CHAPTER 19
: , Rubin’s third project with Johnny Cash,
came out three years after the successful Unchained. This was in large part due to Cash’s deteriorating health; he was forced to stop touring when he was diagnosed with the neurodegenerative disease Shy- Drager syndrome. (His diagnosis was later altered to autonomic neu- ropathy, which can be associated with diabetes.) But Cash continued to record with Rubin. Said Rubin to Independent Mail, “He wanted to be able to do more than he was physically able to do. He couldn’t understand why one day he would come in and be able to sing great, and feel good, and then the next day he would come in and not be able to catch his breath, or would have to lie down between takes. He was suffering a lot. Actually he had suffered a lot for years, and yet he could still get the job done whenever he wanted to. But now, for the first time, he was experiencing times when he wanted to be working, and the frustration of either physically not being able to do it, or mentally not being able to stay focused, or voice-wise not being of strong voice. This was all new to him, and it was very difficult for him to deal
with. . . . I know there were times when he wished his voice was better. Sometimes he felt embarrassed, and it really took the people around him to say, ‘This is beautiful, and we love it.’ And again, he trusted the people who were saying that, because we really did feel that way. But there were times, I know, when he felt a little insecure about his voice, and wished he sounded stronger.”
The manner in which this album was put together followed the model of the previous two. “The common theme I see in these albums is they weren’t made by a committee,” said Cash to All Star. “They were made by Rick Rubin and I, with my son’s help in Tennessee. These things are very personal. . . . Each of the songs has some personal meaning to me. I have a personal affinity and a feeling for it, or I wouldn’t have released it. I try a lot of songs to see if I feel like I can make the song my own. If I can’t, I drop it. I don’t think anymore about it. . . . One of the purposes of the album, to stretch as far as we could for a variety of themes and songs and beats and tunes, but to be sure that I could feel them personally, that they belonged to me when I did them.” The work Cash had done with Rubin was intensely personal. “These are the things that my heart has been into, in the last three albums. That is where my heart is, these albums. . . . I’m sure that’s going to stay where it is, because [Rubin] has told me that I can record one album after another, so long as the demand is out there and so long as I feel like doing it.”
The collection chosen was diverse, covering a wide range of eras and sung in ways which completely reinvented the songs. One song Cash had always wanted to record was “Mary of the Wild Moor”: “I was probably three years old when I heard that the first time, and I always knew someday I would record it. I guess I must have thought about it at every session I ever had, and, finally, I just went ahead and did it. ‘Wayfaring Stranger,’ I have the same feeling for. It’s an old Southern spiritual that I always wanted to record. It’s a far stretch from there to [Nick Cave’s] ‘The Mercy Seat’ and to Bono’s song, ‘One.’” The album became another critical favorite, with Rolling Stone singling out “The Mercy Seat,” for its “layered production, with organ, regular and tack piano, and accordion swelling and receding under Cash’s onrushing, Leonard Cohen–like delivery. It’s the moment of the greatest artistic
risk.” Notice was taken of the effects Cash’s declining health had on his artistry, and critics complimented his ability to use the weakening of his voice to grow in a new direction. Including the album in its top 10 of the year, Entertainment Weekly highlighted the perfect marriage between the songs, Cash’s performance, and Rubin’s production: “Producer Rick Rubin frames that deep-sea voice with harmonies and churchy organs, making for a dark-angel beauty of an album that’s aus- tere but welcoming.” The magazine went on to say, “[These songs] have rarely sounded so authentic, thanks to arrangements that are spare but never colorless and a voice that’s deep in more ways than one.”
* * *
It wasn’t long before the pair were working on the next album, 2002’s
American IV: The Man Comes Around, which drew thematically on
Cash’s declining health and channeled his deep religious convictions. With his mortality undeniable, Cash made the most of his time left, recording tirelessly in a prolific but brutal period. “I worked on this album in spite of everything. I found strength to work just to spite this disease. Sometimes I came to the studio and I couldn’t sing — I came in with no voice when I could have stayed at home and pouted in my room and cried in my beer or my milk, but I didn’t let that happen. I came in and opened up my mouth and tried to let something come out. There are tracks I recorded when that was the last thing in the world I thought I could do, and those are the ones that have the feeling and the fire and the fervor and the passion — a great deal of strength came out of that weakness.” His battles would become the main theme of the album. “The theme is spirit,” said Cash to Concertlivewire.com, “the human spirit more than the spiritual or godly spirit, the human spirit fighting for survival. It probably reflects a little of the maturity that I’ve experienced with the pain that I’ve suffered with the illnesses that brought me so close to death.”
