February 2, 2026 • 30 mins
There was a time when he was everywhere.
On the radio. On television. In the culture.
And then… the world moved on.
This episode tells the story of an icon in his final act — a voice the industry had quietly set aside, rediscovered by an unlikely collaborator who didn’t want hits, trends, or nostalgia. Just the truth.
What followed was not a comeback.
It was a reckoning.
Recorded in quiet rooms and living spaces, these late-life performances stripped away the myth and revealed something far more powerful: honesty, regret, faith, and resilience.
This is a story about aging, about being forgotten, and about finding purpose when the spotlight fades.
It’s also a story about resurrection.
Because sometimes, the last chapter isn’t about how a life ends — it’s about how a legacy finally finds its voice.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Written by Jonny Hartwell
Voiced by Jonny Hartwell
Music Credit: Reel World Audio.
A iHeart Radio Production
DISCLAIMER: This podcast contains discussions of sensitive topics...Listener discretion is strongly advised. While the stories you’ll hear are rooted in real events, not every detail is strictly historical—some moments are dramatized with creative license to bring the narrative to life. Please keep this in mind as you listen.
Jonny’s Dead Air Podcast
Written, hosted, and produced by Jonny Hartwell.
A production of iHeartRadio Pittsburgh.
Thanks for listening—and for keeping the light on.
On the radio. On television. In the culture.
And then… the world moved on.
This episode tells the story of an icon in his final act — a voice the industry had quietly set aside, rediscovered by an unlikely collaborator who didn’t want hits, trends, or nostalgia. Just the truth.
What followed was not a comeback.
It was a reckoning.
Recorded in quiet rooms and living spaces, these late-life performances stripped away the myth and revealed something far more powerful: honesty, regret, faith, and resilience.
This is a story about aging, about being forgotten, and about finding purpose when the spotlight fades.
It’s also a story about resurrection.
Because sometimes, the last chapter isn’t about how a life ends — it’s about how a legacy finally finds its voice.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Written by Jonny Hartwell
Voiced by Jonny Hartwell
Music Credit: Reel World Audio.
A iHeart Radio Production
DISCLAIMER: This podcast contains discussions of sensitive topics...Listener discretion is strongly advised. While the stories you’ll hear are rooted in real events, not every detail is strictly historical—some moments are dramatized with creative license to bring the narrative to life. Please keep this in mind as you listen.
Jonny’s Dead Air Podcast
Written, hosted, and produced by Jonny Hartwell.
A production of iHeartRadio Pittsburgh.
Thanks for listening—and for keeping the light on.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
And welcome in. I'm Johnny Hartwell and this is Johnny's
Dead Air Podcast, a production of iHeartRadio. Here's another story
of music's dark side, But this particular story isn't so dark.
In fact, as the story gets darker, we actually see
the light at the end of the tunnel. You know.
(00:22):
They say that every career has an arc. First there's
the climb, then the view from the top, and then
if you stick around long enough, there's the part no
one likes to talk about, the part where the spotlight
moves on. Your name was used to sell out arenas,
Now it barely sells out a Tuesday night. You were
once on every TV screen in America. Now you're lucky
(00:44):
if people even realize you're still alive, and if you're
an artist, if your oxygen is applause. The third act
can feel like a slow motion funeral. Tonight. I want
to tell you a story from that third act. It's
about a man who had already changed music once, maybe twice,
maybe more than that. He had his own hit TV show.
(01:05):
He played for presidents and prisoners, movie stars and murderers.
He'd warned, the costume carried the myths, survived the wreckage
and outlive most of his friends. And yet by the
time we pick up his story, the industry had quietly
shoved him into the discount rack wrong age, wrong sound,
wrong era. But here's the twist. This is not a
(01:26):
story about a washed up has been. This is a
story about what happens when one person from a completely
different world looks at a discarded legend and says, no,
he's not done. You're just listening the wrong way. Two men,
one voice, one microphone, and a late life comeback so
(01:47):
powerful it turned an old, forgotten singer into a prophet
of the end times. We're not starting at the beginning.
We're starting at the end, or at least what everyone
thought was the end. This is He Gripped twenty six,
The Return of the Man in Black, Act one. The
man comes around. By the time we meet him, the
(02:10):
story of this singer should have been over. The headlines
were all in the past. Tense Once ruled the charts,
Once hosted his own network TV show, Once Shock the world,
playing behind prison walls. In the sixties and early seventies,
he was everywhere radio, television, magazines. There were albums and
movies and books and tours that never seemed to stop.
(02:33):
He wasn't just a musician. He was a symbol, a
kind of rough hewn moral compass in a black suit.
But fame is a fast moving train, and somewhere in
the late seventies and eighties, the train pulled out without him.
Taste changed, country music, change rock change, MTV showed up
and rewrote the rules overnight, and while this man kept recording,
(02:56):
the world quietly drifted away. His record stopped chart, his
label lost faith. By the time the nineties rolled around,
younger executives saw his name as legacy product, a back catalog,
an nostalgia play. But he was respected, but not needed.
(03:16):
The kind of artist you name a highway after, not
the kind of artist you add to your playlist. He
was getting older, his health was up and down. Years
of addiction, endless touring, and hard living had taken their toll.
He'd already survived enough near misses to make most people quit.
But he didn't quit. He just kept saying yes. Yes
(03:37):
to fairs and the casino showrooms, Yes to small theaters
where people came out to hear the old hits and
remember who they were when those songs were new, And
sometimes even smaller than that picture. This a low ceiling
dinner theater off of some suburban highway, the kind of
place that smells like coffee and fried food and red
(03:57):
wine that's been opened since noon. The carpet is tired.
The tables are packed with couples who got a babysitter,
older fans who brought their original LPs, A handful of
curious stragglers who saw the name on a flyer and said, wait,
he's still performing. The house lights dim, not to arena darkness,
(04:18):
just a modest please look at the stage kind of dim.
