You know that producing a definitive piece like this is every music nerd's biggest dream, and that he or she already has that list ready and waiting to go, so I just imagine the conference room of NME probably looked like a battlefield of broken bottle glasses and mangled EPs. How all the editors got together and finally found their 100 picks is beyond me, but you can't deny that their number one pick – Johnny Cash covering the Nine Inch Nail's "Hurt" – is a solid choice. It's not too fringe, it was the last song Cash filmed (and the one he made right after his wife died, though she appears in the video), and it's filled with some of the rawest emotion ever caught on tape from the Man in Black.

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"I don't know those songs," replied Cash, "but I got a few of my own I can play for you." Dressed in his trademark black suit, his jet-black hair a little longer than usual, Cash draped the strap of his Martin guitar over his right shoulder and played three songs, all of them decidedly to the left of "Okie From Muskogee." With the nation still mired in Vietnam, Cash had far more than prison reform on his mind. Nixon listened with a frozen smile to the singer's rendition of the explicitly antiwar "What Is Truth?" and "Man in Black" ("Each week we lose a hundred fine young men") and to a folk protest song about the plight of Native Americans called "The Ballad of Ira Hayes." It was a daring confrontation with a president who was popular with Cash's fans and about to sweep to a crushing reelection victory, but a glimpse of how Cash saw himself -- a foe of hypocrisy, an ally of the downtrodden. An American protest singer, in short, as much as a country music legend.

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Writer-director Mangold, his co-screenwriter Gill Dennis, and his two lead actors, Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon, have captured the sturdy practicality of that love affair: This isn't so much a love story as that of a man grabbing at the last thing he believes he has to live for. Is that last thing the love of God or the love of a woman? Or, as "Walk the Line" suggests, is it both, the two so chronically intertwined that not even Cash himself could tell them apart? If "Walk the Line" isn't the full story of Johnny Cash, it's at least a crucial corner of it, a way of coaxing a legend down to a human scale, without shrinking that legend away to nothingness.

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What a strange time to do this interview.

I know. I feel, actually, it's somewhat ludicrous to be talking about a record. I mean, I'm really heartsick, and I can't stand CNN, although I have it on right now. I'm going to turn it off now. I think they're part of the problem. They take 30 seconds of important information and stretch it into six hours.

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Aren't tribute albums terrible? This one is really terrible -- and the Atlanta band's view all the way into one of Costello's greatest recordings ranks with Eminem's "Lose Yourself" and DJ Shadow's "The Private Press" as the most undeniable sound of the year.

Maybe it was always obvious that the song is about the gang-rape of a local girl at an army base, with the woman looking back: "The soldier asked my name and did I come here very often/ Well, I thought that he was asking me to dance." Maybe the song was always about the woman cherishing his death when his company's transport vehicle is blown up: He's getting the sleep of the just, all right, the big sleep. In Costello's performance, though, the beauty of the composition makes the story into a fable, and the people in it float like ghosts.

Shannon McArdle is all flesh, still trying to wash off the stains after all these years. She makes her voice small and flat for the difficult shifts in timbre, removing any hint of professionalism. She's as off-the-street as the woman in the middle of the Human League's "Don't You Want Me," and the naturalism of the performance -- carried from the beginning by a solemn church organ that is even more damning when it plays pop changes -- is almost unbearable. The woman has her satisfaction over the soldier's death, but that's all she has. He and the rest took everything else.

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Ha! -- Ha! The sultry singing trio would like you to know how wrong you are.

"We were young and sacrificed a lot," 19-year-old lead singer Beyoncé Knowles gripes to the U.K. Telegraph. "I had to give up cheerleading, as did the others."

"With beauty comes pain," seconds Michelle Williams, bemoaning the sore feet that come from traipsing around in high heels and the misery of squeezing into a tight corset night after night.

And as if forgoing comfort and cheers weren't bad enough, the band members say they've had to make the ultimate sacrifice: sex.

Knowles tells the Scottish Daily Record that she and her bandmates haven't really been getting much action recently; men are too cowed by their fame to approach them, so they've just been sleeping with their Bibles.

The tabloid suggests that the trio's message to interested fellers is, "Please, just come up to us and say, 'Hello, how are you?'"

Or they could just say their name.

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Prodding the Cougar within

"I hear these records on the radio and I think, 'What the fuck was I thinking about putting all that music on there?'"

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Unlike Merle Haggard, who served time in San Quentin State Prison for armed robbery, Cash, even in his hard-livin', motel-trashin' younger days, was never more than a small-time offender. According to Nicholas Dawidoff's authoritative "In the Country of Country," Cash was jailed on seven different occasions, each time for just one night. Once, he got thrown in the slammer in El Paso, Texas, after trying to smuggle amphetamines across the border from Mexico. (Cash's early self-destructive habits are legendary and well-documented.)

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Hank Williams Sr., the honky-tonk god of country music, wrote and
sang standards like "Your Cheatin' Heart." He drank and drugged himself to death at 29, suffering a heart attack on the way to a gig on New Year's 1953. His son, Hank
Jr., who was 4 at the time, became his own brand of country rebel in the late 1970s and went on to become one of the music's biggest stars throughout the 1980s.

Performances are one thing, but don't talk about Hank III's new record. It sucks
bigtime. "It's weird," he says. "People come up to me and say, 'Oh, your
album kicks ass.' It don't. I just can't get behind it. I'm already looking
forward to the second album."

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June Carter Cash, Johnny's wife and a musical legend in her own right, appears more the gracious hostess than the main attraction, even though tonight, that's exactly what she is. The early evening event is to honor June upon the release of "Press On," her first solo record in more than 25 years. June will play for the invited guests later on, and if she's nervous at the prospect of performing on her own instead of in support of her husband, which is what she's done mostly since the couple married over 30 years ago, she doesn't show it.

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Cash, of course, should live forever. An America without his sort
would be one left finally estranged from our native, specifically
rural, form of moral authority -- the one that comes from
draining the cup of sin to its dregs until you decide you just plain
don't care for the taste of it anymore.

Perkins was an American of another simple, once-familiar type. He was an eager-Johnny, a backwoods prodigy -- he was a good guy with simple manners, strong ambitions and a bit of a bad streak. Not the sort of bad streak that makes for a villain (or, in Cash's case, a hero), but
the sort that makes for the flash and pathos of a genial small-town operator, a likable showoff with a bottle hidden on the side.

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But then, it's easier to argue with Rick Rubin, who produced both "Unchained" and Cash's 1993 Grammy winner "American Recordings." Rubin has an indisputable talent for wringing the best possible performances out of the artists he works with, and for pushing flattened-out careers over the brink of stardom. Under his guidance, the Chili Peppers went from sales of a half-million or so to quintuple platinum. He pushed the Beastie Boys onto the charts. He worked wonders with Slayer, and with The Cult. But opinion is divided as to whether his records have ever sounded good.

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