Cash wrote “The Man Comes Around,” the album’s title track, inspired by a dream he had “about seven years ago, in Nottingham, England. I dreamed I was in Buckingham Palace and Queen Elizabeth said, ‘Johnny Cash, you’re just like a thorn tree in a whirlwind.’ I
couldn’t figure out what that meant, and I couldn’t get it out of my head.” Evenutally, Cash decided to look it up in the Bible and found that “the whirlwind is always symbolic of God, and the thorn tree is symbolic of man’s obstinacy, and arrogance. So there you have it: me and my arrogance standing against God. I don’t know why Queen Elizabeth felt she had to preach to me, but she did.” Cash “wrote dozens and dozens of verses — I thought it was just going to be one of my weird poems but I started seeing a song forming. I never had a writing project that I put in as much time and as much writing, as I did that song. I knew I was overwriting, but I had to get it out.” He called it his “song of the apocalypse, it comes from the Book of Revelation, I love the language there. It’s astonishing and it’s scary, but there’s so much love and kindness in it at times that you wouldn’t think that’s what it’s all about.”
For the songs on the album he didn’t write himself, Cash tried to make the collection as personal as possible. “I think he tried to make them all his own,” said Rubin to Gibson.com. “I don’t think he was especially concerned with what the writer’s original intention was. It was a question of, ‘How does this song hit me, and how can I convey that mood, or the emotion that I feel, in my version of the song?’” Cash described his process for selecting material to Concert - livewire.com: “I listen to everything that people bring me. I get my coffee early in the morning and I listen to some music, usually to songs that were submitted to me the day before. I start recording the songs that I couldn’t get over — the ones I just had to get out. I brought a pocketful of songs to every session, and if I couldn’t sing this one, I’d sing that one. In the middle of taping something that wasn’t quite working, I’d just start a new song. And that always worked — to alter- nate, to go to something that I could do. We wound up with about 32 songs that I liked and wanted to record, and then came the painful process of weeding them out to the ones that made the final cut.”
His covers of songs were so evocative because, from Rubin’s per- spective, Cash “was really a master at taking a song — even a song you might’ve heard many times in your life — and imbuing it with a kind of storyteller mentality. Again, even if you had heard a particular song
your whole life, when he sang it, all of a sudden you understood it, or thought about the words in a different way, or you took the song more seriously.” Cash took a certain ownership of the material in his per- formance of it. “The way I approach a song, I have to love the song up front first. But I knew that with those songs, I couldn’t sing them the way they were recorded — and I didn’t want to sing them that way, I wanted to sing them my way. I wanted to make them my songs. And if I’m recording and it doesn’t begin to feel that way, I just throw it out.” Once the collection of songs had been chosen, Cash saw that “as it turned out, the album took a very sad theme in a lot of ways. But it has its humor too — like ‘We’ll Meet Again’ and ‘Sam Hall.’”
So successful were Cash’s interpretations of songs, in some cases he completely reinvented the song — most notably in the case of the single “Hurt,” his cover of the Nine Inch Nails hit. Said Cash to Time of including the song, “It was Rick Rubin’s idea. We were looking for a song that we felt had an impact. He found this one, and he asked me what I thought of it. I said, ‘I think it’s probably the best antidrug song I ever heard, but I don’t think it’s for me.’ And he said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘Because it’s not my style, it’s not the way I do it.’ And he said, ‘What if it were?’ And I said, ‘Well, I could give it a try.’ So I went out and recorded it. When I listened to it, I felt it came out all right. . . . I would just get down and do it until I felt like I was doing it with feeling. I probably sang the song 100 times before I went in and recorded it, because I had to make it mine.” To Johnny Cash, “Hurt” was a song about “a man’s pain and what we’re capable of doing to ourselves and the possibility that we don’t have to do that anymore. I could relate to that from the very beginning.”
