Johnny Cash: The Life (67 page)

Haltingly for the next forty-five minutes, when his breath didn’t desert him, he told me about personal things, especially some regrets—not being a better father to his daughters, not being a better husband to June in the early days, not being a better Christian, and not being a more dedicated musician.

As time went on, the breaks to catch his breath became more frequent. Still, Cash wasn’t finished.

“I needed help…”

He paused.

“…to make that last record, and I’m not just talking about Rick and the others.”

He paused.

“I called upon Jesus. He stood with me. I can never praise Him enough for all his blessings.”

Cash again had to pause.

“But I tried to praise Him with ‘The Man Comes Around.’ If someone is still listening to my music fifty years from now…”

He paused, then repeated, “…if someone is listening at all, I hope they’re listening to that song.”

Romanek took a red-eye flight to Nashville on October 18 to begin work on the “Hurt” video. Accompanied by his producer Aaris McGarry and cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffer, they were met early the next morning by Cash in the Hendersonville house’s library. Romanek was saddened to see Cash surrounded by a massive wall of books he was no longer able to read. Though weak, Cash was gracious and took the three men upstairs to meet June, who was resting in bed.

There wasn’t time to arrange to shoot the video on a local soundstage, so Romanek looked around the house for an appropriate setting. He decided on the living room, where Cash could sit at the piano. “I don’t remember him being associated with the piano, so I thought that would be more interesting than having him with a guitar,” the director recalls. “We could then shoot him somewhere else in the room with the guitar and at the dining table—and that was the only affectation that we put into the video. It seemed weird for him to be sitting at a bare table, so we set up this sort of banquet at the table.”

As Romanek and team spent the rest of the day assembling a local crew and ordering lighting and other equipment, he was troubled by one thing. “I didn’t know if the scenes in the house were going to be enough to make a three-and-a-half-minute video,” he says. “When I spoke to Rick that night on the phone, I told him my concerns, and Rick suggested we check out the House of Cash museum.” The museum had been closed for some time and it was in a state of disrepair.

The combination of Cash’s health and the museum’s shabby appearance gave Romanek pause. “I found myself struggling with how to do this,” he says. “Do I try to glamorize everything and put a scrim over the lens and use lighting tracks you might do with an aging woman who is vain—or do I show it the way it is? My instinct—because it was Johnny Cash—was that we had to be very truthful and show how he looks because it’s wrong—especially for this song—to try to prettify the whole thing. Finally I decided that the only thing to do was to be honest. I realized, ‘This is Johnny Cash. I should do the bold thing, not the safe thing.’”

Cash allowed Romanek to shoot the museum and had no problem with his showing the broken records and places where the ceiling had recently caved in from the rain. A woman from Cash’s housekeeping staff came in at one point and offered to clean things up, but Romanek gently shooed her away. He wanted everything the way it was, dust and all. The only “prop” he added to the museum was a “Closed to the Public” sign on the front door; the museum was closed, but Romanek wanted to make the point more clearly. The museum scenes—including stacks of video and film archives in the basement—were meant to help add contrast to the performance scenes, which were all filmed in the house.

At one point in the shooting, June walked from her bedroom to the stairs and looked down at her husband, who was lip-synching to the instrumental track of “Hurt.” When Romanek noticed her, he was struck by the anxious, loving look on her face, and he asked if she would mind being in the video. After putting on some makeup, she returned to the stairs and the cameras again rolled. Her loving but highly anxious expression was an unexpected highlight of the eventual video. Because Cash had trouble lip-synching, the shoot went slowly. He did two or three takes by the piano, two or three more near some Frederic Remington paintings, a take or two by the stairs, and finally the climactic banquet scene.

Romanek’s idea was for Cash to sing right into the lens for added impact, but Cash, because of his limited sight, couldn’t locate the lens; the problem was solved when a tiny flashing light was placed next to the lens. Just before the final take, the director approached Cash with a suggestion: “This is the last thing we are going to shoot, so if you want to do something crazy, go for it—if you want to sweep the food off the table, this is the time. Let’s be bold.’ He said, ‘I think I’ve got something, Mark.’ And that’s when he poured the wine onto the table. It was totally him, and that turned out to be one of my favorite moments in the video.”