He walks a little slower than he used to. The
hair is grayer, the body's softer. The hands shake just
enough that everybody notices. But when he steps up to
the microphone and opens his mouth, the room changes. Conversations
(04:39):
die down, forks stop moving, people turn their chairs, lean
in on their elbows, eyes locked on one man and
one guitar. And the voice, Oh, the voice is still there, older,
rougher than his heyday, sandpaper over steel, but it's that
same low rumble that once cut through trendsit to radios
(05:01):
in black and white televisions and for an hour or
ninety minutes or so he plays some hits, some deep cuts,
some gospel, some stories. The applause is warm, but smaller now.
No one's fainting in the aisles. There's no police barricades outside.
When the show's over, he signs autographs, takes some photos,
(05:21):
shakes hands with people who are saying things like, my
daddy loved you. We used to dance to your songs
in the kitchen. I didn't know you were still touring.
It's polite, respectful, almost museum like, a living exhibit from
another era. On paper. This is the last phase of
a long career play. The old songs make the round,
(05:44):
slowly fade into the background music of American culture. But
somewhere out there, in another part of the music universe,
someone is watching this slow fade and thinking, no, no,
this isn't how this story ends. Act two, Sunday morning
(06:06):
coming down. While our singer is grinding it out in
these small rooms, while he's playing dinner theaters and fairs
and one nighters that barely make the local paper, something
else is happening out in LA and New York and
everywhere else. Cutting edge music is being made. A different
kind of legend is at work. He's younger beard, baseball cap,
(06:28):
bare feet in the control room. His reputation has been
built on loud records, rap and metal and alternative rock,
the kind of stuff that made parents furious and record
labels very very rich. He's worked with hip hop pioneers,
metal bands misfits. He's known for stripping songs down, pushing
artists to cut the fat, finding the raw heart of
(06:50):
the track on paper. These two men live in different galaxies.
One is a country icon from the Eisenhower era. The
other is a producer whose logo is stamped on the angriest,
loudest records of the late eighties and early nineties. But
this producer has a secret. He loves old records. He
(07:13):
loves authenticity more than any genre, and he's not sentimental
about nostalgia. He's attracted to honesty. Somewhere along the way,
he rediscovers our singer in a newspaper ad for a
dinner theater show, and the producer thinks, wait a minute,
he still got it. They just don't know how to
listen to him anymore. And he starts asking questions, where's
(07:35):
he playing now, who's his label? What is he doing?
The answers are well not encouraging, no big label push,
no major radio support. He's out there essentially on his own,
playing wherever they'll have him, even dinner theaters. For producer
who's used to scouting fresh talent, this is kind of backwards.
(07:56):
It's like realizing one of them Mount Rushmore heads is
still walking around taking bar gigs. So he makes a decision.
He doesn't send an an r REP. He doesn't send
an assistant. He goes himself. Now, imagine that dinner theater again,
same low ceilings, same little stage, same menu with prime
(08:18):
rib and cheesecake in the back half hidden in the shadows,
just another guy, another bearded guy in a plain T shirt.
There's no entourage, no spotlight, just watching. He sees the
old singer walk onto that tiny stage. He hears the
chatter died down as the first notes ring out. He
watches a room full of people forget about their dessert
(08:41):
because an aging man with a guitar just punched a
hole in time. The producer hears misnoes and shortened breath
and something else. Truth, truth, something that's lacking in today's music. Truth,
(09:01):
not the polished kind you auto tune, the kind that
comes with living long enough to regret some things and
be grateful for others. He sits there thinking this is
a nostalgia. This is the real thing, more real than
half the acts I'm producing right now. And after the
show he waits his turn. Fans get their photos and
(09:23):
their signatures, staff stack chairs and wipe down tables. Someone
vacuuing in the back, and finally he steps forward and
introduces himself. The singer knows the name. Everybody in the
business does, but they've never worked together. They don't belong
to the same radio stations, the same charts, the same
(09:43):
award shows. The producer says something simple like I love
what you do, and I think it still matters, and
I think the world has forgotten how much it matters.
They talk for a while about music and about God,
about fame and how it gives takes, about records that
meant something and records that were just product. They're from
(10:05):
different generations, different scenes, but they connect over one thing
that cuts through it all songs, good ones and bad ones,
songs that tell the truth, songs that lie and call
it entertainment, songs that get you through the night. Before
they part, the producer makes a pitch, let me record you,
(10:26):
not for the old label, not like before, just you,
just your voice the way you sounded tonight. The singer
is skeptical. He's been through labels and contract and promises.
He's watched executives come and go each one. Sure they
had the secret formula, but this doesn't sound like that.
(10:46):
This sounds like an invitation to do something he hasn't
really done since the very beginning. Just sing, no strings,
no Nashville politics, no charts, no marketing plan, and just sing.
They agree to try Act three, I've been everywhere. Next
(11:16):
back three, I've been everywhere. Things move slowly at first,
phone calls and scheduling conversations that drift late into the night.
The producer doesn't come in with a grand concept album
already mapped out. He doesn't hand over a list of
hits to re record with a modern twist. Instead, he
says something like, I'd like you to do whatever feels
(11:38):
right for you. So our singer, this man the industry
had quietly shuffled to the side, sits in a room
with a guitar and just plays old folk songs and
gospel hymns, dark little story songs, new material covers. No
one expects a country legend a touch. At first, they
(11:59):
try at the conventional way a studio with a band
build a big, modern record around a familiar voice, but
it doesn't feel right. The producer hears it immediately. The
arrangements are fine, the players are great, the takes are usable,
but the magic from the dinner theater isn't there. In
(12:20):
the control room, with all the flashing lights and the
expensive gear, the voice somehow sounds smaller, so they strip
it back. First they lose the big band, then the studio.