The Depeche Mode classic “Personal Jesus” was a much easier song for Cash to conceptualize in his own way. “That’s probably the most evangelical gospel song I ever recorded. I don’t know that the writer meant it to be that, but that’s what it is,” said Cash to Livewire. “It’s where do you find your comfort, your counsel,” he told NPR, “your shoulder to lean on, your hand to hold to, your personal Jesus.” Rubin enlisted Red Hot Chili Peppers’ guitarist John Frusciante to play guitar on the song, who told Paper Magazine, “I recorded it in the amount of
time it takes to play the song, and I sent it to Rick. And Johnny sang along with the scratch vocal. I never met him!” Frusciante felt that it was destiny he should work on this song. “Rick Rubin knew very well that I’m a fanatic of Depeche Mode because he is also working with the Peppers. Rubin had kind of a slow, dark blues in mind but he couldn’t convince Johnny. As I knew Martin Gore’s original concept for the song by chance, it was pretty easy for me in the end to suggest him a corresponding version on the acoustic guitar.”
On some of the more traditional selections for the album, Cash noted, “I recorded [‘Streets of Laredo’] in the ’60s but wasn’t happy with the recording, not at all. This time we made it the song I really wanted to record. ‘Give My Love to Rose’ came up on the spur of the moment in the studio, and I think it’s also better than the original recording. . . . We recorded [‘Danny Boy’] in the Episcopal church in Los Angeles. The session lasted about two hours and it was over — just exactly the way we had hoped and planned and prayed it would be. It really adds an element that I’ve never had on record before, never had anything like that.”
Upon completion, Cash was satisfied with the album he and Rubin had put together. “I firmly believe that it’s the best record I’ve done for American. We put more blood, sweat, and tears and love into this one than anything we’ve ever done. It reaches out even farther and in more directions than the others did — the simplicity of Nick Cave and singing ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’ with just a couple of guitars, and some of the pop songs that no one would ever in a hundred years think of me singing, me included, until I heard myself singing it. It goes in so many different directions but they all come together in a one-ness with me, that I could make these songs my own. They come together in being my songs.” For Rubin, it was difficult to single out a song more poignant for him than the rest but felt that “Bridge Over Troubled Water” was one track that Cash managed to make com- pletely new. “I’ve heard that song my whole life, but until Johnny sang it, I never thought about what it meant. All of a sudden the words took on a whole new seriousness, when he sang them. Some people have said they felt that way about ‘One’ — the U2 song. They’ve said that
when Johnny sang it, the words rang true in a way that was different from what they had heard before.”
Less than a year after The Man Comes Around was released and just a few months after his wife, June Carter Cash, passed away, Johnny Cash died on September 12, 2003, at the age of 71. It was the New York Times that best described the closeness of Rubin and Cash’s relationship in an article published after Cash’s death, writing that Rubin had been “much more involved with every aspect of the production — from the choice of songs to the arrangements to the videos — than he had been with any other artist. Rubin and Cash also had a deep spiritual kinship: during the final months of Cash’s life, they took communion together every day, even though Rubin, who was born Jewish and now sees himself as not having any specific religious orientation, should not be eligible for the holy sacraments. Even after Cash’s death, Rubin would close his eyes and hear Cash’s voice as he said the benediction.”
“When all else fails, call Rick Rubin.”
— LaRs ULRich
PART V
on 2000’s Solitary Man and 2002’s The Man Comes Around, Rubin returned to the studio with System of a Down, who were working on their sophomore lp. During the lengthy pre-production process, Rubin said to mtv, “It’s hard to know where it’s gonna end up, but I heard a lot of things that were really wild and exciting.” The band was hyped to be back at work with Rubin. Besides being the head of their label, Rubin had done “a great job with the last [album],” said guitarist Daron Malakian. Drummer John Dolmayan said of the producer, “He’s just a cool guy who brings out the best in people.” Toxicity was recorded in February and March 2001 at Cello Studios and released on September 4, 2001. The album debuted on the top of the Billboard Top 200 Album Chart and won the band a Grammy nomination for the single “Chop Suey!”
After Rage Against the Machine frontman Zack de la Rocha left the group in 2000, the remaining three members wanted to keep making vital music. Rick Rubin suggested they meet with former Soundgarden singer Chris Cornell. The musicians found common ground and