Johnny Cash - Video Vault

  by Adrian Janes

published: 17 / 4 / 2025

Openness and vulnerability are the two characteristics that run through this immensely moving video. The openness is shown in Cash’s willingness to be guided to cover songs such as this one of Trent Reznor’s, far from his country and gospel roots, by Rick Rubin, a producer steeped in hip hop and hard rock. The vulnerability is in the slightly quavering voice and the lined face, and their contrast with so many of the video’s other images from his earlier years. The opening shot is of a figurine of Christ with a crown of thorns, a form of torment echoed in Reznor’s lyrics. The music itself is stripped down to a seated Cash, playing either an acoustic guitar or at the piano. This starkness contrasts with the opulence of a table laden with fruit, food and wine, a visual echo of many historical paintings, still-lives intended to suggest transience and decay. In that spirit, in a dismissive gesture Cash pours wine over the table’s contents. In less than four minutes, Mark Romanek packs into the video a flood of images, of Cash as a vigorous younger man hopping on board a freight train in the romantic tradition of precursors like Woody Guthrie, or striding in the country with his children. But these are tellingly set against shots of the closed House of Cash museum and a dilapidated former house, and of a throng of awards and portraits in his present home which comes to rest on a gold disc on the floor in a cracked case. “What have I become/My sweetest friend/Everyone I know goes away in the end.” It's astonishing to realise that Reznor’s poignant lyrics were written by a man in his late twenties yet seem so apt sung by one forty years older. Perhaps such melancholy wisdom knows no age. As Cash sang, did he perhaps think of fellow members of the famous Million Dollar Quartet session, like Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins, who had gone before him? Or even more heartbreakingly, his wife June, seen when they were both young and now in the video, equally old, gazing at him with sad compassion and who was to die just a few months before he did. Some of the lyrics suggest a struggle with drug addiction. If not “the needle (which) tears a hole”, Cash had his own repeated battles with amphetamines. This empathy for life’s ‘losers’ is also seen in glimpses of his famous prison concerts. The climactic montage is a deluge of scenes of him old and young, a flood in spate, and the hammer blows of Christ’s crucifixion coupled with hammered piano notes. Finally we see the Man in Black in silhouette, head bowed, before a last shot: the piano lid being closed. Perhaps with some irony, this video itself won industry awards and music press acclaim. But if in one way Cash was right to view his fame as a passing thing, his voice and this video will last lifetimes.

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