Eventually they end up where the story was always heading,
in a living room. Literally. Some of the songs are
(12:42):
recorded in the producer's place in Los Angeles. Some are
cut in the singer's own cabin in Tennessee. No elaborate
set up, just a microphone and a guitar and a
voice that now carries decades of victories and failures In
every single note. There's creaking for a dogs wandering through
air conditioners that kick on at the wrong moment. It's
(13:06):
as far from the glossy Nashville system as you can get.
And that's the point, because when this man sits in
a chair and starts to sing, you can hear everything,
the strain and the breath, the age and the resolve.
You can hear that kid from Arkansas who sold millions
(13:29):
of records. You can hear the prisoner's friend, the addict,
the husband, the believer, the doubter. He's not trying to
sound young again. He's not chasing trends. He's just telling
the truth in a low, steady voice that refuses to
apologize for getting older. The producer sits across from him,
(13:52):
often with his eyes closed, listening. Later he'd say his
favorite part wasn't even recording. It was talking, sitting around,
letting the singer tell stories, building a friendship on long
conversations and simple songs. Weeks turned into months. Slowly the
songs add up, and when they're finally done, there's an album,
(14:14):
a new one, not a reissue, not a repackage, not
a greatest Hits collection, a record they decide to call
American Recordings. And now we can finally say his name.
And I'm going to say it the way his producer,
Rick Rubin said it when he saw that Dinner Theater
(14:34):
newspaper ad Johnny fucking Cash. He says it with reverence
and with respect. And here they are now together, a
country legend written off by the industry, a rock rap
producer known for turning chaos into classics, and they have
together made something stark and quiet but dangerous. But as
(14:58):
the tapes are boxed up and the mixes are printed,
a different question hangs in the air. Who is this
album four? The country stations who dropped him, the pop
stations who never played him, the kids who only know
his name from their parents' record sleeves. They made the
record they wanted to make. Now the terrifying part, Who's
(15:22):
going to listen? Back four an American resurrection? Next? Back four?
American Resurrection American Recordings hits the world in April nineteen
ninety four, and there's no shiny radio chasing single, no
(15:45):
guest rap verse, no power ballad with key change and
a string section. Is just Johnny Yep, Johnny Cash, mostly
alone with his guitar, singing murder ballads, spirituals and confessionals
straight down the ste center of your soul. Critics lose
their minds. Magazines that had moved from country suddenly rediscovered him.
(16:09):
One reviewer calls the album quote monumental and viscery intimate.
Another says, it's quote life affirming because the message is
taught through adversity, ill luck and fighting for survival. Awards
start showing up. In nineteen ninety five, American Recordings wins
the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album, proof on paper
(16:30):
that the industry that once ignored him now has to
stand up and clap. But the awards are almost beside
the point. What really matters is what's happening in living
rooms and bedrooms and headphones around the world. You've got
aging fans who never stop loving him, suddenly weeping in
their cars. They've got kids in flannel shirts, and Doc
Martin's raised on grunge and hip hop hearing his weathered
(16:52):
voice and become raving fans. The collaboration works so well
they keep going. American two Unchained shows up in nineteen
ninety six, this time with a full band, Tom Petty
and the Heartbreakers backing him up, guitar snarling behind that
same unshakable voice. It wins a Grammy for Best Country Album.
Then come More Records American three, Solitary Man, American four,
(17:15):
The Man Comes Around, songs about death, regret, and salvation,
covers of everyone from Soundgarden, to Depeche Mode. Late in life,
when most artists are politely retiring, Johnny Cash is cutting
some of the most intense, spiritually loaded music of his career.
And then there's that song. Somewhere in this run, Rick
Rubin brings Johnny a track from a band most of
(17:37):
his longtime fans have never heard of, Nine Inch Nails.
The song is called Hurt. The original is a slow, industrial,
self lacerating piece of nineties darkness, full of noise and
distortion and despair. At first, Johnny wants nothing to do
with it. Later, Ruben recalls that when he played Cash
the song, Johnny looked at me like I was insane
(17:59):
because the Nine Inch Nails version was so aggressive and
so noisy. But Rubin is stubborn. He hears something in
the lyrics, a man taking stock of a life full
of damage and wondering what was real and what was wasted,
And he thinks who could sing this better than Johnny
Cash staring down the end of his life. So they
strip it down again. No howling guitars, no industrial clang,
(18:22):
just a weary acoustic guitar, a piano and that voice, older,
now fighting for breath, but loaded with gravitas. When they're done,
Hurt doesn't feel like a cover, It feels like a confession.
They make a video. Director Mark Romanek films a seventy
one year old Johnny back home, seated at a table
with a ruined feast, rotting fruit, broken glass, images of
(18:46):
his past flickering in and out, old footage of the
man in black and his prime to intercut with the
shots of him now fragile, shaking, determined to finish this song.
The result is brutal. This isn't nostalgia. It's an open
casket with a heartbeat. When the video comes out in
two thousand and three, it hits like a televised funeral
(19:08):
and a resurrection service at the same time. It wins
the Grammy for Best Short Form Music Video. It racks
up nominations at the MTV Video Music Awards. Later, NME
will name it the greatest music video of all time.
But maybe the most telling reaction comes from the man
who wrote the song. Trent Resner, the architect of nine
(19:29):
inch Nails, watches Johnny's version and says, quote tears welling, silence, goosebumps. Wow,
I just lost my girlfriend because that song isn't mine anymore.
Let that sink in. A young industrial rock star writes
a song about pain and self destruction, and an old
country singer at the end of his life sings it
(19:50):
back to him, and the songwriter says it's his now.
It's not a cover, that's possession. By this point, the
American record series has fully rewritten the last chapter of
Johnny Cash's story. He's no longer a legacy act. He's
a living ghost walking through the pop landscape, singing about
God and death and violence and forgiveness and the weight
(20:13):
of memory. College kids, metal heads, country diehards, pastors, punks.
They all claim him as theirs. He's on magazine covers again.
