The person Bono claimed saved Johnny Cash’s life: “If you don’t, I will die”
Any artist has truly reached a different level of stardom if they had the good fortune of knowing Johnny Cash as a friend.
He was far from an unfriendly person when he was with us, but anyone with that massive a voice and musical authority was bound to be more than a little bit intimidating whenever he walked into a room. But while Cash talked about a lot of his fair share of sins within the context of his songs, he never got to the point where he was too afraid to ask for help.
Then again, Cash seemed to be doing fine even when the rest of the world had turned their back on country music. There were bound to be a few embarrassing moments in the 1980s, but it’s not like he was one of the most serious songwriters in the world. He could sing a few funny tunes every once in a while, but once he started making his own videos and becoming a bit more goofy, it’s not like every one of his fans was thrilled.
This was a man that relied on being ‘The Man in Black’, and you weren’t going to find too many more more allergic to the MTV generation than Cash was. The idea of him dressing in the same loud colours as everyone else was bound to be a nightmare, so when The Highwaymen began, it almost felt like a way for him to apologise and get back to his roots with a few of his musical buddies like Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson.
But it’s not like he didn’t have friends from the rock world, either. Despite being one of the biggest names in country music, Cash struck up a brilliant friendship with Bono over the years, and while his cameo on the album Zooropa is one of the most profoundly weird things that he has ever done, it actually managed to go over a lot better than most people would have expected out of someone that primarily relied on that country bounce.
Although Cash could go through life like nothing phased him, no one of his stature was going to give up on their legacy that easily. No one could have cared for the legends of music back in the 1990s, but after years of struggling, Bono remembered that Cash had first connected with Rick Rubin because of how much he needed music in his life again.
There had been more than a few complications over the years, but when talking about the American recordings, the U2 frontman felt that the production genius was there to help guide Cash through the final years of his life, saying, “Those American recordings were the result of a conversation he had with Rick Rubin where he said, ‘Please will you work with me? Because if you don’t, I will die.’ Just, what a voice!”
And if you hear Cash singing on any of those series of records, there’s a stronger sense of urgency in what he’s doing. It wouldn’t really be accurate to say that he sounds “desperate” by any means, but he wasn’t going to sit around and watch the 1980s become a part of his legacy. He needed to remind people of the kind of heart that he still had, and it only made sense that after his wife, June, passed away that he would eventually follow her in 2003.
It’s still tragic to think that Cash struggled through a lot of sickness through the making of those records, but it really speaks to the kind of artist he was that they even managed to exist at all. Not everyone would be thinking about their work during the final years of their life, but Cash was an artist in the truest sense of the word, and when listening to his version of Nine Inch Nails’ ‘Hurt’ is enough to make anyone want to cry their eyes out.
