Rick Rubin says Johnny Cash didn’t want to record ‘Hurt’ cover: “He looked at me like I was insane”
Most artists can only hope to end their careers on a high note. In the music business, it’s almost expected that most stars will fade into obscurity long before they pass away, either moving on to different careers or trying desperately to capture the same spark they had in their glory years. Although Johnny Cash may have been brought back from the brink thanks to the help of Rick Rubin, the acclaimed producer knew he was a bit wary when taking on his final masterpieces.
Coming out of the 1980s, Cash was already a country music legend and had come from working in the country supergroup The Highwaymen. While Rubin had developed a rap sheet of working with artists as varied as Beastie Boys and Slayer, Cash was still willing to listen to him when working on the American series of recordings.
Being a mixture of Cash staples and covers, Cash was brought back to his outlaw roots on these albums, as if the troubled soul hidden in songs like ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ never actually grew older. Towards the end of his life, though, Cash was a little hesitant to bring on what would become his career swan song.
When talking about the song ‘Hurt’, Rubin revealed that Cash didn’t want to record the song it at first, telling Music Radar, “I played him the song first, and Johnny just looked at me like I was insane, because the Nine Inch Nails version of the song is very noisy, aggressive”.
Being the focal point of Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral, the song’s original version is much more tortured, as Trent Reznor sings about a man either surviving or not surviving a suicide attempt and reflecting on what he could have done better. Since the original version ends with a sudden blast of industrial noise, Cash was certainly right to have his concerns.
Then again, Cash was known to reinvent songs in his image countless times. Just a few albums prior, he had turned in newer takes on songs like ‘Rusty Cage’ by Soundgarden, adding a shuffle rhythm that fits in with his lonesome drifter persona.
To get the song in Cash’s good graces, Rubin eventually got a demo made with the same arrangement used on Cash’s version, explaining, “I think I did a demo where I had a guitar player play it, and I said the words the way I imagined him saying it, and then when he heard the lyrics, and he heard the format of what it could be, he said, ‘Let’s try it’”.
By the time Cash was ready to record it, he wasn’t in the best of health, often struggling to get through the songs he had intended for the fourth instalment of the American series: The Man Comes Around. When he did deliver, though, Cash gave his fans a dark look into his soul. Staring down the end of his life, most of Cash’s cover is about wanting to right the wrongs of his past in whatever way he can, even though he knows his time is short.
Although Cash wouldn’t live for much longer after the song was recorded, Reznor eventually had to give it up for the cover, claiming that Cash owns the song these days much more than he does. For a song that’s as hopeless and desperate as ‘Hurt’ is on the page, leave it to Johnny Cash to bring that subtle hint of optimism into the equation.