New box sets like Unearthed start to collect the outtakes
from these sessions, turning this late career run into something
critics actually call a resurrection. But real life doesn't stop
(20:34):
for art. While the world is catching up to this
new version of Johnny Cash, something far more personal is
about to break his heart. Act five, I Wear this
Crown of Thorns. Next Act five, I Wear this Crown
(20:56):
of Thorns. By the early two thousands, Johnny Cash is
not a well man. Years of touring, substance abuse and
illness have caught up with him. He's been misdiagnosed, rediagnosed,
hospitalized with pneumonia, dealing with complications from diabetes. His body
is failing, even as his voice is finding this strange
late life power through it all, though there's one constant June.
(21:22):
June Carter Cash isn't just a wife. She's his duet partner,
his co conspirator, the one who dragged him through addiction
and stood beside him on every stage that mattered. Then,
in two thousand and three, she needs surgery, a heart
valve replacement. She goes into the hospital in May. There
are complications, her condition worsens. On May fifteenth, two thousand
(21:45):
and three, June Carter Cash dies at the age of
seventy three from complications following heart surgery. With her family
and Johnny by her side. The woman who saved his
life more than once is now gone. Friends and families
say he was devastated. One close friend later said he
(22:05):
cried every night after she passed. But here's the thing
about this last chapter of Johnny Cash's life. He doesn't stop.
He can barely see, he can barely walk. He's in
and out of the hospital, but he keeps recording. Sometimes
he's sitting in a chair, oxygen tanked nearby, headphones on,
eyes closed, giving everything he has left to these last songs.
(22:28):
As if in the empty space where June used to be,
he pours in more music. On September twelfth, two thousand
and three, just under four months after June's death, Johnny
Cash dies in Nashville from complications from diabetes. He's seventy
one years old. The headlines that roll around the world
(22:49):
talk about the hits, I Walk the Line, Ring a Fire,
the prison concerts, the TV show, the black suits, and
the rebel image. But something else has happened in those
last ten years, thanks to those stripped down late life
recordings with Rick Rubin, the American series, the Hurt Video,
the spirituals that covers the whispers about more unreleased material.
(23:13):
Johnny Cash dies not as a forgotten relic, but as
a prophet, a man whose final act was to stare
straight into the camera, into the microphone, into the abyss
and say, this is what it looks like to get old,
this is what it feels like to regret, this is
(23:34):
what it sounds like to still believe. The body gives
out the show ends, but the tape keeps rolling. The epilogue,
Redemption Day, next epilogue, Redemption Day. You know, I tell
(24:00):
stories about death. That's the job description for dead air right,
dark corners and tragic endings, the last pages of lives
that stopped too soon and too violently. But this, but
this one, this hits different. I guess this is where
I break the fourth wall and tell you why I've
(24:22):
always carried his name spelled differently, sure, but close enough
for people to make the joke, Hey, Johnny, huh eh?
Any relation to Cash? I always say, Nope, blame my father.
But the truth is, my dad loved Johnny Cash, absolutely
loved him. When I was a kid, we never missed
(24:44):
the Johnny Cash Show. Every week. There we were Dad
in his chair, me on the floor, and Johnny and
Black on the TV. But some of my earliest memories
are tied to that voice. And here's a here's a scene.
I don't think I've told many people. My mom used
to host bridge games with her friends downstairs. Whenever that happened,
(25:07):
the boys were banished to the upstairs bedrooms like we
were being quarantined for bad behavior. And my dad he
would come up to my room with a stack of
Johnny Cash records under his arm. He dropped the needle
and filled that tiny room with that booming voice. I
would make him play a boy named Sue, I swear
over and over and over again. He must have been
(25:30):
ready to pull his hair out, but he just smile
and dropped the needle one more time, because that's what
dads do. But here's the twist. Just like the rest
of the world, Somewhere along the line, I forgot about
Johnny Cash too. Oh when I got my first iPod.
Of course, Ring of Fire and False and Prison Blues
(25:51):
made the cut. But those are classics. They're supposed to
be there. They're almost ritual. But the new stuff that
wasn't on my ring at all. And here's the part
I'm a little embarrassed to admit. When the Cash Reuben
collaboration started rolling out, I was a music director at
an adult top forty station. I got a copy of
(26:13):
that first American Recordings album in the mail and it
sat untouched on a pile of CDs for months, didn't
even crack the shrink wrap. And to be fair, I
thought I knew what it was going to be. I
thought it would be a rehash of that old voice.
I grew up with something worn out, a museum piece. Then,
(26:34):
on one random day, god knows why, I was compelled
to pop it into the CD player. Maybe it was
slow in the office, maybe the universe tapped me on
the shoulder. Maybe Johnny himself said, hey, kid, I think
you forgot something. I didn't expect much. I didn't think
his voice would sound like it did in the seventies,
and it didn't. But here's what I didn't expect. By
(27:00):
the third song, I had tears in my eyes, real ones,
not radio guy reviewing an album, tears, human tears, because
that wasn't the voice I remembered from my childhood. That
was a voice a man who had lived through the fire,
(27:21):
walked through the dark, and came out the other side
carrying the truth like a lantern. He was older, it
was cracked, and it was fragile, and it was the
strongest thing I'd ever heard. Then it hit me. Johnny
Cash didn't just have a comeback. He had a resurrection,
(27:41):
not the kind they write about in press releases, not
the kind that wins trophies, although he won those two.
A resurrection of relevance of power, of honesty. He rose
from the margins, from the discount rack, and from the
oh yeah he's still around comments. He rose at an
age where most artists are settling into soft retrospectives and
(28:05):
farewell tours. He rose because someone finally let him do
what he always was meant to do, to tell the truth.
Nothing more, nothing less, And that's why this story matters.
The body is gone, the earthly part of this legend
has certainly faded, but the legacy, the legacy, is still alive.
(28:31):
Listen to him sing hurt, Listen to the Man comes around.
