I wonder how many people spend their first listen of “Ballad of a Teenage Queen” waiting for a tragic end. It seems inevitable. It’s called a “ballad,” for one. There’s a Greek chorus of backup singers (shades of “Leader of the Pack”). Our protagonist is a pretty girl who has it all—golden hair, eyes of blue, not a care. There’s the boy next door, whom she loves, who works at the candy store, who saves his money and buys a ring. And here comes the movie scout, tempting her with fame. (Uh-oh.) She bites, moves away, becomes a star, buys a house, shiny cars, a swimming pool with a fence around. (A pool? Will she drown? Die of hubris?)

But wait. One day the teenage star sells her house and all her cars. She gives it all up. She catches a train home and shows up the next day at the house of the lonely boy next door, who still works at the candy store. It’s a sweet song, you see. A happy song.

When Sam Phillips heard the song, in 1957, he wanted to vomit. Jack Clement, his right-hand man at Sun Studios back then, had written it, Johnny Cash had recorded it, and Phillips thought it was a piece of drivel. It eventually sold over a million copies. “Sam bitched about that for the rest of his life, every time we’d get together,” Clement recalled recently, sitting in the office of his home in Nashville. “He told me years later that he went home and prayed about it. He said ‘Oh, Lord, don’t let it come to this.’”

It was a silly folk song, Clement says, and he remains delighted that it somehow passed for rock & roll—in part because Johnny Cash sang it, and in part because, at the time, rock & roll was whatever Sun Records said it was. Clement, after all, was the producer at the board when Jerry Lee Lewis recorded “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.” He wrote the b-side, “It’ll Be Me,” while on the commode. He recorded Roy Orbison, Charlie Rich, Cash, and the Teenage Queen herself, Barbara Pittman, a beautiful redhead who had dated Elvis Presley and who sang at the Cotton Club over the river in West Memphis, Arkansas. Clement and Pittman struck up a little romance, the musical output of which included her single “Two Young Fools in Love,” which Clement wrote and played guitar on—“That guitar,” he says, pointing to the wall of instruments behind him. “The big Gibson. I played that on a lot of things. I played that on ‘Ballad of a Teenage Queen.’ Sun Records was kind of the candy store. And I’m the guy working in the candy store, and here’s this girl wanting to go to Hollywood, you know? And she did.”

Pittman, one of Sun’s few female artists, sang on soundtracks for a few motorcycle movies in the 1960s, and would become something of a rockabilly poster girl, but her career would be marred by disappointments and lost opportunities. You might know the rest. Sam Phillips died in July 2003, and Cash died that September, shortly after recording the backing vocals for Clement’s own version of “Ballad of a Teenage Queen,” which he finally released last year, nearly fifty years after he wrote it, on his album Guess Things Happen That Way.

Clement’s spread in Nashville, the Cowboy Arms Hotel and Recording Spa, does indeed have a swimming pool, with a fence around, but no shiny cars to speak of. Clement, a spirited seventy-four, seems to have little reason to leave his house, for it contains, above the ground-floor living quarters, a recording studio, a mixing console, and a television studio complete with lighting rig and green screen, which Clement has employed to produce, for instance, a short video of himself playing the ukulele while singing the Hawaiian classic “My Little Grass Shack” in front of a colorful aquarium scene. He has a ukulele workshop in the basement. Around this fiefdom Clement wanders in a short-sleeve Hawaiian print shirt or a guayabera, looking like Santa Claus on vacation—jolly and paternal, thick white hair, round belly.

His downstairs office is Mission Control. From behind a desk covered with CDs, scribbled-in notepads, and an ashtray full of Virginia Slim butts, Clement can tune into what’s happening upstairs (when I visited in May, he and his crew were mixing a new album by the eighty-seven-year-old cowboy singer Eddy Arnold). He speaks to the engineers up in the studio through an old desktop microphone, and their voices, along with the music, come back over giant speakers on either side of a big-screen television, on which Clement can monitor any goings-on in his television studio.

Clement has spared little expense turning his home into a creative wonderland, just as he has shown little fear or thrift in indulging his creative impulses over the years.

In the mid ’60s, Clement broke the Nashville color barrier when he recorded Charlie Pride, a black Mississippian who had grown up listening to the Grand Ole Opry and who sounded, if one closed one’s eyes, just like the white good old boys of the day. Clement spent his own money to cut Pride’s first record, and for a while he had the only copy, which he would play for people who came by his office. Invariably, the visitors would be impressed, and Clement would ask if they wanted to see a picture. When they said they would, he’d pull Pride’s picture slowly from a manila envelope and watch their expressions while the unlikely image sank in. “Part of what appealed to me was just the sheer craziness of it,” he remembers.

Pride was a huge hit, and Clement made a small fortune. He began discussing with friends the possibility of a private space voyage to Alpha Centauri which in the end was deemed unfeasible. (“It didn’t matter if we did it or not,” he told me. “We had people charged up.”) So Clement instead spent his money producing a horror film called Dear Dead Delilah, in which Agnes Moorehead (of Citizen Kane) stars as a Southern plantation heiress whose greedy siblings are hacked to death, one by one.

