, because I never could do anything very good. I didn’t get to retire. Now, here comes my friend Ron Haney, a great singer, guitar player and songwriter–and a couple of his friends, Gator and Jimmy Reece, who played piano and bass. Ron said, “Hey, you don’t need to retire, let’s get a band together.” I said, “Ya’ll are so good; but what would you call the band, and why would you want me in it?” He said, “We’ll call it the W.S. Holland Band.” I said, “As good as you guys are, you’d play in a W.S. Holland band?” That’s what we’re still doing, and I’m not going to think about retiring anymore. [Laughs]
Since we’re talking about your new band, do you think we could talk about your recent LIVE In Memphis CD?
There’s no way for me to explain what an honor it is for me to be with the W.S. Holland Band, and to play shows, and be recorded. I’ve about wore out the Memphis show CD listening to it. It’s a live CD, and that’s what I like. It’s kind of like what we did at Sun Studio–everyone just played what they wanted to play [at Sun] and it came out like a live sound. That’s what this CD is like. I’m so happy Ron put this CD together, it’s another thing Ron Haney’s so good at. There’s also a DVD of the same concert coming out. I joke with people, and say “I hope when this record comes out the first week it doesn’t sell under a million–I hope it sells two or three million.” I want everybody to hear it because I’m so proud of it. Everybody on it did a super good job.
Do you have a favorite Johnny Cash song?
I’m asked that question a lot. I think about it a lot, and I don’t know if there is one that’s my favorite, because he has so many great songs. The one I probably enjoy playing now, the way we play it with the band, up tempo and with a lot of energy, is “Folsom Prison Blues.” But then you get to a slow song and I could call that my favorite. Johnny Cash wrote so many great songs. I could probably talk about 10 or 15 favorite songs, but not one.
What about a favorite full-length album or CD?
Golly! When I joined him we started recording at Columbia and we started recording Orange Blossom Special. That might be my favorite CD now that I think about it.
How was Johnny Cash as an employer?
One of the great things about working with Johnny Cash all of those years is that it’s almost like I didn’t work for anybody–it was like working with him. He wasn’t the type of guy who would act like a boss, to try to tell anybody what to do. The people that worked with him, even the crew and the drivers–he just let everybody do what they needed to do. He didn’t boss anyone around. I kid about it a lot with Ron, and say “I don’t remember a time when Johnny Cash ever told me to do anything.” It just seemed like everybody knew what they needed to do and it all worked great. He let people do what they wanted to do.
Sometimes people ask me what it was like when [Johnny] was doing things that weren’t good. I say, “Hey, if there’s anything that wasn’t good during the whole time I missed it. It was all good to me.”
Is there any common misconception about Johnny Cash that you’d like to clear up?
I wish everybody could have known the real Johnny Cash. The things people hear, the drug thing, the few times he got in trouble . . . so many people thought and still think John served time in prison. I would try to explain to them that John wasn’t in prison. He was in jail a couple of times, nothing serious. They would think I wasn’t telling the truth. I remember one time I told John in the late 1980s, “I’m going to quit trying to make people think you weren’t in prison. I try to tell people it wasn’t that way and they think I’m not telling the truth! So what I’ve started doing when someone mentions something you’ve done, I say ‘Oh, yeah, he was a mean dude. He was in prison three or four times for three or four different things.’” And people liked that, that’s what people wanted to hear. So many people thought that John did a lot of things that he didn’t know, it probably made him as big of a deal that he always was and still is today. Just because of stories that somebody wrote.
I joke about it now when people ask me what I think it was that made Johnny Cash so popular all those years and now after his death. And I say, “Well, it’s really simple what caused that. It was the drummer.”
What is your favorite book?
Powerboat magazine is my favorite book. I have raced boats all my life. I love boats, always have. I started racing boats in the 1950s when 30mph with an outboard motor was flying! And every month for many, many years there has been a Powerboat magazine, and that’s my favorite book.
But my favorite book is going to be one that Ron Haney, me and some other people are working on about me. And I want that to be your favorite one!
Wow, that’s exciting news! I look forward to the release. Any final thoughts you want to share about Johnny Cash?
I think he was the most unusual person in so many ways. Whatever happened, whatever we did, I’m so glad it happened. If it hadn't happened, you would have been interested in writing about it. Johnny Cash wasn’t really all that mean of a guy. He was actually a pretty good ol’ average Arkansas boy, who I think liked everybody.
