Johnny Cash: The Life (66 page)

Somehow, in between all these crises, Cash managed to record more songs for the fourth album. He had a particularly good three-day stretch during which he recorded “The Man Comes Around” for the fourth time. It was his last recording session for the year.

When Rubin got a copy of “The Man Comes Around,” he wasn’t any more knocked out by it than Cash had initially been by “Hurt.” The two songs that would do so much to cement Cash’s legacy in the twenty-first century could both easily have been set aside if either man hadn’t valued the other’s opinion so strongly. If the demo of “The Man Comes Around” had been from someone other than Cash, for instance, Rubin likely would have passed on it. But he gave special attention to any new Cash composition. “The versions of the songs he sent me rarely ended up sounding like the way they did on the final album,” Rubin says. “When he recorded in Nashville, more often than not it was really just to get his vocal performance. We would then take the vocal track and make a new instrumental track to go around it. We would sometimes make the song faster, sometimes slower. That was the biggest change. It wasn’t ever with the words; it was the rhythms.”

In between other recording projects over the next few weeks, Rubin looked at “The Man Comes Around” from different angles—“unlocking the code” is how he describes it. “When we finally got the right feel for it, the track was fantastic. I loved it.” Rubin replaced the original gentle country-styled backing with a more tense and stark futuristic sound and added slightly distorted bits of narration at the beginning and end for even more character and color. Cash was thrilled with the new version.

Finally it was time to turn their attention to “Hurt.” Because of Cash’s condition and the complexity of the song, Rubin wanted to wait until Cash came to California to record it, which meant he had to wait until the new year. John and June once again headed to Jamaica for the holidays. While there, they learned that Waylon Jennings, who had long suffered from a diabetes-related disease, had to have his left foot amputated.

When he heard of the operation, John phoned Waylon in Phoenix, where he and Jessi had moved, and the pair agreed to get together in the new year. They ended the conversation by both saying “I love you.” But Cash and Jennings never kept that date. On February 13, 2002, Jennings died in his sleep.

Two weeks later Cash celebrated his seventieth birthday and wondered about his own future. Increasingly, one verse in “Hurt” was meaning more and more to him:

Rubin and Cash were accumulating a lot of strong tracks for the new album, including versions of Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus,” Sting’s “I Hung My Head,” Cash’s early “Give My Love to Rose,” and the traditional Irish ballad “Danny Boy,” which was recorded in a church with an organ accompaniment. But Rubin’s focus remained on “Hurt.” Reznor had written the song in a fit of depression over his heroin addiction, but Cash came to see it as a deeply personal reflection on the struggle in life against false values and spiritual compromise. In March he learned that President George W. Bush was going to present him with the National Medal of Arts at a ceremony in April at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. Cash appreciated it, but it was his trip to California that meant most to him.

The “Hurt” sessions went spectacularly, and Rubin positioned the album, which was titled
The Man Comes Around,
for release in November to take advantage of the holiday season, which accounts for more than a quarter of the year’s album sales. To promote the album, he wanted a video, Cash’s first since “Delia’s Gone.” His first choice for a director was Mark Romanek, a Chicago native who had directed acclaimed music videos for Nine Inch Nails, Michael Jackson, and David Bowie. Romanek had been lobbying Rubin to let him make a Cash video ever since the first album. As much as he loved “Hurt,” however, Rubin didn’t force the song on Romanek, believing that people do their best work when they are passionate about something. He invited Romanek to his house in mid-September 2002 and played three tracks for him to choose from: “The Man Comes Around,” “Danny Boy,” and “Hurt.” Rubin would have gone along with whatever song Romanek wanted.

As soon as he heard “Hurt,” Romanek had his pick. “Holy crap,” he thought. “This is great.”

Though the budget for “Hurt” was, at around $100,000 to $150,000, minuscule next to the $1 million or more budgets Romanek was used to working with, he was ecstatic. “The truth is, I would have done a video of Johnny singing ‘Happy Birthday,’” he says. “I wanted to work with him so much. But ‘Hurt’ was something more. It was so powerful. I definitely had chills listening to the song.”

