by Steve Turner
The song's construction presented a musical challenge. "We cut it a few times," says David Ferguson. "We first cut it with Marty Stuart and Johnny as a tick-tock sort of thing. Then he worked on it again with Randy Scruggs. It was then edited to make it meter out. The way Johnny laid it out, only he knew where the changes were going to be in the instrumental parts. It was something you had to learn. Rick would take a bar out here and a couple of bars out there to make the whole thing uniform."
Cash's deteriorating eyesight meant that the words of each song had to be printed in eighteen-point boldface type for him to be able to read. Nick Cave was visibly shocked when he met him for the first time in Rubin's studio, where he recorded a duet on the Hank Williams song "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" and the traditional song "Cindy." "There were steps into the studio and he had to be led down them very slowly by two people," he says. "One of his illnesses meant that when he went from light to dark he couldn't see for a while. He looked real sick, and he just sat down and was blind. He asked me if I was there and I told him I was. His eyes adjusted but it wasn't immediate. But when he started working he came alive. This man who I had seen virtually having to be carried down the stairs was utterly transformed when he started singing. In his own words, 'This is what I love to do. This is what I want to do. I want to do as much of it as possible.' It was his cause for living."
The other experimental track on the album was Trent Reznor's song "Hurt." Few would have spotted a Johnny Cash classic lurking inside the Nine Inch Nails rendition, but Cash did.
While still a junkie, Reznor had written the song about the despondency of someone addicted to heroin who not only hurts himself but those who love and try to help him. Although Cash never shot heroin, he could certainly relate to the sentiment. It was a song about disengagement from friends, feelings, surroundings, and even conscience. Yet in Cash's mouth the words took on another dimension. The numbness of the opening lines became the numbness of living on medication. The needle came from the familiar IV unit. The "sweetest friend" referred, of course, to June. The "everyone I know" who "goes away in the end" included Ray and Carrie, Maybelle, Ezra, Anita and Helen Carter, Roy Orbison, Waylon Jennings, Luther Perkins, and Jack Cash. His "empire of dirt" manifested itself in his possessions, awards, and earthly reputation.
"Hurt" could also be about vicarious atonement. From this perspective, the "sweetest friend" is Christ, the "empire of dirt" becomes Cash's collection of sins, and the pain at the heart of the song reflects the pain of the Crucifixion. The song, then, becomes an admission of his unfaithfulness to Christ. At the same time, it provides an assurance that this unfaithfulness is included among the sins for which Christ died.
I will let you down
I will make you hurt.6.
Though a recurring theme in Cash's life, pain never made him bitter. "He lived in constant physical pain for the last ten years of his life," says John Carter. "He struggled with it for a long time, and it got to the point where you never heard him complain. There was a great sadness inside him but at the same time a great strength. He would never draw attention to himself. He owned those pains. He took them all on as his own, and he didn't blame anybody for it."
The song that Cash thought best summarized his faith was "Personal Jesus," written by Martin Gore and recorded by Depeche Mode. He once wished that he had composed it. It's easy to see why. The language is direct ("Reach out and touch faith / Your own personal Jesus / Someone to hear your prayers . . . " ) 7.and the message seems unambiguous: Jesus is ready to forgive anyone who calls on him and to establish a personal relationship with them. However, it was written as satire, mocking the tendency of people to turn lovers into savior figures. Gore wrote it after reading Priscilla Presley's book Elvis and Me. "It's a song about being a Jesus for somebody else," he said. "It's about how Elvis was her man and her mentor, and how often that happens in love relationships."
Departures and farewells permeated the new Cash album. The men in "Give My Love to Rose," "I Hung My Head," and "The Streets of Laredo" try to make amends before they die. "Danny Boy" is a plea to a soldier leaving for war. The Beatles' song "In My Life" is a lament for a disappearing world. "We'll Meet Again," a song made popular in World War II by Vera Lynn in Britain and the Inkspots in America, captured the mood of people thrown together by circumstance who never knew whether they'd ever reunite. Cash defined the theme as "the human spirit fighting for survival."
