Johnny Cash: The Life (65 page)

He was even more eloquent talking about June and their future. “There’s unconditional love there,” he said. “You hear that phrase a lot, but it’s real with me and her. She loves me in spite of everything, in spite of myself….She has always been there with her love, and it has certainly made me forget the pain for a long time, many times. When it gets dark, and everybody’s gone home, and the lights are turned off, it’s just me and her.”

American III: Solitary Man
was the first of the Rubin-produced albums to crack the Top 100 pop chart, thanks to sales of nearly ninety thousand in its first two months in the stores—almost 50 percent more than
Unchained.

Nothing, however, was coming easily. While in Jamaica for the holiday season, Cash went through another siege of pneumonia that was serious enough for him to return to the Baptist Hospital in Nashville. He was still too weak to travel to Los Angeles for the Grammy Awards ceremony on February 21, so he watched on television as he was honored for best male country vocal for his performance of the song “Solitary Man.”

Cash and Rubin approached the fourth album with high hopes. They had gotten past the novelty aspect of an odd couple making music together and now had the public’s attention—and they wanted desperately to deliver something lasting. Rubin began to look for a song even more challenging than “The Mercy Seat.” Cash wanted to write something epic—a final statement, a work that would define his spiritual beliefs.

“I know everyone will say I’ve got to be out of my skull, but I feel like my recording career has just begun,” Cash told a reporter. “You know, my dreams and ambitions after all these years are pretty much the same as they were at the beginning. I still just want to make records and sing on the radio. After I finally got on the radio I just wanted to make better records and that’s still what I want to do.”

Cash was finally back in touch with the standards that had once defined his best songwriting—from Jimmie Rodgers to Merle Travis on. At the same time, he held on to his spiritual inspiration. In a very real sense his musical vision was complete.

ONE SONG HAD BEEN HAUNTING
Cash for years, and it was back on his mind in the early weeks of 2001. He had started laying down tracks for the new album the previous fall, just three months after finishing
Solitary Man.
“That’s the way we worked,” Ferguson says. “We just kept recording. There were no big breaks between albums.” During the September and November sessions in Hendersonville, Cash recorded more than twelve songs, including Bruce Springsteen’s feverish “I’m on Fire” and Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin’,” the wistful song from the film
Midnight Cowboy.
But none of them would make the fourth album. Cash and Rubin were just marking time. They both feared that Cash had enough strength for only one more album, and they were both searching for one song that would serve as their pinnacle accomplishment.

Up most mornings by five, Cash would shower, have breakfast, and take in the news on CNN before settling in a chair, either in his upstairs office or in the house’s massive round room below. He’d invariably think about that new song—one largely inspired by U2’s, “The Wanderer.” Cash loved the way Bono took a story from the scriptures and turned it into a parable that spoke to contemporary music fans. Cash wanted to write a “modern gospel” song that would speak to the young fans who had begun listening to him.

Cash had been talking to Rubin about recording two gospel albums—a collection of hymns he’d learned as a child and a set of black gospel tunes he also prized, but Rubin kept advising him to wait. The producer wanted to establish Cash’s relevance with modern audiences before releasing something as specialized as a gospel album. But John wasn’t thinking about a gospel album now. He wanted this “modern gospel” song for his next general album. He traced its genesis to a dream he had on the same 1993 European tour when he recorded “The Wanderer.” John Carter believes that the vision occurred in Germany, just days before Dublin. “He came to me and said he had the strangest dream about visiting Queen Elizabeth in Buckingham Palace,” he recalled.

As Cash told it, he walked into a room and found the queen sitting on the floor knitting and laughing. She looked up and declared, “Johnny Cash, you’re just like a thorn tree in a whirlwind.” The image stuck with Cash, though he had no idea where it was from until, he claimed, he came across a reference in the Old Testament. Soon after, he began thinking of using the line in a story—a poem perhaps—and he continued to seek out accompanying images in the scriptures. He eventually changed his plan from a story to a song, but the idea lingered in his mind for years until he thought of writing it in the style of “The Wanderer.”

Looking forward to his fourth album, he began to think of the new song as the ultimate statement he was seeking. In the final weeks of 2000, Cash wrote verse after verse, day after day. It was his overriding passion for months. As with Folsom and San Quentin, he was trying to seize the big moment.

When John Carter walked into his father’s office to hear the song for the first time, early in 2001, he noticed some twenty sheets of paper on the desk containing forty or so alternative verses of the song, now titled “The Man Comes Around.” The expression of salvation was as uncompromising as Bob Dylan’s “Gotta Serve Somebody” from his spiritual-driven
Slow Train Coming
album from 1979, which Cash greatly admired. John had even recorded “Gotta Serve Somebody” during the previous fall’s sessions in the cabin and included a lighthearted reference to it in one of the early versions of his new song. In that verse he substituted “But you gotta know it’ll be written down / when the man comes around” for Dylan’s “But you’re gonna have to serve somebody”:

Though the lyrics didn’t mention Jesus’s name or the words “judgment day,” it was about Christ’s second coming and the final judgment, the fundamental tenet of his faith. In the series of verses, Cash cited other images from the Bible, including the “whirlwind in the thorn tree” and “the virgins are all trimming their wicks.” It was more overtly spiritual than U2’s “The Wanderer,” but just as majestic and bold.

A musician himself, John Carter tried to be honest when he was asked his opinion of his father’s songs, and this time he raved. When he wondered about the phrase “virgins trimming their wicks,” Cash reached for the Bible that was always on his desk and quoted Matthew 25, the parable of the ten virgins. As much as John Carter liked what he’d heard, Cash continued to work on the song, constantly revising lines. John Carter remembers his father asking him one day as he was working on the song, “So, the word ‘shalom’ is Hebrew for peace. What is the word in Arabic?”