Romanek suggested early November in Los Angeles as a possible shooting date, which would enable Rubin to distribute the video by the end of the year.

Over the next few days, Romanek put a CD of “Hurt” on his music system and pushed the “repeat” feature. “It felt like I listened to it a million times, hoping for an idea for the video to do the music justice,” he says. “I began thinking of something I had always wanted to do—a rip-off of a Samuel Beckett play called
Krapp’s Last Tape,
where a person was dwarfed by this pile of crap they had accumulated during their life. I began thinking of a very stylized video. I was going to have Johnny sitting in a chair with a microphone singing the song and there was going to be literally a mountain of stuff piled up behind him. I wanted it to look like crap, just…objects from his past.”

Romanek’s concept for the video was highly theatrical, with Cash singing the song alone on a stage. As the video unfolded, actors in work clothes would walk onstage and start taking all the stuff away, so that at the end of the video, Cash would be sitting on a bare stage with just a spotlight on him. To create further interest, Romanek planned to have celebrities doing cameos as the workmen; two he had in mind were Beck and Johnny Depp. The whole thing would be shot on a soundstage.

Plans were far along when Romanek got an urgent phone call from Rubin on October 16—a Wednesday night. “Johnny’s taken a turn for the worse,” Romanek was told. “He’s planning to go to Jamaica earlier than planned. There’s no way he can jump on a plane and come to L.A. to do this. You’ve got to go to Nashville tomorrow because they’re leaving Monday.”

The turn in Cash’s health caught everyone by surprise. John and June had seemed to be going through a good spell for much of the spring and summer of 2002. He had resumed recording songs for the next album in April, reprising his earlier version of the Rolling Stones’ “No Expectations” as well as his version of the Eagles’ “Desperado” and his own 1970s excursion into honky-tonk heartbreak, “Tear-Stained Letter.” In July, August, and September, he added eighteen more tracks, ranging from Stephen Foster’s “Beautiful Dreamer” and Ian Tyson’s “Four Strong Winds” to Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get Ready” and Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s “This Train.” The last two were for the long-awaited black gospel set.

At the same time, June started work in midsummer on another solo album, this time produced by John Carter for Dualtone Records, a new indie label in Nashville that focused on singer-songwriters and the country music tradition. She wanted to salute her Carter Family legacy by recording songs she had heard as a child—“Keep on the Sunny Side,” “Church in the Wildwood/Lonesome Valley,” and “Wildwood Flower” the best known of them. To help his mother select the songs, John Carter listened to every studio recording the Carter Family had ever made.

To give the project even more of a family vibe, it was mostly recorded in the cabin in Maces Springs, Virginia, where June was raised. The couple had bought the cabin in the 1980s and loved spending time there because the phone rarely rang. John Carter’s wife, Laura, played guitar and fiddle and sang on various tracks, and a slew of other family members made cameos, including Cash, Carlene Carter and her daughter Tiffany Anastasia, Anita Carter’s daughter Lorrie Carter Bennett, and Joe Carter, the son of A.P. and Sara. The only disconcerting note was renewed worry over June’s health. June had ballooned to nearly two hundred pounds. To spare her embarrassment, John Carter used a drawing of his mother rather than a new photograph on the cover of the album.

Cash, meanwhile, continued to pile up honors. On September 13 he was feeling well enough to accept the free speech award at the first annual Americana Music Awards ceremony in Nashville. In presenting the award, John Seigenthaler, the former editor of the
Nashville Tennessean
and a longtime friend, saluted Cash’s history of standing up for “the poor and oppressed, including prisoners and Native Americans.”

Referring to the September 11 terrorist attacks the year before, Seigenthaler said, “At a time of tragedy and terror and civil strife and danger, he knows that we must reach beyond the bombs and the barriers to embrace Christian, Jew, and Muslim as one. This ‘Man in Black’ is a symbol of rebellion against those whose minds are closed to other ideas.” Cash then recited the lyrics to “Ragged Old Flag,” updating the song by including references to Desert Storm and Afghanistan.

