"He was real excited," recalls producer Rick Rubin, describing his last phone conversation with Johnny Cash. They talked, Rubin says, about the imminent completion of Unearthed, a boxed set of previously unissued recordings from the sessions for the four, acclaimed albums they had made together since 1994: American Recordings, Unchained, American III: Solitary Man, and last year's American IV: The Man Comes Around. "I said, 'We finished all the mixes, and we're sending them to you this weekend, so you can hear them all.'" Cash never heard those mixes. He died the next day, September 12th, in Nashville of complications from diabetes, at the age of seventy-one.

Speaking the day after Cash's funeral, Rubin was still hopeful that Unearthed would be issued as originally planned, before Christmas. The collection will include a greatest-hits disc drawn from the four original albums, plus four, thematically constructed CDs with their own subtitles: "Who's Gonna Cry," "Trouble in Mind," "Redemption Songs" and "My Mother's Hymnbook," the last one an entire, unreleased gospel album cut at the same time Cash made Unchained. "But there may be a sixth disc," Rubin adds, "because I just found a whole other batch of tapes. It came as a surprise at the last minute -- songs we had worked on four, five months ago, when we started the new project," a reference to American V, another gospel album which Cash and Rubin had also been laboring on over the past year, despite the singer's increasingly perilous health.

"It was a new kind of gospel album for him to do," Rubin says of Cash's last studio recordings. "It was heavy, old blues-type things -- 'No Grave's Gonna Hold My Body Down,' 'John the Revelator' -- but also some gospel songs that he'd grown up singing but had never recorded. We'd been working so furiously on the boxed set, that I haven't gotten into it enough to know where we are. But I know there's a lot there, and it's going to be amazing." As for the feast of outtakes on Unearthed, Rubin sighs with awe. "The older stuff -- it's just phenomenal. It's blowing my mind, how great it is."

What was the state of the last work you did with Johnny? How much had he recorded, and how much of it was finished?

We recorded about fifty songs, working towards the next album. And they are in various states of being done. It was going to be "The Black Gospel Album." But along the way, we recorded a lot of other stuff. In my last conversations with Johnny, the songs that we continued picking and working on were not gospel songs. It's not like the idea went to the wayside. I just don't know if that would have ended up being the next album.

How many songs would you cut with Johnny for each of those four, original American albums?

I would say anywhere between forty and eighty. There was a lot of experimentation. Not all of the experiments were successful. And some of the things on the boxed set are things that we liked the idea of, but when we actually recorded them, we thought, "Hmm, this isn't going to work on the album."

For example?

There's a Dolly Parton song which I wanted to record, "I'm a Drifter" [from Parton's 1976 album All I Can Do]. We tried recording it for the first album and the second album. On the box, there are two different versions recorded during the second album. One was recorded with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and one was recorded, I think, with the Red Hot Chili Peppers' rhythm section. They're both good, but neither of them felt up to what was on the rest of the album. I felt like we never really captured it. We never found a way to get the song over in a way that the most successful songs had gotten over for him.

Were you surprised by the fearlessness with which he made these records with you? This was a man who had been at the birth of everything, at Sun Records in the 1950s, and had made some of the best and most important country albums of the 1960s and 1970s. He had nothing left to prove to anyone.

It was about the quality of the songs. There were loads of songs that I would suggest that he would not want to do. I would send him a CD of fifteen or twenty songs, and he would say, "Well, I like these three or four." Or, in some cases, "I like none of them." But he would really listen to the lyrics.

Some songs were a harder sell than others, based on the way they were originally recorded. When I first played him the Soundgarden version of "Rusty Cage," he looked at me like I was crazy: "You don't think I'm going to do that?" I said, "Listen to the song." Still, it was a hard one to get past him. It's a heavy metal record; Chris Cornell is screaming. He didn't know what to make of it.

I did a demo of how I imagined it would be if we did it together, how his version would go. When I played him that and showed him the lyrics, he loved it: "I'll do this one."

How did you sell him on the Nine Inch Nails song "Hurt"? Trent Reznor, as a singer and songwriter, is so wrapped up in himself, in his own agony. Yet Johnny hijacked the song for himself, made it truly his own.

He just heard the words. They resonated with him. I remember when I sent it to him. I said, "I really feel like this one has the potential to be special." So he may have given it a stronger chance, than if it was one of twenty songs on a CD. I don't know if he would have picked it, but I asked him to listen closely and pay attention to the words. I imagined him singing it and knew how powerful it could be.

