The Mercy Seat - Cave Version & Cash Version
I came across this snippet in an interview Nick Cave gave in 2017 that included the following:
One of those who went for it was Johnny Cash, who covered the song on one of his late-period Rick Rubin albums. But Cash made a significant change. At the beginning of Cave's version, the man on death row describes himself, marvellously, as “nearly wholly innocent,” something that seems to prefigure the song's final lines: and anyway I told the truth / but I'm afraid I told a lie. But Cash must have seen the song differently; in his version, the prisoner describes himself as “totally innocent.”
I mention what Cash sings to Cave when we talk in Australia.
[I've edit out your initial reticence to address this]
“Well, ‘nearly wholly innocent’ is much better than ‘totally innocent,’ ” he points out. “I like the idea that the man feels he is innocent apart from the fact that he committed the crime. This is an interesting idea. ‘Totally innocent’ just means he didn't commit the crime and has been wrongfully imprisoned and hence the rest of the song doesn't really make any fucking sense.”
I think Cave's incorrect about the intention and effect of the change Cash made to his lyric, and that in reality, he greatly improved the song, which was already incredibly good.
Listen to the tone of forced defiance in Cash's voice when he sings 'totally innocent'. It's bullshit. It's a lie. He knows he is guilty, but like Sean Penn's character in Dead Man Walking, he will not, cannot admit it. (It's worth noting that Cash provided an incredible song, 'In Your Mind' to the soundtrack for this film.)
As they say in the Shawshank Redemption, 'Everybody's innocent in here, don't you know that?' But the closer we get to death, the closer we come to the truth of things. Thus, there can be seen in the mercy seat, an actual (if twisted) form of mercy; that of forced attrition. As death looms like fire, the guilty man can no longer conceal his guilt. Fear (I'm afraid I told a lie) releases the truth. He is scared of the fact he's told this lie, as it will follow him into the afterlife. The bravado, the denial, the vanity is supplanted by the burning truth. I'm afraid. I told a lie.
In Cave's version, declaring the guilt at outset robs the song of its rising tension. It's a guilty man about to be fried. Personally, I think 'nearly wholly innocent' is an overplayed hand, even though it sounds really good. Its innate contradiction, to me, is too obvious. In Cash's version, it's a man transformed by the sentence of death become his actual, final moments of life. His life at this point, after fighting it for so long, BECOMES his death. And he cannot do it in any other form than his true self. In Cave's version, the duality remains, whilst in his, the truth becomes the fear of the consequences of telling that lie.
Thus, that final admission of guilt is one of the most devastating moments in Cash's entire career, I reckon, and that's really saying something. You can hear the fear in his voice. The tremble, the shudder. But also, the release is there, too; he just doesn't sing it. It's all conveyed in the piano's cathartic, emotional thumping resonance. We hear the grace imbued by the Mercy.
Does this mean the song becomes an astonishing, highly subversive valorisation the death penalty as a result? That's probably a stretch, but the fact the possibility exists almost gives the song another dimension of meaning, where of spirits of the Old and New Testaments seem doomed to fight it out until the end of time.