‘God Loves Me When I’m Singing’ : Country music: Legendary Johnny Cash speaks with candor about friends, family, pain and pleasure in his life.

Any who have perused the book “Nashville Babylon” know that it makes pretty slim reading compared to similar tell-alls about other fields of entertainment. In large part, that’s because most country artists already are so open about their own human qualities and lapses that there’s scarcely anything left for a muckraker to uncover.

But even knowing that tradition of country candor, it’s a bit disarming when you ask Johnny Cash “what’s new?” and he actually tells you.

“I’ve been in a treatment program at Loma Linda Hospital the last month,” the living legend explained in his famed quavery rumble, talking by phone Wednesday from a Newport Beach hotel. “I had a broken jaw and a bone graft a year ago, resulting in severe pain, unceasing. I couldn’t handle it, so I turned to pain pills again, you know. I went through a treatment program learning how to handle the addiction to the medication, to drop it, and learning how to handle the pain without medication.

“I think the program has worked. I haven’t had any pain medication in a month now. I feel good about myself and I’m looking forward to getting back on stage.”

Cash may have control of his dependencies (which have included the bottle as well as pills) but he said the pain is something that is likely to dog him all his days.

“A damaged nerve grew back, but it didn’t grow through the bone graft. It grew through the gums, and the least little thing sets it off, like talking to you, drinking a Coke or eating. Anything that touches my gums, like my cheek or my tongue, kind of sets off the pain. It’s something I’ve learned is mine alone to live with, and it’s going to be a part of me, so I’ve accepted it.”

And his singing?

“That’s one thing that doesn’t bother me. God loves me when I’m singing, see. I never have felt any pain when I’m singing. When I walk onstage there’s a little magic thing that happens. I’m above pain then. It’s always been a very spiritual experience for me to perform. I hope I don’t ever have to retire because it’s my life, performing.”

He’ll be doing that tonight at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano. In his nearly four decades of performing, there are few places where he hasn’t appeared, from performing arts centers to rough honky-tonks. And while others hire publicists to obscure their frailties, Cash’s openness about his life certainly hasn’t diminished him in people’s eyes.

Indeed, there is scarcely a more widely accepted or respected performer today. He has practically every country award there is and was inducted this year into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The 60-year-old seems equally at home with U.S. Presidents, prisoners and punkers. He has associated with everyone from Billy Graham to Keith Richards, from Ernest Tubb to Elvis Costello. If people are human and have feelings, Cash seems to connect with them.

His own life started out dirt poor in Arkansas. After stints farming, working in a Detroit auto plant, cleaning margarine vats and doing time in the Air Force, he started singing country music in the early ‘50s. While working as an appliance salesman in Memphis, he auditioned for Sun Records in 1955. The result was his first hit, “Hey Porter,” quickly followed by “Folsom Prison Blues,” “I Walk the Line” and other hits stamped with his unmistakable voice and no-frills arrangements.

Sun also was the first label to record Elvis Presley, Howlin’ Wolf, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and others who also helped form the foundation for decades of rock, country music and blues. The studio, a simple room with a tape recorder, seemed to bring out the essence of each performer who passed through it.

“It’s not so much the studio that caused that as the minds at play in there, (owner-producer) Sam Phillips and (engineer) Jack Clement,” Cash said. “They were determined to do something different, and present the music in a way that it had never been performed or sounded before. That’s exactly how I felt about music. Elvis broke open the door for all of us at Sun and showed people it could be done, that you could do something different and people would like it.”

Cash teamed up again with Clement, now a producer, for his most recent album, “The Mystery of Life” in 1991, an excellent set with more than a nod to their original direct Sun sound.

“It didn’t have quite enough of it, though,” Cash said. “We’re going a little bit more heavy on the old boom-chicka-boom on my next album. It’ll be the Sun sound a la 1992. Over the years I’ve had a few producers that went off on some kind of trip and overproduced me or produced me wrong, but I’m not going to work that way anymore. The last album is indicative of more simplification to follow. I think I’m going to be a little more bare even than that, and a little more stark.

“That music has got a simple beat people can relate to, and a haunting quality that tries to go right to the gut and to the heart, and sometimes it does. I don’t know where it comes from. I just like that mysterious sound. A song has to be something I can feel. And ‘feel’ covers a lot of space with me, meaning spirituality, gut feeling and heart feeling.”