Back in Los Angeles, Romanek and his team went through the footage and found some haunting material, but they still weren’t sure it was enough to hold someone’s interest for an entire video. It wasn’t until they interspersed shots from the archives of the younger, charismatic Cash with the Hendersonville footage that the video came to life. This took longer than expected, but Rubin was patient.

“It was that juxtaposition that gave the video its power,” Romanek says. “It’s the shocking contrast of a man in his prime smacked one frame right up against someone who is coming toward the end of his life. It’s a shocking dose of everyone’s mortality. Plus the song made an equation that was way beyond the sum of its parts.”

When the team, including editor Robert Duffy, was finished, a copy of the video was sent to Rubin. Two hours later, Rubin was on the phone. “He said, ‘Wow,’ but it wasn’t a good ‘wow,’” Romanek remembers. “It was kind of like, ‘I’m upset by this—emotionally upset. It’s obviously very powerful, but I don’t know if it’s good or bad.’”

Ultimately, Rubin knew the decision to release the video rested with Cash, and he sent him a copy without comment. When Cash phoned, he wanted to know how Rubin felt about it, and the producer said he had been troubled at first but had grown to believe it was a marvelous piece of art, especially Cash’s performance and such scenes as the spilling of the wine at the dinner table.

In turn, Cash told Rubin that he was disturbed watching it and needed time to think it over; his tone led Rubin to believe he was leaning against releasing the video.

When Cash showed the video to people around him, several, including June, advised him not to allow the video to be released. She felt his fans might believe he was destitute. But Rosanne, among others, argued strongly in favor of it. “Dad showed me the video in his office at the house and I cried all the way through it,” she says. “I told him, ‘You have to put it out. It’s so unflinching and brave and that’s what you are.’ I was tremendously proud of him. I thought it was enormously courageous. It was a work of art, excruciatingly truthful. I thought, ‘How could that be wrong in any way?’”

After a few days, Cash phoned Rubin with an answer. “I remember sitting in my car in Santa Monica, looking at the ocean while talking to Johnny, having a feeling that nobody’s ever going to see this video,” Rubin says. “I thought for sure he was going to say no, but he decided it should be seen.”

Rubin immediately phoned Romanek, who had been aware of the dissension in Cash’s camp. “It was a nail-biting week,” the director says. “It seemed like it could go either way. I knew we were treading this line which some might see as disrespectful or some kind of premature eulogy, which was not what I was trying to do. I didn’t pick that song. He picked the song. If he had sung ‘These Are a Few of My Favorite Things,’ it would have been a lighter video.”

For Cash, the decision was a striking example of his courage as an artist; in the end, he saw it as part of his artistic journey. Where
Folsom
showed a young man full of energy and creative fire, “Hurt” showed a man—the same man—nearing the end of his life, struggling to maintain both his health and his faith.

Though thrilled by Cash’s decision, Romanek wondered if youth-oriented MTV or any other TV music outlet would even show the video. “Videos were aimed at sixteen-year-olds mostly,” the director relates. “I kept thinking, ‘He’s a senior citizen. Nobody is going to show this.’”

As feared, the “Hurt” video was largely ignored in the weeks after the album was released, and few music writers made special mention of the “Hurt” track; perhaps the song was too closely identified with Reznor for them to pay much attention. Similarly, little was said about the other two major rock covers, “Personal Jesus” and “In My Life.” In fact, one reason why critical reaction was mixed was that many critics thought Cash spent too much time doing remakes of overly familiar songs, including “Bridge over Troubled Water,” which had been a massive hit for both Simon & Garfunkel and Aretha Franklin, and “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” which was strongly identified with Roberta Flack.

When the reviews came out in November, two themes were common: a widespread suspicion that this would be Cash’s final album and special praise for the title track. In England,
Mojo
magazine declared, “If this is Cash’s last album, then what a magnificent way he has chosen to say goodbye.” England’s
Uncut
found it to be “probably the most consistent of the Rubin-produced albums.”