Two weeks later Cash was saluted again by the release of two tribute albums. The more ambitious one,
Kindred Spirits,
was produced by Marty Stuart and featured such guests as Bob Dylan (“Train of Love”), Bruce Springsteen (“Give My Love to Rose”), and Steve Earle (“Hardin Wouldn’t Run”). A second album,
Dressed in Black: A Tribute to Johnny Cash,
featured such artists as Raul Malo (“Guess Things Happen That Way”) and James Intveld (“Folsom Prison Blues”).

John and June also made a rare appearance in late September at the weekly Saturday night barn dance sponsored in Maces Springs by descendants of the Carter family. Admission at the one-thousand-capacity building was just $4 for adults, and the seating was first come, first served, in the room’s eccentric mix of old school bus seats, church pews, and movie theater chairs. It was the most informal setting in which you’d ever expect to find a country music superstar.

Word had spread through the county that Cash was going to appear that evening and the overflow crowd greeted him with an explosion of cheers when he took the stage.

Things started off well as Cash, backed by a local three-piece group, opened with “Folsom Prison Blues” and followed with “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,” but his shortness of breath showed in places on “Suppertime.” Most of the fans were too excited to notice when he missed an occasional word, but June quickly rushed to his side at the end of the piece, allowing him to sit and rest while she sang a few numbers. After a couple of minutes Cash was back at the microphone, and the crowd again roared.

Following the brief set, the Cashes took seats in the audience to watch the other performers, but they were rushed by fans eager for autographs or just the chance to shake their hands. Overwhelmed, John and June retreated backstage, where several admirers stepped forward to help steady him when he headed down the steps on the way back to his car. Moments later, he and June were sitting in their robes in the nearby cabin. June was eating corn bread and milk, and John had milk and cookies on a tray in front of him.

Though this was more than a month before the release of
The Man Comes Around,
Cash was already looking forward to the next album he wanted to make, the collection of black gospel tunes. Earlier in the day he’d played for me a tape of some rough vocals of the songs he was thinking about including in the collection. When the tape ended, he picked up an acoustic guitar and sang a few more songs in a similar style—without any of the pauses he usually needed during conversation.

But the shakiness of his performance at the barn dance that evening brought out a vulnerability that he hadn’t shown when singing the gospel songs. Back in the small house’s living room, he told me he’d feared that his recording days were over when he finished
The Man Comes Around.
In fact, he had designed the last track as a farewell—a group sing-along version of “We’ll Meet Again,” a sweet, optimistic song that had become a virtual anthem for soldiers during World War II, especially in England, thanks to a recording by Vera Lynn. Cash, however, had first heard the song on an Ink Spots recording. It became a special favorite of his after he heard it again in Stanley Kubrick’s political satire
Dr. Strangelove.

“The last album was so hard for everybody, not just me,” he told me. “They had to do so much to fix my vocals because I had to keep stopping during the songs to rest and get back my breath. I’m getting good write-ups and I’m proud of the albums, but they’re not really selling all that much—compared to the other acts that Rick works with. So I felt I was overstaying my welcome with Rick.

“I had just finished my last vocal for the record and I shook hands with Rick and I said, ‘It’s been fun.’ I think it was my way of saying I understood if he wanted to call it quits. But he immediately asked what I wanted to do next. I mentioned the black gospel album and then I mentioned an album of songs that would show my musical roots, and Rick said, ‘Let’s do them both.’ I was dumbfounded. It was just what I wanted to hear. I had thought I might finally be at the point where I would only be singing for myself. I’m a lucky man.”

It was the second time that day Cash had mentioned the word “lucky.”

Earlier he’d told me a conversation he had in 1970 with Michael Nesmith of the Monkees. Cash had given Nesmith a tour of his house after the group appeared on his TV show. “We were standing outside looking at the house and Michael said, ‘I’m glad for you. Shame you can’t keep it.’

“I asked what he was talking about, and he said, ‘We can’t keep things like that in this business. My bet is you’ll lose this place and this woman because this business is awfully rough and you’re as vulnerable as anybody else.’”

After a brief pause, Cash continued the story.

“I knew what Michael was saying, but I told him I’d take that bet, and you know what? I won. I guess I’m one of the lucky ones.” June stood up and kissed her husband on the forehead and went to bed, but John still wanted to talk.