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”:
You can be first on the draw
You can kill your mother in law
You can steal some of the pilgrims’ mackinaw
But you gotta know it’ll be written down
When the man comes around.
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.
There’s a man going around taking names
And he decides who to free and who to blame
Everybody won’t be treated all the same
There’ll be a golden ladder reaching down
When the man comes around
The hairs on your arm will stand up
At the terror in each sip and in each sup
Will you partake of that last offered cup?
Or disappear into the potter’s ground
When the man comes around
Hear the trumpets, hear the pipers
One hundred million angels singing
Multitudes are marching to the big kettledrum
Voices calling, voices crying
Some are born and some are dying
It’s alpha and omega’s kingdom come
And the whirlwind is in the thorn tree
The virgins are all trimming their wicks
The whirlwind is in the thorn tree
It’s hard for thee to kick against the pricks
Till Armageddon no shalam, no shalom
Then the father hen will call his chickens home
The wise man will bow down before the throne
And at his feet they’ll cast their golden crowns
When the man comes around
Whoever is unjust let him be unjust still
Whoever is righteous let him be righteous still
Whoever is filthy let him be filthy still
Listen to the words long written down
When the man comes around
Hear the trumpets, hear the pipers
One hundred million angels singing
Multitudes are marching to the big kettledrum
Voices calling and voices crying
Some are born and some are dying
It’s alpha and omega’s kingdom come
And the whirlwind is in the thorn tree
The virgins are all trimming their wicks
The whirlwind is in the thorn tree
It’s hard for thee to kick against the pricks
In measured hundred weight and penny pound
When the man comes around.
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:
I hurt myself today
To see if I still feel
I focus on the pain
The only thing that’s real
The needle tears a hole
The old familiar sting
Try to kill it all away
But I remember everything
[Chorus]
What have I become
My sweetest friend
Everyone I know goes away
In the end
And you could have it all
My empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt.
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.
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:
What have I become?
My sweetest friend
Everyone I know
Goes away in the end.
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.”
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