The album's packaging, coupled with Mark Romanek's video for "Hurt," intensifies the somber mood of the tracks. The front cover, dominated by a black background, features a bespectacled Cash in profile. His head is slightly tilted and his eyes appear to be closed. All but the front of his face is in shadow, giving the impression that he is slowly slipping from view. Photographs inside the CD booklet cast Cash almost as an apparition—his hair white and his fingers gnarled. In a closeup of his left hand, his black onyx ring displays a crucifix.
"On that record he was really showing his age," says Martyn Atkins, who did the cover photography. "There was a lot of frailty to the music, and the pictures tell the same story."
The video for "Hurt" must rank as one of the most tear-inducing ever made. Cash was filmed at home performing the song with June standing nearby watching him and then footage of his younger more vigorous self was edited in, giving the undeniable impression that he was singing about his own demise. The contrast between the powerfully built, dark-haired singer of the 1960s and this frail, balding man sitting on a sofa was painful to watch. Images from the House of Cash Museum, now obviously in a state of disrepair, were also used to underline the impression of a life drawing to a close.
Romanek had not planned to shoot the video this way. He originally wanted to film something inspired by images from a Samuel Beckett play, on a set in Los Angeles, but Cash got sick and couldn't travel. With four days left before the Cashes disappeared to Cinnamon Hill, Romanek had no choice but to shoot the video at home. When he arrived in Hendersonville on October 18, 2002, he picked out three or four areas in the house to film and then saw the museum, which had not only been closed for a long time but had been damaged in a flood.
Says Romanek, "I think I shot the museum the way it was and didn't try to gloss over the state of John's health and his advanced years because I was bolstered by the bold truthfulness and unusual candor that defined most of John's songs and public life. The use of archival footage wasn't part of the plan. We discovered this trove of material in a storage house while we were there and asked if we could take some back to L.A. Frankly, I didn't think it would be of much use, but when my editor Robert Duffy and I put a little piece in the first cut, the hairs on our necks stood up. We knew then that this footage would make up a huge part of the video. It then took us three weeks to comb through all the footage we'd brought back."
The result was an intensely moving study of someone facing the indignities of illness and aging but doing so without shame. It fit perfectly into Cash's oeuvre as a man known for his honesty and directness. He had for many years sung about the fleeting nature of life and the ravages of death, and now he courageously shared his own walk through the valley of the shadow of death. He'd started his career in a business that exalted youth, and now he exemplified the dignity in growing old.
Romanek sent a copy of the finished video to Cash in Jamaica. "Rick Rubin told me that the family watched it together as a group," he says. "Tears were shed. I think John was initially unsure about it, but the family convinced him that it was a strong, unusual, well-intentioned piece." Rosanne didn't see it for a while because her sisters thought it might upset her. She finally saw it when Cash played it for her in his office. "I was devastated," she says. "I was crying like a baby. He was sitting next to me patting me on the shoulder. I told him that it was the most powerful video I had ever seen. I said it wasn't even a video. It was a documentary."
The Man Comes Around hit stores on November 4, 2002. On November 26, Cash appeared in an hour-long interview wit
h Larry King on CNN, which had been recorded six weeks earlier on October 11. Larry asked whether Cash was angry about his physical setbacks. He said he wasn't. Things had been good and things would get better. Did he have regrets? He said he didn't. Was he bitter? No, he wasn't. "Why should I be bitter? I'm thrilled to death with life! Life, the way God has given it to me, was just a platter—a golden platter of life laid out there for me.
It's been beautiful." Was he angry at God? "Oh no," said Cash. "I'm the last one that would be angry at God."
Cash and June retired to Cinnamon Hill while The Man Comes Around started to make waves. The video received instant accolades. Rolling Stone called it "one of the most intense and affecting videos in memory." The album went on to sell over a million copies and became his first platinum studio album.
