Johnny Cash: The Life

by Robert Hilburn

  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.”

  II

  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.

  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.”

  III

  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.