He makes a metal anthem sound like a folk song with generations of pain and heft behind it. Well, Johnny adds something new (and yet older) to those intense lyrics.
I understand Cash heard Cornell’s voice and was impressed, complimentary and deferential to his superior range. It sounds even more metal when he does it. “You wired me awake and hit me with a hand of broken nails, you tied my lead and pulled my chain to watch my blood begin to boil, but I’m gonna break, I’m gonna break my… I’m gonna break my rusty cage and run” I loved him teaming up with Rubin for the American Recordings and I loved hearing some of the lyrics to Rusty Cage clearly for the first time. Johnny signing The Wanderer over electronica and humming machines had as ‘full circle’ a feel to it as Hurt in a way.
I loved his cameo appearance at the end of U2’s Zoo TV scene report record (the under rated and highly experimental) Zooropa. Johnny found his way to me in other forms after leaving home. My family have learned it’s a good time to leave the room. “Hi, I’m Johnny Cash, alright!” – Both my Dad and I interject that as a 3 second warning before we begin to sing songs. I got the CD Dad got the DVD (neither of us had ever actually seen the footage until that deluxe package hit) and we revelled at the clarity of the sound, the tracks we’d never heard before and the revelation that the songs came in a different order to the vinyl copy I’d grown up listening to him play.
Indeed, around the millennium a remastered and re-released full version of Live In San Quentin album got us both in a flat spin. Be it Boy Named Sue on the Hour of Country Cassette that lived in the car or I Walk The Line and Ring Of Fire at home on the turn table. Johnny (The Voice) Cash was one of my Dad’s go to artists. He took Johnny back to a guitar and a voice and he chose with him a mix of material that both bore his influence and fed his interests.
So Rick Rubin’s reinvention of The Man In Black at the end of his days is the stuff of legend now. Johnny Cash singing one of the tracks that blew my hair back in the days when I was finding my scene with my team and stepping out into the big wide world leaves quite the footprint. Trent Reznor is a musical genius and all but I’ve always been more of a Soundgarden and Chris Cornell fan than I was a NIN one. You can see why it got used in all the TV shows and movies it did to convey a sad bleak ending to a heroic (or anti heroic) life. Doing Hurt and missing his wife and making people cry with that retrospective slow mo’ big heart sincerity. I know the popular option is to choose Johnny Cash covering Nine Inch Nails near the top of lists like this.