Noah Myers67 said:Just wanted to mention how incredibly hard it is to track down Merle's DVDs... seriously, I had to jump through hoops just to find them... 😠
An old-school Japanese country fan sent this to me—he’s one of those guys who personally ripped everything from VHS tapes back in the day. Just wanted to give him a huge shout-out through this post... 😬
Here’s a snippet from an Interview transcript featuring Merle:
I actually met Johnny Cash back in '63 in a restroom in Chicago. I was just taking a leak when he strolls up next to me with a flask of wine tucked under his coat and goes, "Haggard, you want some of this?" That was the very first thing he ever said to me. Honestly though, I’d already been totally floored by him since watching him play on New Year's Day in 1958 at San Quentin Prison while I was an inmate there. He’d actually lost his voice the night before out in San Francisco and couldn't even sing that well; I seriously thought he was washed up, but the guy completely won over the prisoners. He just had the perfect attitude—chewing gum, looking all arrogant, flipping the bird at the guards... he basically did everything every single prisoner wanted to do. He was this tough guy from the South who showed up just because he cared about us. By the time he walked off that stage, every single person in that place was a Johnny Cash fan. There were 5,000 inmates in San Quentin and maybe thirty guitar players between them; I was easily one of the top five guys in there. Man, the day after Johnny's show, every guitar player in San Quentin was breathing down my neck, begging me to teach them how to play like him. It was exactly like how, the day after a Muhammad Ali fight, you'd see everyone out in the yard shadowboxing... except that day, everyone was just trying to figure out "Folsom Prison Blues"...