Listen to those American recordings, stripped, bare, trembling and defiant.
He sounds like a man standing in between worlds, one
foot in the dust and one foot in eternity. Maybe
that's why it still hits me, because I think about
(28:52):
that little kid in my bedroom listening to a boy
named Sue with my dad, both of us laughing every
time Johnny said, I'm the son of a bitch that
name you sup. Now I listen to those final words
and the ones recorded on oxygen tanks in quiet rooms,
with a voice just strong enough to finish the verse,
(29:16):
and I swear it feels like Johnny Cash rose again
just so he could say goodbye the right way. Not
with a hit single, not with a comeback tour, but
with honesty, with a kind of music that doesn't die
when the singer does. And maybe that's why this story
isn't about death at all. It's about resurrection. It's about
(29:40):
the idea that sometimes, if you're brave enough to strip
everything away, the last chapter can be the most powerful
one of all. And Johnny Cash, the man whose records
my father played in my bedroom, taught me something long
after the world thought he was done. Legends don't fade,
They verberate, and sometimes they rise again. I hope you
(30:09):
enjoyed script number twenty six, The Return of the Man
in Black. This has ben Johnny's Dead Air podcast. I'm
Johnny Hertwell and thank you so much for listening.
And welcome in. I'm Johnny Hartwell and this is Johnny's
Dead Air Podcast, a production of iHeartRadio. Here's another story
of music's dark side, But this particular story isn't so dark.
In fact, as the story gets darker, we actually see
the light at the end of the tunnel. You know.
(00:22):
They say that every career has an arc. First there's
the climb, then the view from the top, and then
if you stick around long enough, there's the part no
one likes to talk about, the part where the spotlight
moves on. Your name was used to sell out arenas,
Now it barely sells out a Tuesday night. You were
once on every TV screen in America. Now you're lucky
(00:44):
if people even realize you're still alive, and if you're
an artist, if your oxygen is applause. The third act
can feel like a slow motion funeral. Tonight. I want
to tell you a story from that third act. It's
about a man who had already changed music once, maybe twice,
maybe more than that. He had his own hit TV show.
(01:05):
He played for presidents and prisoners, movie stars and murderers.
He'd warned, the costume carried the myths, survived the wreckage
and outlive most of his friends. And yet by the
time we pick up his story, the industry had quietly
shoved him into the discount rack wrong age, wrong sound,
wrong era. But here's the twist. This is not a
(01:26):
story about a washed up has been. This is a
story about what happens when one person from a completely
different world looks at a discarded legend and says, no,
he's not done. You're just listening the wrong way. Two men,
one voice, one microphone, and a late life comeback so
(01:47):
powerful it turned an old, forgotten singer into a prophet
of the end times. We're not starting at the beginning.
We're starting at the end, or at least what everyone
thought was the end. This is He Gripped twenty six,
The Return of the Man in Black, Act one. The
man comes around. By the time we meet him, the
(02:10):
story of this singer should have been over. The headlines
were all in the past. Tense Once ruled the charts,
Once hosted his own network TV show, Once Shock the world,
playing behind prison walls. In the sixties and early seventies,
he was everywhere radio, television, magazines. There were albums and
movies and books and tours that never seemed to stop.
(02:33):
He wasn't just a musician. He was a symbol, a
kind of rough hewn moral compass in a black suit.
But fame is a fast moving train, and somewhere in
the late seventies and eighties, the train pulled out without him.
Taste changed, country music, change rock change, MTV showed up
and rewrote the rules overnight, and while this man kept recording,
(02:56):
the world quietly drifted away. His record stopped chart, his
label lost faith. By the time the nineties rolled around,
younger executives saw his name as legacy product, a back catalog,
an nostalgia play. But he was respected, but not needed.
(03:16):
The kind of artist you name a highway after, not
the kind of artist you add to your playlist. He
was getting older, his health was up and down. Years
of addiction, endless touring, and hard living had taken their toll.
He'd already survived enough near misses to make most people quit.
But he didn't quit. He just kept saying yes. Yes
(03:37):
to fairs and the casino showrooms, Yes to small theaters
where people came out to hear the old hits and
remember who they were when those songs were new, And
sometimes even smaller than that picture. This a low ceiling
dinner theater off of some suburban highway, the kind of
place that smells like coffee and fried food and red
(03:57):
wine that's been opened since noon. The carpet is tired.
The tables are packed with couples who got a babysitter,
older fans who brought their original LPs, A handful of
curious stragglers who saw the name on a flyer and said, wait,
he's still performing. The house lights dim, not to arena darkness,
(04:18):
just a modest please look at the stage kind of dim.
He walks a little slower than he used to. The
hair is grayer, the body's softer. The hands shake just
enough that everybody notices. But when he steps up to
the microphone and opens his mouth, the room changes. Conversations
(04:39):
die down, forks stop moving, people turn their chairs, lean
in on their elbows, eyes locked on one man and
one guitar. And the voice, Oh, the voice is still there, older,
rougher than his heyday, sandpaper over steel, but it's that
same low rumble that once cut through trendsit to radios
(05:01):
in black and white televisions and for an hour or
ninety minutes or so he plays some hits, some deep cuts,
some gospel, some stories. The applause is warm, but smaller now.
No one's fainting in the aisles. There's no police barricades outside.
When the show's over, he signs autographs, takes some photos,
(05:21):
shakes hands with people who are saying things like, my
daddy loved you. We used to dance to your songs
in the kitchen. I didn't know you were still touring.
