Johnny Cash: Following In The Footsteps of Greatness

Thomas Gabriel is the eldest grandson of the legendary Man in Black, but he refuses to “cash in” by using the famous family surname to boost his own music career.

“For a while I didn’t sing any of his songs. I would do my own thing on stage. But I realised a lot of people who turned up missed him and wanted to hear those songs,” he told me. “It’s an honour to be able to sing them. It’s carrying on a tradition because I see them as being passed down. I don’t see them as cover songs at all.”

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Thomas not only sounds uncannily like his grandfather but he also had his own battles with drugs and booze addictions. While he also ended up behind bars too, which is ironic seeing as he was actually a cop for eight year.

“It was all violent crimes. I had a road rage incident where I assaulted somebody. I had a lot of things that had built up and the judge got tired of seeing me,” said the 50-something-year-old, who is now clean and sober several years. “It all boiled down to anger and hating who I was, so therefore I hated everybody else too.”

Thomas confessed to finding it difficult living under the shadow of a living legend. I think in my case it established a false sense of entitlement. I felt as if I was allowed to say and do what I wanted,” he reflected.

“When I was younger I didn’t really know how to express anything except for anger. I walked around with a lot of guilt and self-hatred. “I took cocaine and amphetamines – pretty much anything I could get my hands on, expect opiates.

“Once I got out of prison, I spent a lot of time working on getting rid of that (anger) and establishing a relationship again with my kids. Because after being gone so long, they didn’t even really know me.”

Thomas first showed worrying signs of alcoholism when still only 13 – prompting his grandfather to drag him at such a young age to his first AA meeting.

“He took me to the front door and said, ‘You go in here and listen. I’ll be back to get you’. He sat in the parking lot and made sure I stayed. He realised I would’ve felt uncomfortable with him sitting in there,” said Thomas, who is convinced he genetically inherited the disease from his grandfather.

“I was the oldest grandchild so he was a little harder on me than most. Plus, I needed it – I got into a lot of trouble as a kid. He said several times that he seen a lot of himself in me.”

Thomas confessed he was once in “such really bad shape” after being fired from his job and going through a divorce, along with his drug addiction, that he ended up stealing money from him.

“He called me in about a week later and didn’t point blank ask me, but I knew what he was getting at,” he said. “So, I just told him and said, ‘I’m really sorry’. But it turned out to be more of a positive thing than anything.”

Thomas said one his biggest regrets is not getting the chance to say a proper goodbye to his grandfather on his deathbed in 2003. Thomas had only gotten out of prison a couple months earlier and was helping “take care of him” in his last days.

He recalled: “So, that day he’d gone back to the hospital he said, ‘I’ll be back. Take care of the house’. Later that evening he called and said, ‘I need you to come down to the hospital and tell you something. I want to talk to you’.

“And I’d been taking amphetamines and I’d run out. And when you run out you feel like you want to die. You’ve got no motivation, you don’t want to get off the coach. I couldn’t stay awake. My intention was to lay back down for an hour and sleep it off and then go see him. But I never got back up.

“And my mother called me around 5am and said he had passed. I regretted not just putting the phone down and going (straight) to him. That’s one of the things I had to work on as well – regrets and guilt. I carried that around with me for a long time. I finally let it go.”

What does he think Johnny wanted to tell him?

“I’ve thought about it a million times. I like to think that he knew he was going, but we’d also had talks in the weeks before about music – he wanted me to get back into my music,” he concluded.

“Back in the early ’90s when I was doing music, he wanted me to put a stop to it and have something to fall back on, a trade or a career.

“But he really wanted me to start that back up. He wanted me to get back into something that I loved because I was just spinning my wheels – I wasn’t going anywhere. You don’t want to be known as his grandson who writes crap! Don’t think it doesn’t cross my mind. But one of the best feelings ever is standing on stage and singing.”

And long may it continue, too…

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