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08/24/2003 11:00:57 EST
Johnny Cash May Steal Show at MTV Awards
By DAVID BAUDER
AP Television Writer
This week's MTV Video Music Awards, celebrating a medium that usually oozes youth and invincibility, would seem like the last place to celebrate a somber video with a frail, 71-year-old Johnny Cash.
Yet the extraordinary clip for "Hurt" - one that its creator feared would never be seen on television - is up for six awards, making Cash third only to Missy Elliott and Justin Timberlake in nominations.
The country legend, who suffers from the nervous system disease autonomic neuropathy, has been working with doctors in the hope of traveling to New York for the show.
"He's planning on it," said singer Rosanne Cash, his daughter.
The video depicts a white-haired Cash, his gnarled hands occasionally shaking, in his home singing a song popularized by the rock band Nine Inch Nails. The images are interspersed with clips of a younger, more vital Cash.
The wrenching song is about the damage done by a life of drug abuse. "What have I become?" he sings. "My sweetest friend. Everyone I know goes away in the end."
A camera cuts to a picture of Cash's late mother on the wall of his Tennessee home after he sings the lyric.
The video is made even more heartbreaking in retrospect by the presence of Cash's wife, June Carter Cash, who looks at her husband with a mixture of pride and concern. She died on June 12, a few months after filming.
Warned by her sister that it may be tough to watch, Rosanne Cash avoided popping the video in her VCR. On a visit to Tennessee, her father asked if she had seen it.
"I watched it with him and June and I was weeping and weeping through the whole thing," she said. "My dad was completely clear-eyed and focused on the merits of the video, which is so much like him. He's able to focus on the most awful truths with an artist's eye."
It was only through director Mark Romanek's nagging that the video was even made.
A Cash fan, Romanek begged producer Rick Rubin for years to make a video of his hero. He and Rubin expected no airplay. They figured they would sell copies in stores.
Memorable music videos are much rarer now than when MTV started the Video Music Awards in 1984. MTV plays videos infrequently and outlets like MTV2 and Fuse don't have the same cultural impact.
"If you watch what's on MTV, you don't see anything like this," Rubin said. "You won't see anything from any artist in Johnny's age range and you won't see anything with this kind of serious content. It really sticks out like a sore thumb."
MTV won't say how many times the video actually aired on the network; Rubin said he's heard it was played six times - one for each video music award nomination.
It has, however, gotten much more exposure than Romanek expected on outlets like CMT and MTV2.
Romanek's original idea was to film Cash on a Los Angeles soundstage packed with memorabilia from the singer's career. The artifacts would gradually disappear until Cash appeared alone at the song's end.
Yet Cash wasn't healthy enough to make the trip, so the director brought his crew to Cash's home, not knowing what he'd find. One stroke of luck was finding the shuttered and decaying House of Cash Museum five minutes from the singer's home. It was used in the video, too.
He never expected to make such a powerful reflection on aging and mortality.
"You really get an inside feeling of the human experience of growing up in a family and all the trials and tribulations that come up for everyone," Rubin said. "It's such a common thing but it's so rarely touched upon."
The veteran producer, a pioneer in rap music who has helped Cash to a creative rebirth with a series of intimate recordings, said he's heard more people talking about the video than anything he'd ever worked on.
"If you were moved to that kind of emotion in the course of a two-hour movie, it would be a great accomplishment," he said. "To do it in a four-minute music video is shocking."
Romanek said that as a fan, he's always appreciated the candor in Cash's music and thought the video should reflect that.
"I certainly didn't want the piece to appear like a premature obituary," he said. "That wasn't the intention, and I hope the piece doesn't come across that way."
Cash may have been clear-eyed when watching with Rosanne, but was quite taken aback when he first saw it, Rubin said. It was only with his family's encouragement that he agreed to release it.
Now, he said, Cash is quite proud and excited that it has gotten recognition.
Tom Calderone, MTV's executive vice president of music and talent, is hoping to see Cash at Thursday's awards show. He'll provide some heft for an event that even Calderone admits usually has its share of here-today-gone-tomorrow artists.
"Back in the day, he had edge," Calderone said. "He was kind of a rebel."
Cash continues to work despite his health problems and the emotional blow of becoming a widower. He and Rubin are recording their fifth disc together, and are also preparing a box set of unreleased material from their sessions over the past decade.
Romanek said he doesn't want his video confused with real life. Cash's life isn't that bleak, he said.
"It's a very somber song, but when we yelled `cut,' there was a very different Johnny Cash that emerged, who was a lot more lively and a lot more sprightly and funny and frisky with June. (He was) having a good time."