He started feeling bad again in Jamaica, so the Cashes returned early to Hendersonville. Cash was admitted to the hospital in January suffering from pneumonia. "It was a really hard time for him," says his niece, Kelly Hancock. "He came out in January and was then back again in February (after gashing his knee) and then back again in March (after falling out of bed and losing consciousness). I believe he was released either on the last day of March or the first day of April, but this was the first time that he was unable to walk. He had to have a wheelchair and a walker and he found this really difficult. Two days later his sister Louise died of cancer and he was so fragile that he couldn't go to the funeral. The doctor forbade him from leaving the house."
The house Cash had moved back to was the house his mother had lived in before she had died. Being on one level it was more convenient for him now that his legs were weak, and the need to build an elevator in the house on Old Hickory Lake meant there was building work going on at home. June, as ever, was busying herself with making sure that he was as comfortable as possible, sticking resolutely to her belief that his needs were her number-one priority.
Karen Adams and Kelly Hancock would go over regularly with mail delivered to the House of Cash and talk over business decisions that needed to be made. "I noticed that June was taking all this special time with him and how important it was to her," says Kelly. "I remember thinking later that it was so sweet, and it was amazing to me that they had been married for so many years and yet they were still like that with each other. That's how they were. She wanted to be his caregiver. I don't think that he really wanted that for her, but a lot of times she would take over that role and see that things were done by her. Looking back, we realize that she was sick herself."
It was during the third week of April, after her brief stay in the hospital, that those who visited the house regularly noticed that June seemed different. Her energy seemed depleted, and her breathing seemed more labored, but she was so involved in looking after her husband that she didn't have time to mull over her ailments. On April 18, Good Friday, she told Kelly that she didn't have long to live. She told another friend that "something's going on in here," pointing to her chest.
On April 28 June was taken into the hospital. Whereas Cash was not initially aware of the seriousness of her condition, she appears to have instinctively realized that something major was wrong. "I think that she knew," says John Carter. "Before she left for the hospital, she had me come in with her to the room and go through stuff. She wanted to talk to me about things, about what should happen if she died. I think she knew she was going."
When she underwent the tests, June was apprehensive about her chances of survival. "I just don't have the energy," she told Michele Rollins, who went with Cash to visit her. They discussed the options until it became clear to everyone that there were really only two options—certain death almost immediately or the chance of an extended life. Cash was distraught about the possibility of losing June, telling her how much he loved her and how his life would be over if she were to leave him. They chose the possibility of life.
When Merle Kilgore visited, Cash seemed remarkably composed. "He was sitting in his wheelchair at the hospital and he reached out both hands to greet me," says Kilgore. "I remarked to him that he seemed so strong. He said, 'No. I'm really weak inside.' He said, I can talk about June without breaking up because I'm dehydrated. I can't make any tears.'"
The next two weeks proved the most harrowing of Cash's life. Hopes of a remarkable recovery were soon dashed by June's lapse into coma. The devastating moment when they agreed to unplug the life-support machine was closely followed by the excruciating period of waiting for her body to finally close down. "Part of him was gone," says John Carter of the effect of her death. "The two were one. When she left, part of him just wasn't there anymore."
"He was the most alone person I had ever seen in my life," remembers Kelly. "It was so strange to walk into his house and not to see June and to know that we were never going to see her. I don't think he'd ever been alone. He'd always had very strong women around him. June was someone who had been stable for him, and I looked at him and realized that for the first time he was alone and he was lost."
Cash never went back to their marital bed. Instead, he slept on a twin bed in his office with the pillows propped up to avoid acid reflux. Surrounding him were the things he loved: his guitar, his Bible, more than five hundred books of theology, history, poetry, music, fiction, and Western lore, a TV almost always tuned to CNN, and a framed photograph of June that he spoke to constantly. He napped there in the afternoon and slept there at night, waking around 5:00 a.m. for his first coffee of the day.
"John struck me as a quiet, pensive man," daughter-in-law Laura Cash says. "After June passed in May, he seemed to withdraw even more from having much conversation. Many times John Carter and I would sit with him for long periods with no words spoken. I believe it was a comfort to him to have someone there who didn't feel it necessary to talk."