While country music may be enjoying its greatest financial success these days, Cash doesn’t think it’s experiencing a musical renaissance.

“There’s too much overplasticization. And there are too many artists that are not up to snuff. That’s really being cold and hard, I know, but that’s exactly how I feel about it. There’s some really great ones, don’t get me wrong, like Ricky Van Shelton; he’s one of my favorites. I like Rodney Crowell, Rosanne Cash, Carlene Carter--I sound a little prejudiced, I guess. I’ll go ahead and name all my daughters if you want me to,” he said with a laugh.

Cash always has tried to reach across barriers with his music, something he says he also tried to do in the divisive late ‘60s with his ABC-TV variety series.

“I had everybody from Mahalia Jackson to the Who on there, Kenny Rogers and the First Edition to Louis Armstrong, Bob Dylan as well as Bob Hope. It did help bridge the gap, I think, with as many young people watching as older people.

“I told the producers that I would only do a network show if I could have a say-so in who the guests are, people I can relate to and sing with. They said, ‘Well, who do you want first?’ and I really shook them up when I said ‘Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan.’ They said, ‘Pete Seeger? Are you kidding, the guy who had to appear before the hearings on communist activities?’ I said ‘Yup, the same one. He plays really good banjo.’ I’d go to Pete’s house and we never talked politics. We’d sing folk songs. I wanted to bring somebody who was as bare and earthy as Pete Seeger to network television.”

While his fellow Highwayman Kris Kristofferson (the supergroup also includes Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson) is involved actively with political causes, Cash shies away from them, though he will admit to a general disgust this season: “I think politics is really in a mess and I’m not sure who I’m going to vote for if I vote. I don’t see much real beef out there.

“June and I do a lot of charity work, mainly for children, retarded citizens and supporting Jessi Colter’s organization to help battered women in Tennessee. I don’t really jump on the bandwagon of a lot of causes because I’m very careful about that. Politics is a thing on which people are so divided.”

“Now Kris is a man of many social causes, and I respect him for his beliefs and his drive. He’s a very brave man and lets the chips fall where they may. It’s not a matter of being brave or not with me. I just don’t like controversy. The road itself is enough controversy, you know, getting down that highway and onto the stage and doing the kind of show people want to hear from me. That’s enough battle for one day.

“At times occasionally I’ve joined Kris in a few things, but Willie, Waylon, Kris and I are four people from four different worlds really. As close to any of them that I come is Waylon’s world. He and I are the best of friends. I’m good friends with Kris and Willie too, of course, but Waylon and I have been really close friends for almost 30 years.”

Jennings, Carl Perkins and others have cited Cash’s great friendship in helping to get their lives on track. Cash says that’s a two-way street.

“A lot of people have been a big help to me and influenced me, people that are good and straight and strong. I’ve got a special little phone-numbers book of good, straight people. It’s my spiritual feeding book; I’ll call people and just get strength from hearing their voice. Like I do Waylon: he’s straight as an arrow, and I like to talk with him on the phone. We may not talk about problems with drugs or alcohol or anything else, but just talking to him and hearing his voice makes me feel stronger. I’m making a lot of phone calls today, and Waylon’s the next one.

“Friends are vitally important to me. You can tell a friend things you can’t tell your wife, you know? And of course you can tell your wife things you can’t tell your friend.”

Many musical marriages are broken by the separation of touring, something Cash and wife June avoid by touring together. It takes a lot more than that, though, to make the marriage work, he said.

“You know, it’s easy to break up. Anybody can do that. June and I next year will celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary and we’ve had to fight to keep our marriage together because a lot of people and lot of things have tried to come between us, and we’ve fought like tigers to stay together. Sometimes we’ve fought each other and the things we saw wrong in each other. Sometimes we’ve had to fight ourselves, like I just did again, to make the marriage stronger.

“Now we’re together again for the first time in a month, and we’re so excited about being together that I crammed in beside her in her little bunk in the bus and just really crowded up against her, lay there and just talked for hours, feeding off each other again.”

After their West Coast dates, the family will play a week in Las Vegas, and then Cash regroups with the Highwaymen for a series of East Coast dates. It’s a road he doesn’t see ever ending.

“My long-term life goal is to stay straight and clean and to do all the concerts I can, make all the records I can and maybe do a good Western movie again. I just want to do more of the same, really. I love my work.”

Johnny Cash sings tonight at 7:30 and 9:30 at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. $32.50. (714) 496-8930.