Dear Dead Delilah was the penultimate film in Agnes Moorehead’s otherwise highly distinguished career. But for Jack Clement, it was an expensive but invaluable learning experience, the beginning of a film fetish that has cost him additional millions of dollars but yielded miles of precious footage. Clement planned a number of television specials that were never aired (or even finished, for that matter), but some of the tape has made it to the screen in a recent hour-long documentary, Cowboy Jack’s Home Movies (or, Shakespeare Was a Big George Jones Fan), which directors Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon premiered this spring at the Tribeca Film Festival. There are staged moments, where we see Clement at his campiest—ballroom dancing with a bottle on his head, singing renditions of his songs with musical-theater bravado, hamming his way through Hamlet’s famous soliloquy. But a more telling image emerges from the amateur films that Clement shot himself. Home movies, after all, are a portrait of the cinematographer as much as the subject, and Clement’s movies prove two of his greatest gifts—liberating those around him, and taming difficult personalities.

To see Johnny Cash crawl like a crab into a low, red Ferrari or tell a joke wearing a plastic pig nose is a novel treat. But to see him at A.P. Carter’s grave, leaning against the tombstone in his muddy boots, smoking a cigarette, is something more intimate and moving. “He died in 1960,” Cash says forlornly to the camera, holding his cigarette over his shoulder to offer his uncle-in-law a drag, “and I never got to have a smoke with him.” We see Cash clowning around in Clement’s office with Waylon Jennings, who was Cash’s roommate in Nashville before Cash married June Carter. (“He and Waylon were both into drugs at that point,” Clement recalls, “and they’d try to hide it from each other”). In scene after scene, publicly brooding male vocalists—Cash, Jennings, Bono, John Prine, Townes Van Zandt—let down their guard for Jack.

One begins to understand that this behavior is fertilized by Clement’s two-handed grasp of the humorous and the heartfelt, a quality that saturates his songs as well. Cash knew this; in 1968 he pulled two Clements from his quiver of songs at his famous Folsom Prison show. There among a set full of drugs, murder, and hard times, he threw in “Dirty Old Egg-Sucking Dog” and “Flushed from the Bathroom of Your Heart” like hand buzzers or pressure valves or life rafts. The inmates went wild. Of course they did. They saw a badass making fun of himself, a vision of masculinity without machismo. It must have seemed, silly as the songs were, like a brave and genuine thing.
Yes, Clement is there when you need him. Cash, in his liner notes to his 1978 album, Gone Girl, describes how, a week before recording, he had been woefully short on songs. He’s in New York, he says, crammed into a taxi with Clement and June Carter Cash and Jan Howard. Clement playfully teases the driver about his long hair, then breaks into song, crooning out the open window: “She is deliciously tall, sort of a long girl/She is delightfully small, sort of a song girl....” Johnny, June, and Jan join in: “She freely admits to the world that she was a wrong girl....” Back at the hotel the two men stay up until the wee hours, guitars on their laps, playing through Clement’s songs and covers until Cash has what he needs for an album. Cash asks Clement to play with him when he takes the songs into his session. Clement says yes.

Another story, in another car: Clement driving Townes Van Zandt and a friend around downtown Nashville in his new Cadillac. They’ve just finished mixing The Nashville Sessions. Townes is depressed—his music has gone unappreciated, he’s broke, he wants to get high. “Townes kept bitching that he was gonna sell all his songs,” Clement says, meaning the copyrights. “He was gonna quit.” Clement pulled over near a Baptist bookstore, got Townes out of the car, and slugged him. They tussled for several minutes. “I had him down on the ground with my arm around his neck holding him down and the cops came along. Boy, did I rally. I managed to get up and say ‘I’m a record producer. This is my artist. It’s a family thing.’ They let us go. They seemed to understand.”

Clement originally wrote “Ballad of a Teenage Queen” to sing himself, but he played it for Cash, who liked it and asked to record it. So Clement let him. Afer all, Clement was working for Sun as a producer, not as an artist. He gave it to Cash, and Cash made it a hit. So it goes. Sometimes you’re the voice on the radio and sometimes you’re the guitar in the background and sometimes you’re the ears in the headphones and the fingers on the controls. Sometimes you’re the enabler, sometimes the innkeeper. Like a lot of Nashville luminaries, Cash had keys to the Cowboy Arms Hotel and Recording Spa. Clement remembers waking up on more than one occasion and hearing footsteps in the studio above. “I’d say ‘Oh, that’s just Johnny Cash,’” he told me. “He’d come over and mill around for a while and then he was gone.”

The walls of the stairway up to the studio are painted with clouds, so it feels as though one is ascending into heaven. On the way back down, above the downstairs door, one sees a crude painting of Cash dressed in black with a guitar slung in front of him, arms outstretched, parting the seas. When Cash himself was last at Clement’s, a few months before he died, he couldn’t climb these stairs, so he recorded his backing vocals for Guess Things Happen That Way in the office, where the photographs that cover the walls feel more and more like pictures of a gone world.

The guitars mounted in the room, however, are there for easy access as much as for show, and Clement is staying quite active, as so many Nashville elder statesmen do. “I’ve got some records I cut nearly fifty years ago that they’re still playing. Like ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On,’ and ‘Ballad of a Teenage Queen,’” Clement says. “My goal in life right now is to cut a record they’ll be playing in a thousand years, ’cause it’ll be groovy enough. Might have to be an instrumental, ’cause the language will change.” He hasn’t written a song in several years, he admits, “but I can still do it if I want to. I might get into that out by the pool this summer.”

He also has a few movie scripts he’s working on. “One is called A Band in Every Port,” Clement says, “about this guy who decides he wants to go on the road and somebody comes along and convinces him he can find him a different band in every town…. Then I got this other one called “Shut Up and Sing, Shakespeare.” That’s a science-fiction musical comedy. Takes place in the year 2016 and this guy has a time machine….”

Both will have happy endings. *

Text and Photograph © Matt Dellinger