49 – The Hurt – Johnny Cash – 2003

The Hurt - Johnny Cash

            This is a song I bought from Zune marketplace as a direct result of seeing the video. A devastating, heartbreaking video with an aged, but still undiminished, Johnny Cash several months before his death. The song, written by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, is about an addict, and you know Johnny Cash sings from experience there.

            The instrumentation is spare; a piano, and Johnny’s voice:

                        I hurt myself today
                        To see if I still feel
                        I focus on the pain
                        The only thing that's real
                        The needle tears a hole
                        The old familiar sting
                        Try to kill it all away
                        But I remember everything

            When the lines below are sung, June Carter is seen briefly.

                        What have I become
                        My sweetest friend
                        Everyone I know
                        goes away
                        In the end
           

            And as it flashes on June Carter, several months before she died, the lyrics hit home with a power that’s unlike any other, on my Zune anyway.

            Then, as the piano chimes (and that’s the only word for it when you listen with ear buds) louder and louder, the song climaxes.

                       
                        And you could have it all
                        My empire of dirt
                        I will let you down
                        I will make you hurt

                        If I could start again
                        A million miles away
                        I would keep myself
                        I would find a way.

            Incredible and, again, shattering. The most powerful music video ever (in my humble estimation). It brings me to tears just hearing the song, because it cannot be separated from the video and the images of a young and, especially, old Johnny Cash.

            But it also reminds me, weirdly, of my youth, when we would get together at Thanksgiving or Christmas in Rockford, Illinois with my grandparents, my grandmother’s brother and sister-in-law, and their unmarried son who still lived at home and played the Hammond Organ (foreshadowing my career at Accutronics, which was owned by and supplied all the circuit boards for Hammond Organ).

            He played both kinds of music, Country and Western, and a lot of Johnny Cash, but he played in a kind of mechanical way with a sort of Liberace leer. He was in his mid 30s, still at home, unmarried, which at the time I found a little weird (writes the guy who didn’t marry until he was 34, though I moved out of my folks’ home after college).

            He did meet a nice girl at work (he worked for the company that made Chiclets and every Christmas we would get a sampler pack of their products, Chiclets, Certs breath mints, Beeman’s and Black Jack gum), married her, and had a daughter. I felt bad for him  because when his mom died, his dad remarried and, when his dad died, the house he lived in was left to his step mom and he had to pay her rent to live in the house he grew up in. Then she sold the house from under him and he had to move out.

            My grandmother was still alive at the time and she bought several pieces of furniture from him, to help him out financially, that her (and his dad’s) parents had owned. I have one piece, a beautiful oak side board.