Rick Rubin on Cash's Legacy

"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."