The story behind Johnny Cash’s ‘Hurt’, still the saddest music video of
all time
The concept had to be completely revised as
Cash's health declined
Ask someone to name a song that always has the power to reduce them to
tears, and the chances are they’ll swiftly reply “Johnny Cash. Hurt.”
Most people know that it was originally an (excellent in its own
right) Nine Inch Nails song, but exactly how the cover and its iconic
music video were put together only adds to its resonance.
When asked if Cash could take on the song, NIN’s Trent Reznor at
first said he was “flattered”, but worried that “the idea sounded a bit
gimmicky” (his opinion would massively change, but we’ll get to that).
The recording went ahead, produced by super producer Rick Rubin, and was
released as a single in 2003, catching the ear of respected One Hour
Photo director Mark Romanek.
Universal eventually agreed to the music video, but Romanek now faced a
race against time, with Cash’s health declining and the 71-year-old being
unwilling to stick around in the cold Tennessee weather. He had only days to
turn something around.
Original conception for the video thrown out the window, Romanek jumped
on a red-eye flight to Nashville and began scouting potential filming
locations, leading him to Cash’s home and museum, The House of Cash.
“It had been closed for a long time,” the director recalled. “The place
was in such a state of dereliction. That’s when I got the idea that maybe we
could be extremely candid about the state of Johnny’s health - as candid as
Johnny has always been in his songs.”
That idea would blossom into a heart-wrenching music video, that spoke
about the transience of life, the gracelessness of death, the Ozymandian
crumbling of an oeuvre and the decline of a genre, an era and an attitude.
The ‘closed to public’ sign on the museum. The cracked platinum
records. The caviar and lobster banquet with no diners. The clips from earlier
in Johnny’s career. His wife June looking on. The closed piano lid.
The tears well at different times for different viewers - for me
it’s always the pouring of the wine from Cash’s frail hand.
June would die three months after filming, her husband, seven.
“I cried the first time I saw
it,” he said. “If you were moved to that kind of emotion in the course of a
two-hour movie, it would be a great accomplishment. To do it in a four-minute
music video is shocking.”
Reznor was sent the video while in the studio with Rage Against the
Machine’s Zach De La Rocha, and, when the pair sat down to watch it, any doubts
he had about the cover were long gone.
“We were in the studio, getting ready to work and I popped it in,” he
recalled. “By the end I was really on the verge of tears…there was just dead
silence.
A sad footnote to a sad story, Cash’s home of nearly 30 years in which the
video was shot, burned down in 2007.
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