To What Are Yee Listenin' Right Now?


Trent Reznor says about the Cash version of Hurt: "I'd been friends with Rick Rubin for several years. He called me to ask how I'd feel if Johnny Cash covered Hurt. I said I'd be very flattered but was given no indication it would actually be recorded. The idea sounded a bit gimmicky. Two weeks went by. Then I got a CD in the post. I listened to it and it was very strange. It was this other person inhabiting my most personal song. I'd known where I was when I wrote it. I know what I was thinking about. I know how I felt. Hearing it was like someone kissing your girlfriend. It felt invasive". Johnny played this song over 100 times before he recorded it. He called it "The best anti-drug song I ever heard." The song was released as a single in 2003.
 
"One Hour Photo" director Mark Romanek said: “I begged Rick Rubin to let me shoot something to that track” being instantly enamored of the rendition, he offered to shoot the video for free. Universal eventually agreed to the music video, but with 71-year-old Cash’s health declining and being unwilling to stay long in the cold Tennessee weather as he was going on holiday to his ranch in Jamaica that coming Saturday, Romanek had only days to make the video and after scouting in Nashville, he decided upon Cash’s home and museum in Hendersonville, Tennessee, The House of Cash. "Arriving on Friday with no idea of what I was going to make" Romanek said. "I looked around the house and made a few suggestions of where we might film Johnny performing. I was making it up off the top of my head. Then I went to the House of Cash Museum and found it in total disrepair. There was no time to clean it up so I decided that I'd just film it, and Johnny, exactly as they were. He was no longer in his prime - he was fading and that was what I wanted to show. The place was in such a state of dereliction. That’s when I got the idea that maybe we could be extremely candid about the state of Johnny’s health - as candid as Johnny has always been in his songs. While I was filming the opening segment of Johnny playing guitar in his living room, his wife, June, came down the stairs and watched.
 
The look on her face was so complex: full of love and pride and concern for her husband. So I asked her if I could film her too and she agreed. But the most important element was when we discovered a film archive in the museum. When we looked back at the rushes we'd filmed at the house we thought they were good but not great. But once we dropped in the archive footage of Johnny we realized that was the soul of the video. The whole thing was so spontaneous. It's made me realize that sometimes you can be too prepared and that there's some value to urgency." The music video speaks about the transience of life, the gracelessness of death, the Ozymandian crumbling of an oeuvre and the decline of a genre, an era and an attitude. The ‘closed to public’ sign on the museum. The cracked platinum records. The caviar and lobster banquet with no diners. The clips from earlier in Johnny’s career. His wife June looking on. The closed piano lid. The video was so intimate that Cash's management didn't think it should be released, and Johnny was leaning in that direction. According to Rick Rubin, it was his daughter, Rosanne Cash, who convinced Johnny to let it go. June died May 15th, 2003, three months after filming, Johnny died September 12, 2003 four months after his wife.
 
Rick Rubin said of the video: “I cried the first time I saw it. If you were moved to that kind of emotion in the course of a two-hour movie, it would be a great accomplishment. To do it in a four-minute music video is shocking. I think the hurt video is a historical document, it's like looking back across a life." Trent Reznor was sent the video while in the studio with Rage Against the Machine’s Zach De La Rocha, and, when the pair sat down to watch it, any doubts he had about the cover were long gone. “We were in the studio, getting ready to work and I popped it in,” said Reznor. "Tears started welling up. I realized it wasn't really my song anymore. It just gave me goose bumps up and down my spine. By the end I was really on the verge of tears…there was just dead silence. There was, like, this moist clearing of our throats and then, ‘Uh, okay, let’s get some coffee.' It really, really made sense and I thought what a powerful piece of art. I never got to meet Johnny but I'm happy I contributed the way I did. It felt like a warm hug. It's an unbelievably powerful piece of work. After he passed away I remember feeling saddened, but being honored to have framed the end of his life in something that is very tasteful. For anyone who hasn't seen it, I highly recommend checking it out. I have goose bumps right now thinking about it. Having Johnny Cash, one of the greatest singer-songwriters of all time, want to cover your song, that's something that matters to me. It's not so much what other people think, but the fact that this guy felt that it was worthy of interpreting. " There will NEVER be another Johnny Cash, and there will NEVER be another video like this. A sad footnote to a sad story, Cash’s home of nearly 30 years in which the video was shot, burned down in 2007.
 
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