After a time of grieving he knew the only way to cope with his loss was to get back to his music. "He said to me, 'I've got to get into the studio, son,' and so that's what we did," says John Carter. The first project he worked on was a collection of Carter Family songs, and then he continued with what he wanted to be the follow-up to The Man Comes Around, an album already being referred to as American V. John Carter continued in the role of associate producer.
One of the musicians working on these sessions was his old friend Jack Clement, now into his sixth decade of working with Cash. "I was pretty proud of the way John Carter rose to the occasion," he says. "Cash got to the point where he couldn't even read, much less decipher lyrics. But John Carter would sing them in the sessions so that he could learn to play them."
Cash had been taping new songs ever since completion of the last album. At the same time, preparations were underway for a five-CD box set that would contain the best of the American Recordings already released, as well as the best of the work not used. David Ferguson flew back and forth between Nashville and Los Angeles to sift through hundreds of hours of tape with Rick Rubin for the box sets and work with Cash in his home studio.
"He was weak by now," says Ferguson. "His voice would come and go. He never knew from one day to the next whether he was going to be able to sing. He was real weak. He was in a wheelchair and sick, but whenever he could and whenever he felt like it he wanted to record because he really wanted to finish up that record."
On June 21 he played seven songs at the Carter Family Fold in Virginia to celebrate what would have been June's seventy-fourth birthday. The concert, organized by Janette Carter, June's eighty-year-old cousin, attracted almost sixteen hundred people—twice the venue's normal capacity. With his wispy gray hair and sunken features he was a husk of the man he'd once been and seemed wrapped in a cloak of loneliness. "I don't know hardly what to say tonight about being up here without her," he said. "The pain is so severe there is no way of describing it."
"He'd bury himself in his music," says Ferguson. "He was lonely. He had fun when he was recording because he was surrounded by his friends. I've been working with him a long time and I know that's one reason
that he liked to work—to have buddies around him. He had people like Pat McLaughlin, Jack Clement, Mark Howard, Randy Scruggs, Marty Stuart."
His daughter Cindy came to stay with him in June. Although he was 80 percent blind, he had her bring more photographs of June to his office. He even had Mark Burckhardt, an artist from Austin, Texas, paint June's face on the elevator doors. "He missed her so bad," says Cindy. "He sobbed for her daily. He would pick up the phone to talk to her as if she was on the other end."
Cindy would take him to sit outside in the sun, but after thirty minutes he was ready to come back in and lie down. Almost all of his enjoyments had now been taken away from him. One time she took him in his wheelchair to see June's grave. "He stared at it awhile and tried to focus so that he could see the tombstone," she says. "As soon as he had focused, he said, 'I'm coming baby. I'm coming.' That upset me. I had to tell him that I didn't want to hear those kinds of things."
Her sister Tara came to visit for three days in July, and she spent hours sitting with him in his office or outside the house. Knowing that it was almost certainly going to be their last time together, she made tapes of their conversations and of a game he enjoyed playing where she would throw a random topic at him and he had to dig up an appropriate song from his encyclopedic mind. "I'd say, 'Dad, sing a song about a rock,' and he'd break into one," she says. "Then I'd say, 'Sing one about grass,' and he'd break into one. I did that for maybe thirty subjects. He loved it. I think it helped to keep his mind active, and he loved the challenge."
As Cash's eyes and legs grew weaker, his faith appeared to grow stronger. He had a light box that projected pages of his Bible onto a screen so that he could read it with his 20-percent vision. He talked regularly on the phone with Billy Graham, someone whom he'd always relied on as a rock to lean on in times of trouble. "I think that God had given him such faith, almost to the point of it being unreal," says Kelly. "I think that's the only way he made it. I think he had the utmost faith in God and he looked to God for his strength and direction. After the funeral he could have gone to bed and told everyone that he wasn't going to get up again. He could have gone into isolation. But he chose not to. He could have got angry, but I never saw him angry. What I saw from him was that he was lost and he was still trying to find his way without her, but I didn't see the same man that I saw that day in the hospital who was utterly broken. I didn't see that again."