It's fascinating to look at the songs he covered on the American albums, and the people who wrote them: Reznor, Soundgarden, Beck, Nick Cave. With his intense life experiences with drugs, poverty, despair and ultimately resurrection, Johnny Cash had every right to look at these younger songwriters and say, "What the hell do these kids now about life?"

He wasn't like that. He looked at everyone and everything equally. He liked what he liked, and he didn't like what he didn't like. It didn't have anything to do with who you were or what experience you had or what your track record was. He looked at these songs as art, judged them as art. And he decided, "This is good art, and it's good art that fits me.

He was like that in every way in his life. It's not unique to his music. He didn't see barriers or classifications between people. He just loved people.

When did you first meet him?

In 1992. I went to see him perform, got to meet him after the show backstage. And we talked. I can't really remember anything about it. But I felt like there was a strong connection. The connection we made didn't seem to come from the words we spoke. It felt like we could have sat together silently for the same amount of time, and the exchange would have been the same -- or maybe better.

Were you awed by his titanic presence, the gravity of his voice?

It's odd: With some people, I've had that. For some reason, I didn't feel that with him. It was an immediate feeling of safety. There was no sense of intimidation, right from the time we met.

What do you think he saw in you as a producer? He had been in the music business for four decades. He had worked with Sam Phillips at Sun Records and with the top dogs in Nashville -- and outlasted many of them. What do you feel he needed from you?

I don't know the answer to that. But I will tell you something that someone told me at the funeral. A friend of his -- someone I didn't know but who came up and talked to me -- said that he just wanted to let me know how much Johnny cared about me. Johnny told him, "Rick saw something in me that I didn't know was there anymore. Because of that, when he saw that in me, when the work we did was accepted, it made me trust him."

He was not an ego-driven person. He did not come from a place of confidence. For all of his success, he was somewhat insecure. When we were working on the first album, we tried a lot of experiments, before we found out we were going to do the acoustic thing. We recorded with bands, did all kinds of thing, to find out what this new sound was going to be. Eventually, we went back to the acoustic recordings that he did in my living room. That's where the songs got over in the best way.

Once we decided that, after a lot of experimentation, I asked him if he would get up at a club and do a set of acoustic material. I felt it would have impact on the acoustic recording we were doing. We set up a show at the Viper Room [in Los Angeles]. It was an incredible show. And I remember, he was terrified before going on. This was a guy who did 200 shows a year for forty years. He'd played prisons. And the idea of going up by himself, with a guitar and singing songs, absolutely terrified him. I remember watching him, how nervous he was through the first song. Then everyone accepted him, and he calmed down a bit. By the end of the second song, he was fine.

But he was not overly confident. I think that is part of why people connect with him. He was humble, someone who fought to be ego-less. I'm sure he wasn't always. But it was something he always worked on.

What was the state of his health during the sessions for The Man Comes Around? There is a poignant fragility to his singing, compared to the deep strength in his voice a few years earlier, on Unchained.

It was difficult. But I'll tell you the difference between those two records. Unchained was hard to make, because that was right when he got sick. He was struggling -- he didn't know why, and it was new. He'd have to lay down. He wasn't his normal self. His body was stronger, but his psyche was more confused, because he didn't know what was hitting him. On the last album, his body was weaker, but his psyche was stronger. He knew what was going on; he was more in control.

Was there a sense -- an acceptance -- that it could be his last record? Topically, the record is drenched in death, references to reckoning and mortality: the opening reading from the Book of Revelation; songs like "Streets of Laredo" and "We'll Meet Again."

It's not the kind of thing we would talk about. He wrote something interesting for [the liner notes of] the third album: that while he was working on it, "I thought it would be my last." Then the fact that we made the fourth album -- something shifted. He realized, "We're just going to keep going." We talked about that all the time. I can remember, not long ago, telling him, "There should be ten volumes in this American series, and then we'll figure out what we want to do after that."

On the other hand, he wanted "We'll Meet Again" to be the last song on the record. He had all of the people around -- his staff in Nashville, the people who worked on the record and in his home -- sing along on "We'll Meet Again." When we came to L.A. to finish the record, he said to me, "You have to sing on it." All of the guitar players in L.A. who were on the album: "You guys have to sing on it too. I want everybody on this." He was adamant about it.

[From Issue 936 — November 27, 2003]