Next Big Resurrected Legend: Johnny Cash

Fortunately for American Recordings, however, rock fans continue to fixate on Cash as a renegade: ''He's the original rebel, and he has all that mystique of being the outsider and the loner,'' says James Lien, music editor of the College Music Journal, an alternative-radio tip sheet. ''That's the crack in the door,'' he adds, that could attract the alternative demographic.

Underground musicians, in fact, have already adopted the bearlike Cash as their latest, cool-suffused mascot. According to Breeders lead singer Kim Deal, when Rubin declined the chance to produce their gold-selling Last Splash in order to do the Jagger record, ''we thought that was stupid. Now, if he had been working on the Johnny Cash album, we would have understood.'' Last December an unannounced, guest-list-only gig at Johnny Depp's notorious Viper Room attracted a reverent full house of buzz makers, from Sean Penn, Juliette Lewis, and Patricia Arquette to Flea, Henry Rollins, and Butthole Surfers frontman Gibby Haynes.

''My father always told me he could learn more from 19-year-olds than he could from people his own age,'' says Rosanne Cash. When she learned of the Lollapalooza offer, though, she warned him against accepting: ''I said, 'Dad, do you really want to do that? I would hate to see you in the position of playing to a bunch of snot-nosed 14-year-olds who didn't appreciate you.'''

''My first reaction was to run,'' concurs the elder Cash. ''But then I got to thinking, why not? Young people especially see so much video and film that they know what's real when they see it. They appreciate the honest and open baring of emotions. And you can't have any more honesty than just taking a guitar up there and singing your songs.''

Cash — a man more than twice as old as the members of headliners Nirvana — rests one meaty paw on the acoustic guitar that leans against his fireplace, next to a legal pad scrawled with lyrics. ''I no longer have a grandiose attitude about my music being a powerful force for change,'' he says. But in spirit, if not flesh, he still throws himself in with the young firebrands' lot. ''I think (today's youth) sees the hypocrisy in government, the rotten core of social ills and poverty and prejudice, and I'm not afraid to say that's where the trouble is. A lot of people my age are.'' And that, by no mean coincidence, is a stance even the Flannel Generation can admire.