It's polite, respectful, almost museum like, a living exhibit from
another era. On paper. This is the last phase of
a long career play. The old songs make the round,
(05:44):
slowly fade into the background music of American culture. But
somewhere out there, in another part of the music universe,
someone is watching this slow fade and thinking, no, no,
this isn't how this story ends. Act two, Sunday morning
(06:06):
coming down. While our singer is grinding it out in
these small rooms, while he's playing dinner theaters and fairs
and one nighters that barely make the local paper, something
else is happening out in LA and New York and
everywhere else. Cutting edge music is being made. A different
kind of legend is at work. He's younger beard, baseball cap,
(06:28):
bare feet in the control room. His reputation has been
built on loud records, rap and metal and alternative rock,
the kind of stuff that made parents furious and record
labels very very rich. He's worked with hip hop pioneers,
metal bands misfits. He's known for stripping songs down, pushing
artists to cut the fat, finding the raw heart of
(06:50):
the track on paper. These two men live in different galaxies.
One is a country icon from the Eisenhower era. The
other is a producer whose logo is stamped on the angriest,
loudest records of the late eighties and early nineties. But
this producer has a secret. He loves old records. He
(07:13):
loves authenticity more than any genre, and he's not sentimental
about nostalgia. He's attracted to honesty. Somewhere along the way,
he rediscovers our singer in a newspaper ad for a
dinner theater show, and the producer thinks, wait a minute,
he still got it. They just don't know how to
listen to him anymore. And he starts asking questions, where's
(07:35):
he playing now, who's his label? What is he doing?
The answers are well not encouraging, no big label push,
no major radio support. He's out there essentially on his own,
playing wherever they'll have him, even dinner theaters. For producer
who's used to scouting fresh talent, this is kind of backwards.
(07:56):
It's like realizing one of them Mount Rushmore heads is
still walking around taking bar gigs. So he makes a decision.
He doesn't send an an r REP. He doesn't send
an assistant. He goes himself. Now, imagine that dinner theater again,
same low ceilings, same little stage, same menu with prime
(08:18):
rib and cheesecake in the back half hidden in the shadows,
just another guy, another bearded guy in a plain T shirt.
There's no entourage, no spotlight, just watching. He sees the
old singer walk onto that tiny stage. He hears the
chatter died down as the first notes ring out. He
watches a room full of people forget about their dessert
(08:41):
because an aging man with a guitar just punched a
hole in time. The producer hears misnoes and shortened breath
and something else. Truth, truth, something that's lacking in today's music. Truth,
(09:01):
not the polished kind you auto tune, the kind that
comes with living long enough to regret some things and
be grateful for others. He sits there thinking this is
a nostalgia. This is the real thing, more real than
half the acts I'm producing right now. And after the
show he waits his turn. Fans get their photos and
(09:23):
their signatures, staff stack chairs and wipe down tables. Someone
vacuuing in the back, and finally he steps forward and
introduces himself. The singer knows the name. Everybody in the
business does, but they've never worked together. They don't belong
to the same radio stations, the same charts, the same
(09:43):
award shows. The producer says something simple like I love
what you do, and I think it still matters, and
I think the world has forgotten how much it matters.
They talk for a while about music and about God,
about fame and how it gives takes, about records that
meant something and records that were just product. They're from
(10:05):
different generations, different scenes, but they connect over one thing
that cuts through it all songs, good ones and bad ones,
songs that tell the truth, songs that lie and call
it entertainment, songs that get you through the night. Before
they part, the producer makes a pitch, let me record you,
(10:26):
not for the old label, not like before, just you,
just your voice the way you sounded tonight. The singer
is skeptical. He's been through labels and contract and promises.
He's watched executives come and go each one. Sure they
had the secret formula, but this doesn't sound like that.
(10:46):
This sounds like an invitation to do something he hasn't
really done since the very beginning. Just sing, no strings,
no Nashville politics, no charts, no marketing plan, and just sing.
They agree to try Act three, I've been everywhere. Next
(11:16):
back three, I've been everywhere. Things move slowly at first,
phone calls and scheduling conversations that drift late into the night.
The producer doesn't come in with a grand concept album
already mapped out. He doesn't hand over a list of
hits to re record with a modern twist. Instead, he
says something like, I'd like you to do whatever feels
(11:38):
right for you. So our singer, this man the industry
had quietly shuffled to the side, sits in a room
with a guitar and just plays old folk songs and
gospel hymns, dark little story songs, new material covers. No
one expects a country legend a touch. At first, they
(11:59):
try at the conventional way a studio with a band
build a big, modern record around a familiar voice, but
it doesn't feel right. The producer hears it immediately. The
arrangements are fine, the players are great, the takes are usable,
but the magic from the dinner theater isn't there. In
(12:20):
the control room, with all the flashing lights and the
expensive gear, the voice somehow sounds smaller, so they strip
it back. First they lose the big band, then the studio.
Eventually they end up where the story was always heading,
in a living room. Literally. Some of the songs are
(12:42):
recorded in the producer's place in Los Angeles. Some are
cut in the singer's own cabin in Tennessee. No elaborate
set up, just a microphone and a guitar and a
voice that now carries decades of victories and failures In
every single note. There's creaking for a dogs wandering through
air conditioners that kick on at the wrong moment. It's
(13:06):
as far from the glossy Nashville system as you can get.
And that's the point, because when this man sits in
a chair and starts to sing, you can hear everything,
the strain and the breath, the age and the resolve.
You can hear that kid from Arkansas who sold millions
(13:29):
of records. You can hear the prisoner's friend, the addict,
the husband, the believer, the doubter. He's not trying to
sound young again. He's not chasing trends. He's just telling
the truth in a low, steady voice that refuses to
apologize for getting older. The producer sits across from him,
(13:52):
often with his eyes closed, listening. Later he'd say his
favorite part wasn't even recording. It was talking, sitting around,
letting the singer tell stories, building a friendship on long
conversations and simple songs. Weeks turned into months. Slowly the
songs add up, and when they're finally done, there's an album,
(14:14):
a new one, not a reissue, not a repackage, not
a greatest Hits collection, a record they decide to call
American Recordings. And now we can finally say his name.