Even in a
Rolling Stone
preview of the album three months before its release, the focus was on “The Man Comes Around.” While the article mentioned “Hurt” and the other cuts in passing, it contained this quote by Marty Stuart about “The Man Comes Around”: “It’s the most strangely marvelous, wonderful, gothic, mysterious, Christian thing that only God and Johnny Cash could create together.”

Pitchfork,
a fiercely independent Internet publication known for championing innovation and daring, especially in young indie rock, made the strongest case for the album’s title track: “The Cash-penned ‘The Man Comes Around’ is an epic tale of apocalypse, interpreting Revelations with uplifting exuberance. Restraint, resignation, and a hope of peace pervade the prophetic imagery. Truly, the subdued fury and beauty of this track reduces everything that follows. The immediate question posed is: if this man can still write and perform works of this caliber, why is he resorting to the words and music of others?”

The
Village Voice’
s Robert Christgau, one of the nation’s most probing and influential rock critics, also singled out “The Man Comes Around,” writing, “First and best comes the newly written title tune, a look at death as cold as ‘Under Ben Bulben.’” The
Los Angeles Times
called the song “a judgment-day tale as stark as anything else Cash has written.”

With the expectation level that had been raised by
American III: Solitary Man
and the heavy press attention,
The Man Comes Around
got off to the fastest sales start of any of the Rubin-produced albums. After two months, sales had reached nearly 120,000 copies. But then, in the absence of a hit single or video, sales dropped after Christmas to just 6,000 a week—and stayed at or below that level through January.

Rubin saw the “Hurt” video as his last chance to recapture the public’s attention. Knowing that MTV and other primary video music channels took their lead in programming from what radio was playing, on January 14 he took a copy of the video to Kevin Weatherly, the general manager of KROQ-FM in Los Angeles. If the influential station played the record, Rubin knew other stations around the country would follow, and that would make MTV at least consider showing it.

Weatherly, a master at spotting potential hits, was touched by the video and played the record immediately on the station. He wanted to test it on his young rock audience. The radio request lines lit up. Rubin was thrilled. As expected, MTV followed the station’s lead, and the response was impressive enough for the channel to keep showing the video.

In Nashville, CMT’s editorial director, Chet Flippo, praised the video: “Music videos come and go, but the stunning video for Johnny Cash’s Hurt is one that will endure for a long, long time. Visually arresting, artistically captivating, emotionally devastating—it’s the kind of drama to which great music videos aspire. It’s a gripping testimony to Cash’s career and to the magnitude of his stature both as an artist and a man. Along the way, it graphically demonstrates his elevation to worldwide icon.”

This video-driven excitement spread to the retail music world. The album sales, which had totaled only 6,800 copies the week ending February 2, suddenly leaped to 13,300 the following week, according to Nielsen SoundScan. It then jumped to 18,100 the following week, then 21,000, before hitting a peak of 26,500 the week ending March 9. By the end of June, sales for
The Man Comes Around
were over 400,000. It was on its way to becoming the first Cash solo album since
San Quentin
to top the 1 million sales mark.

But the impact of the video went far deeper than sales. For millions of young music fans, Cash became as beloved and respected a figure as he had been in the days of his prison albums and his TV show. His legacy was stronger than ever. His old drummer W. S. Holland was amazed by the resurgence. “It sounds odd just saying it, but you know Johnny Cash may be remembered someday more for that video than any of his records.”

The video exposure also redirected attention to Cash’s recording of “Hurt.” Seeing him sing the song made it easier for young rock fans to notice the changes he’d made in the original—not just altering the line “I wear this crown of shit” to “I wear this crown of thorns,” but the way he had made the song into a parable. In its first decade the album eventually sold nearly 2 million copies in the United States alone. No one seemed more moved than the song’s writer, Trent Reznor, who admitted he had mixed feelings about Cash’s recording such a personal song. After seeing the video, however, he was so touched he cried. “It really, really made sense, and I thought what a powerful piece of art,” he said. “I never got to meet Johnny, but I’m happy I contributed the way I did. It felt like a warm hug.”