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On the Net:
http://www.mtv.com/
http://www.johnnycash.com/
http://www.markromanek.com/video/
___http://www.markromanek.com/video/
EDITOR'S NOTE - David Bauder can be reached at dbauder"at"ap.orghttp://www.markromanek.com/video/
Copyright 2003 Associated Press. All rights reserved. |
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| TheSavageYoungXyzzy |
Dear God, I hope he wins. I hope he wins every single award he's nominated for. I hope he kicks every single whiny little pop singer at that cermony straight to hell. He's got more soul than the entirety of the population at the MTV awards combined.
Go Johnny go!
-tSYX --- Johnny B. Goode! |
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| Mother baby |
June Carter Cash's Parting Gift: 'Wildwood Flower'
By Pat Harris
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (Reuters) - In the offices of Dualtone Records in Nashville, John Carter Cash fingered the lovingly created liner notes for his mother's last album.
"We didn't know until two weeks before her death that we were going to lose her," said Cash, the son of June and Johnny Cash (news) and producer of "June Carter Cash (news): Wildwood Flower," his mother's final album scheduled for release on Sept. 9.
"Thank God she got to hear it before she died," he said of her death in May following heart surgery. "She was always so critical of her own works. We had to reassure her along the way until she was satisfied she had given it her best."
June Carter Cash left more than her best music to her grieving family and public. She left a legacy of pure country sound rooted in her native Appalachian hills of Virginia where the Carter family first sang their way into history.
Her soft-spoken son recalled the twilight of a summer's day last year when she sat on the porch of the old Carter home in Maces Spring, Virginia, and outlined the project she had in mind.
"She wanted to link together the best classic tunes," her son, 33, said. "Sitting there where it all began when the Carter family started singing together, I think my mother felt she needed to do this."
It was more than 77 years ago that Sara and A.P. Carter, along with his sister-in-law Maybelle, drove A.P.'s old Model A Ford from Clinch Mountain, Virginia, to the Victor Talking Machine Company in Bristol, Tennessee. They formed a singing group -- the Carter Family -- recorded songs and earned enough to survive the Great Depression.
June Carter was born to Maybelle in 1929 and was singing at age 13 along with her sisters Helen and Anita.
The Carter Family disbanded in 1943, and Maybelle and her two daughters performed on the "Old Dominion Barn Dance" radio show. Later, the group developed a relationship with Johnny Cash, and in 1968 Johnny and June were married. Their son grew up surrounded by country music icons.
"Willie Nelson (news), Kris Kristofferson (news), Waylon Jennings (news) -- they were at our home all the time but they were just friends of my father's to me," he said.
GRADUAL INTEREST IN MUSIC
He confounded his father's wishes -- Johnny Cash had bestowed a guitar on his young son -- by developing an interest in cooking and aspirations of becoming a chef.
"I still like to cook but I gradually got more interested in music," John Cash said in an interview with Reuters. "I played rhythm guitar in my father's band for a time, and when he retired from the road in 1997 I got into the technical side of studio recording. The first album I produced was one of my mother's in 1998."
Being Johnny Cash's son may have opened doors for him but he forged his own career.
He produced his mother's Grammy-winning 1999 effort, "Press On," and was his father's producer for the soundtrack for Robert Duvall (news)'s 1997 movie "The Apostle." He also produced a track on his father's 2001 album "Timeless: A Tribute to Hank Williams (news)," which won a Grammy. And he assisted on his father's Grammy-winning "American III: Solitary Man," and "American IV: The Man Comes Around."
"Wildwood Flower" was completed about a month before his mother died.
"Her passing hit us all so hard. My father, who is the strongest man I've ever met, is really bearing up. He was absolutely devastated, but he's gone back into the studio to record and is working hard. And I'm working now on a CD for Dualtone of original Carter Family songs sung by my father and George Jones (news), Marty Stuart (news) and the Whites with Ricky Skaggs and quite a few others," he said.
June Carter Cash's album is a collection of classic country songs previously performed by the Carter Family.
"When mother got the idea for 'Wildwood Flower' I dug out more than 300 recordings and started studying them. She had her favorites and we picked others to go with them and then we sort of became a traveling studio," which recorded at the Carter family home and even the Cashes' bedroom.
Kicking off with "Keep on the Sunny Side," the album features seven of A.P. Carter's best songs. They include "Cannonball Blues," "Sinking in the Lonesome Sea" and the poignant "Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone," with vocals by June and Johnny Cash and a bevy of Carters.
Snatches of old-time recordings are interspersed into the fast-moving repertoire. In the notes for "Kneeling Drunkard's Plea," Marty Stuart and Carlene Carter (news) are listed as the "Drunken Choir."
The only non-Carter song on the record is June's rendition of "Temptation" sung with her husband -- possibly the most raucous caterwauling ever committed to disc and a vivid reminder of June's irrepressible humor.
"This album is a great blessing to us," said John Cash. "Looking back on it, I realize that my mother was hurting but she never let on. I don't know if she had a premonition but this was her final great statement and it goes full circle for me from her roots in Virginia back to the songs she recorded with her family. It's not just an album. It's history."
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