And I'm going to say it the way his producer,
Rick Rubin said it when he saw that Dinner Theater
(14:34):
newspaper ad Johnny fucking Cash. He says it with reverence
and with respect. And here they are now together, a
country legend written off by the industry, a rock rap
producer known for turning chaos into classics, and they have
together made something stark and quiet but dangerous. But as
(14:58):
the tapes are boxed up and the mixes are printed,
a different question hangs in the air. Who is this
album four? The country stations who dropped him, the pop
stations who never played him, the kids who only know
his name from their parents' record sleeves. They made the
record they wanted to make. Now the terrifying part, Who's
(15:22):
going to listen? Back four an American resurrection? Next? Back four?
American Resurrection American Recordings hits the world in April nineteen
ninety four, and there's no shiny radio chasing single, no
(15:45):
guest rap verse, no power ballad with key change and
a string section. Is just Johnny Yep, Johnny Cash, mostly
alone with his guitar, singing murder ballads, spirituals and confessionals
straight down the ste center of your soul. Critics lose
their minds. Magazines that had moved from country suddenly rediscovered him.
(16:09):
One reviewer calls the album quote monumental and viscery intimate.
Another says, it's quote life affirming because the message is
taught through adversity, ill luck and fighting for survival. Awards
start showing up. In nineteen ninety five, American Recordings wins
the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album, proof on paper
(16:30):
that the industry that once ignored him now has to
stand up and clap. But the awards are almost beside
the point. What really matters is what's happening in living
rooms and bedrooms and headphones around the world. You've got
aging fans who never stop loving him, suddenly weeping in
their cars. They've got kids in flannel shirts, and Doc
Martin's raised on grunge and hip hop hearing his weathered
(16:52):
voice and become raving fans. The collaboration works so well
they keep going. American two Unchained shows up in nineteen
ninety six, this time with a full band, Tom Petty
and the Heartbreakers backing him up, guitar snarling behind that
same unshakable voice. It wins a Grammy for Best Country Album.
Then come More Records American three, Solitary Man, American four,
(17:15):
The Man Comes Around, songs about death, regret, and salvation,
covers of everyone from Soundgarden, to Depeche Mode. Late in life,
when most artists are politely retiring, Johnny Cash is cutting
some of the most intense, spiritually loaded music of his career.
And then there's that song. Somewhere in this run, Rick
Rubin brings Johnny a track from a band most of
(17:37):
his longtime fans have never heard of, Nine Inch Nails.
The song is called Hurt. The original is a slow, industrial,
self lacerating piece of nineties darkness, full of noise and
distortion and despair. At first, Johnny wants nothing to do
with it. Later, Ruben recalls that when he played Cash
the song, Johnny looked at me like I was insane
(17:59):
because the Nine Inch Nails version was so aggressive and
so noisy. But Rubin is stubborn. He hears something in
the lyrics, a man taking stock of a life full
of damage and wondering what was real and what was wasted,
And he thinks who could sing this better than Johnny
Cash staring down the end of his life. So they
strip it down again. No howling guitars, no industrial clang,
(18:22):
just a weary acoustic guitar, a piano and that voice, older,
now fighting for breath, but loaded with gravitas. When they're done,
Hurt doesn't feel like a cover, It feels like a confession.
They make a video. Director Mark Romanek films a seventy
one year old Johnny back home, seated at a table
with a ruined feast, rotting fruit, broken glass, images of
(18:46):
his past flickering in and out, old footage of the
man in black and his prime to intercut with the
shots of him now fragile, shaking, determined to finish this song.
The result is brutal. This isn't nostalgia. It's an open
casket with a heartbeat. When the video comes out in
two thousand and three, it hits like a televised funeral
(19:08):
and a resurrection service at the same time. It wins
the Grammy for Best Short Form Music Video. It racks
up nominations at the MTV Video Music Awards. Later, NME
will name it the greatest music video of all time.
But maybe the most telling reaction comes from the man
who wrote the song. Trent Resner, the architect of nine
(19:29):
inch Nails, watches Johnny's version and says, quote tears welling, silence, goosebumps. Wow,
I just lost my girlfriend because that song isn't mine anymore.
Let that sink in. A young industrial rock star writes
a song about pain and self destruction, and an old
country singer at the end of his life sings it
(19:50):
back to him, and the songwriter says it's his now.
It's not a cover, that's possession. By this point, the
American record series has fully rewritten the last chapter of
Johnny Cash's story. He's no longer a legacy act. He's
a living ghost walking through the pop landscape, singing about
God and death and violence and forgiveness and the weight
(20:13):
of memory. College kids, metal heads, country diehards, pastors, punks.
They all claim him as theirs. He's on magazine covers again.
New box sets like Unearthed start to collect the outtakes
from these sessions, turning this late career run into something
critics actually call a resurrection. But real life doesn't stop
(20:34):
for art. While the world is catching up to this
new version of Johnny Cash, something far more personal is
about to break his heart. Act five, I Wear this
Crown of Thorns. Next Act five, I Wear this Crown
(20:56):
of Thorns. By the early two thousands, Johnny Cash is
not a well man. Years of touring, substance abuse and
illness have caught up with him. He's been misdiagnosed, rediagnosed,
hospitalized with pneumonia, dealing with complications from diabetes. His body
is failing, even as his voice is finding this strange
late life power through it all, though there's one constant June.
(21:22):
June Carter Cash isn't just a wife. She's his duet partner,
his co conspirator, the one who dragged him through addiction
and stood beside him on every stage that mattered. Then,
in two thousand and three, she needs surgery, a heart
valve replacement. She goes into the hospital in May. There
are complications, her condition worsens. On May fifteenth, two thousand
(21:45):
and three, June Carter Cash dies at the age of
seventy three from complications following heart surgery. With her family
and Johnny by her side. The woman who saved his
life more than once is now gone. Friends and families
say he was devastated. One close friend later said he
(22:05):
cried every night after she passed. But here's the thing
about this last chapter of Johnny Cash's life. He doesn't stop.