John Carter told him “shalam.”

“He wanted the song to be universal,” his son says. “He knew the answer. I think he was just sort of checking again to see what I thought. He really was borderline obsessed with writing that song. It was the most important thing he had written, maybe ever, and he just loved it.”

While Cash was crafting “The Man Comes Around,” Rubin was haunted by another song. The producer had long been a fan of Trent Reznor, the young rock auteur whose dark, controversial music combined the seductive songwriting craft of Nirvana, the gear-grinding howl of industrial rock, and the raw, unsettling language of William Burroughs.

“I am the pusher, I am the whore…I am the need you have for more,” Reznor taunted in one of the songs on
The Downward Spiral,
a 1994 album that employed shocking nihilistic and decadent images, but was at its core an anguished cry for something to believe in during a time when such traditional support systems as religion and family had failed for so many. It was one of the darkest rock collections to crack the Top 10 album charts in America.

Though Rubin didn’t produce records by Nine Inch Nails, the group name under which Reznor worked, he was close to the singer-songwriter, calling him the most exciting musician of his generation: “His whole vision blows me away.” Rubin especially liked “Hurt,” a song that expressed soul-robbing alienation in such a masterly way that Reznor used it to end most of his concerts. “Hurt” was a leap for Cash, Rubin knew, but he felt that Cash was capable of delivering a chilling interpretation.

“I realized at one point while looking for songs,” recalls Rubin, “that I really hadn’t looked at post-punk music, so I listened to Depeche Mode and found ‘Personal Jesus.’ I didn’t even know if it was a pro- or anti-Jesus song, but I could imagine him singing it.

“I also listened to a lot of REM. I’m sure I sent Johnny ‘Losing My Religion,” though I didn’t think he’d want to sing that. I also sent ‘Everybody Hurts.’ I even thought about sending him a Radiohead song, ‘Creep.’ But ‘Hurt’ stood above everything. To me, it was a song about an older person reflecting on their life with remorse. It was so heartbreaking.”

When Rubin assembled his next CD of songs for Cash to consider, he put “Hurt” first and was disappointed during their next phone conversation when Cash didn’t mention the song. Undeterred, Rubin made another CD and again led it with “Hurt.” There was still no response from Cash. Rubin again put “Hurt” at the top of the next sampler CD. He went one step further this time, including a note telling Cash how strongly he felt about the song and urging him to read the lyrics carefully.

The song’s opening verse and chorus go:

Cash felt the power of the words, but he still didn’t know if he could make them his own. He didn’t want to disappoint Rubin, however, so the next time they spoke on the phone he said, “Okay, let’s do it.”

Although Cash and Rubin continued to march toward what would be cornerstone moments in their working relationship, it wasn’t nonstop—especially on Cash’s part. There was a break while John and June spent much of the first quarter of 2001 in Jamaica. Even back in Hendersonville, recording was periodic. He made it to the cabin only about one day a week, and even then his output was hampered by his limited lung power.

It isn’t uncommon for recording artists to sing several takes of a song and then have an engineer or producer splice together parts of each to create the final product. Rubin and Ferguson had been doing that to a limited extent since the second album, but the need for it had increased dramatically. By the start of the fourth album, Ferguson was splicing John’s vocals together phrase by phrase in some cases. The idea wasn’t to camouflage Cash’s declining vocal power but rather to build the most compelling emotional portrait possible. “I looked at all these albums from a documentary standpoint,” Rubin says. “If the frailty of the voice matched the frailty of the lyrics, that was all the better. If he had the right song, the weakness of his voice became a strength.”

Cash wasn’t up for a formal recording session until March 13, when he recorded the old Marty Robbins gunfighter ballad “Big Iron.” The next day he was finally comfortable enough with “The Man Comes Around” to record it. Still wanting to tinker with the lyrics, he recorded it again on March 28 and again the day after. Everyone in the studio shared his passion for the song. Stuart even went to his warehouse after Cash sang the song for him to get the famed Fender Esquire guitar that Luther Perkins had played on the Sun sessions. It was, in a way, Stuart’s attempt to reconnect Cash with Luther. “I remember I had my eyes closed through the whole song,” Stuart says. “I just kept telling myself, ‘Don’t blow it. This is history.’ I felt it was like going back fifty years and shaking hands with the Tennessee Two sonically. It was just magical.”

As summer approached, progress on the album slowed while Cash began spending more time in his room at Baptist Hospital than at home. His eyesight was so bad that John Carter had been forced to print out the lyrics to “The Man Comes Around” in large eighteen-point type for him. Cash also had trouble playing guitar on the sessions because he had lost much of the feeling in his fingers. His feet were so sore that he had to wear large, specially made shoes that greatly limited his mobility. For anyone just stepping into the cabin studio, it would have seemed impossible that this man was actually making an album—much less some of his greatest music ever.

Rosanne was anxious enough about her father’s condition to fly from her home in New York to Nashville to see him in July. “There were so many hospital visits by that time in his life that they tend to blur together,” she says. “But that was one of the worst. He was there for two weeks, and I slept in another hospital room to be near him.”

Then everything took an unexpected turn. While all the attention was on John, June contracted pneumonia and checked in to Baptist Hospital in August, sharing an adjoining suite with John, as they had done many times before at the medical facility. Doctors found that June had heart problems sufficiently serious for them to install a pacemaker immediately. No sooner were John and June back home when Cash had to reenter Baptist Hospital with a series of liver and kidney problems. He was attached to a dialysis machine. Once again, the family thought the end was near. His weight dropped by some fifty pounds, to its lowest point since the pill-popping pre-
Folsom
days.