He can barely see, he can barely walk. He's in
and out of the hospital, but he keeps recording. Sometimes
he's sitting in a chair, oxygen tanked nearby, headphones on,
eyes closed, giving everything he has left to these last songs.
(22:28):
As if in the empty space where June used to be,
he pours in more music. On September twelfth, two thousand
and three, just under four months after June's death, Johnny
Cash dies in Nashville from complications from diabetes. He's seventy
one years old. The headlines that roll around the world
(22:49):
talk about the hits, I Walk the Line, Ring a Fire,
the prison concerts, the TV show, the black suits, and
the rebel image. But something else has happened in those
last ten years, thanks to those stripped down late life
recordings with Rick Rubin, the American series, the Hurt Video,
the spirituals that covers the whispers about more unreleased material.
(23:13):
Johnny Cash dies not as a forgotten relic, but as
a prophet, a man whose final act was to stare
straight into the camera, into the microphone, into the abyss
and say, this is what it looks like to get old,
this is what it feels like to regret, this is
(23:34):
what it sounds like to still believe. The body gives
out the show ends, but the tape keeps rolling. The epilogue,
Redemption Day, next epilogue, Redemption Day. You know, I tell
(24:00):
stories about death. That's the job description for dead air right,
dark corners and tragic endings, the last pages of lives
that stopped too soon and too violently. But this, but
this one, this hits different. I guess this is where
I break the fourth wall and tell you why I've
(24:22):
always carried his name spelled differently, sure, but close enough
for people to make the joke, Hey, Johnny, huh eh?
Any relation to Cash? I always say, Nope, blame my father.
But the truth is, my dad loved Johnny Cash, absolutely
loved him. When I was a kid, we never missed
(24:44):
the Johnny Cash Show. Every week. There we were Dad
in his chair, me on the floor, and Johnny and
Black on the TV. But some of my earliest memories
are tied to that voice. And here's a here's a scene.
I don't think I've told many people. My mom used
to host bridge games with her friends downstairs. Whenever that happened,
(25:07):
the boys were banished to the upstairs bedrooms like we
were being quarantined for bad behavior. And my dad he
would come up to my room with a stack of
Johnny Cash records under his arm. He dropped the needle
and filled that tiny room with that booming voice. I
would make him play a boy named Sue, I swear
over and over and over again. He must have been
(25:30):
ready to pull his hair out, but he just smile
and dropped the needle one more time, because that's what
dads do. But here's the twist. Just like the rest
of the world, Somewhere along the line, I forgot about
Johnny Cash too. Oh when I got my first iPod.
Of course, Ring of Fire and False and Prison Blues
(25:51):
made the cut. But those are classics. They're supposed to
be there. They're almost ritual. But the new stuff that
wasn't on my ring at all. And here's the part
I'm a little embarrassed to admit. When the Cash Reuben
collaboration started rolling out, I was a music director at
an adult top forty station. I got a copy of
(26:13):
that first American Recordings album in the mail and it
sat untouched on a pile of CDs for months, didn't
even crack the shrink wrap. And to be fair, I
thought I knew what it was going to be. I
thought it would be a rehash of that old voice.
I grew up with something worn out, a museum piece. Then,
(26:34):
on one random day, god knows why, I was compelled
to pop it into the CD player. Maybe it was
slow in the office, maybe the universe tapped me on
the shoulder. Maybe Johnny himself said, hey, kid, I think
you forgot something. I didn't expect much. I didn't think
his voice would sound like it did in the seventies,
and it didn't. But here's what I didn't expect. By
(27:00):
the third song, I had tears in my eyes, real ones,
not radio guy reviewing an album, tears, human tears, because
that wasn't the voice I remembered from my childhood. That
was a voice a man who had lived through the fire,
(27:21):
walked through the dark, and came out the other side
carrying the truth like a lantern. He was older, it
was cracked, and it was fragile, and it was the
strongest thing I'd ever heard. Then it hit me. Johnny
Cash didn't just have a comeback. He had a resurrection,
(27:41):
not the kind they write about in press releases, not
the kind that wins trophies, although he won those two.
A resurrection of relevance of power, of honesty. He rose
from the margins, from the discount rack, and from the
oh yeah he's still around comments. He rose at an
age where most artists are settling into soft retrospectives and
(28:05):
farewell tours. He rose because someone finally let him do
what he always was meant to do, to tell the truth.
Nothing more, nothing less, And that's why this story matters.
The body is gone, the earthly part of this legend
has certainly faded, but the legacy, the legacy, is still alive.
(28:31):
Listen to him sing hurt, Listen to the Man comes around.
Listen to those American recordings, stripped, bare, trembling and defiant.
He sounds like a man standing in between worlds, one
foot in the dust and one foot in eternity. Maybe
that's why it still hits me, because I think about
(28:52):
that little kid in my bedroom listening to a boy
named Sue with my dad, both of us laughing every
time Johnny said, I'm the son of a bitch that
name you sup. Now I listen to those final words
and the ones recorded on oxygen tanks in quiet rooms,
with a voice just strong enough to finish the verse,
(29:16):
and I swear it feels like Johnny Cash rose again
just so he could say goodbye the right way. Not
with a hit single, not with a comeback tour, but
with honesty, with a kind of music that doesn't die
when the singer does. And maybe that's why this story
isn't about death at all. It's about resurrection. It's about
(29:40):
the idea that sometimes, if you're brave enough to strip
everything away, the last chapter can be the most powerful
one of all. And Johnny Cash, the man whose records
my father played in my bedroom, taught me something long
after the world thought he was done. Legends don't fade,
They verberate, and sometimes they rise again. I hope you
(30:09):
enjoyed script number twenty six, The Return of the Man
in Black. This has ben Johnny's Dead Air podcast. I'm
Johnny Hertwell and thank you so much for listening.
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